Category: Mac

Just got an email about the new iPhone Dev Center, which so far is focused on optimizing web apps for the iPhone rather than the promised full SDK that will apparently hit early next year. Still, it’s nice to see official sample code and docs.

Zeldman poses the dashboard challenge, and in the process reveals some pretty cool looking widgets. Like the CSS Cheat Sheet, Entities, Color Theory, and Color Burn. Cool for the web designer.

I have been interested for a while in the Getting Things Done productivity methodology, but one thing that has stood in my way is my email. I have email messages that date back to 1993 in my archives. When I was in grad school I had separate mail folders for every class I was in, plus every club, plus … And as you can see from the screen cap on the right, it hasn’t gotten any better.

Enter Merlin Mann, whose 43 Folders site ran some recommendations this week on how to live with just a single mail archive folder. The one that I’m particularly keen to try is Mail Tags. I don’t think I could live in iPhoto without tagging; wish I could do the same in iTunes; and have been aching to try it out in Mail since forever. So we’ll give it a shot and see how we do.

I have long been an apologist for Apple on all things related to their music platform and their Windows software, particularly iTunes. I think it’s unsurprising that iTunes is the fastest growing software installed in the enterprise, simply because there is no better way to listen to music on a computer.

Where things get murky is Apple’s strategy to make iTunes the only way to get content onto Apple devices, including the iPod and now the iPhone. As the devices start to go beyond music and into other types of content that iTunes doesn’t manage directly, the footprint of iTunes expands further into the Windows desktop. Which is fine, I suppose, particularly if one is excited about getting one’s Outlook calendar on the thing (which I am).

But here is the problem: when one downloads iTunes, one is looking for music management. One is not asking Apple to install QuickTime, the Apple Updater, a Windows services, and now two Outlook add-ins.

I’m all for Apple putting software on the Windows platform. But they need to disclose that they’re installing this hodgepodge of executables and plugins and they need to give me the option of turning some of them off. Because I can live without iTunes on my machine (especially with an iPod docked to my speakers right on my desk), but I can’t live, professionally, without Outlook.

Those of us who won’t be getting an iPhone today have at least one good thing awaiting us from Apple: iTunes 7.3. Of course, the only new features are… iPhone compatibility, or as CNet says, “a painful reminder that you are leading an iPhoneless existence.”

I tried to update my work computer using the Check for Software Updates option within iTunes, but it crashed iTunes (probably a Vista thing). I was able to get the update by running the Apple Software Update application directly; it’s installed in c:program filesApple Software Update.

My inlaws and I are trying to figure out why they get such poor iChat performance. We videoconference with them often through iChat, and their sound cuts out, or the picture becomes so pixilated that they can’t see what is going on.

I just ran a Speakeasy speed test and it doesn’t seem that our connection speed is a problem—our speed to their servers in New York (very close to my inlaws) is pretty darned good:

So that leaves a few other possibilities. One is my inlaws’ speed—I know a few other people in their neighborhood have gotten cable modems. Another is iChat version—they are still on Mac OS X 10.3 and we have made the Tiger move.

Steve Jobs’s keynote today at WWDC is the sound of the other shoe dropping. All that griping about whether the iPhone would be opened to third party apps just went out the window. There is a third-party platform in the iPhone, and it’s called Safari. Which, incidentally, will now be available for Windows.

As a product manager, this sounds like my supported platform matrix breaking wide open. As a Windows user at work, this sounds like trumpets from heaven.

As a Mac user, it sounds like it did when iTunes and the iPod first came to Windows. New audiences for technologies on the Mac are a good thing because they tend to drive attention, and resources, to those technologies.

Back to the iPhone thing: this sounds strongly like Apple is making a bet on web application development being the future, at least for phones. Based on the explosion in Dashboard widget development, I’d say they may have a point. Being able to code in HTML+CSS+JavaScript has its advantages for a large number of tasks. Interestingly, games are not among the tasks that the AJAX stack has historically excelled at. I wonder if that means that the iPhone will be a games free platform, or if the partnership that Apple announced today with EA will bring further developments in that direction?

Yes, I know: Sudden Motion Sensor hacks are passé. But I finally got around to playing with one that invokes Exposé, and now I’m hooked. I ended up modifying it to invoke Dashboard instead, which required changing the script to call key code 111 for the F12 key.

So what does this do? Basically, if I want to see my Dashboard–which has weather and a couple other useful things on it, as well as some truly useless ones–I just tap the side of my laptop. Another tap dismisses it. Like I said: useless. (But very, very fun.)

…unfortunately, it wasn’t my most radical guess that got the brass ring. But I’m very glad to see, just a short time after Steve Jobs’s jab at DRM, that the vision is starting to come true with this new deal with EMI (higher quality, DRM free downloads at $1.25 a pop).

What’s not to like about this deal? Even at 256 kbps encoding, you’re paying for lossy copies of the music; for a typical 10-song album, that’s $12.50 for essentially a lo-fi version. But how lo-fi is it? I’d like to see the acoustic research; most of the benchmarking I’ve seen has only looked at 128 kbps AAC. And of course the fact that it’s unrestricted is the key.

Even better for all concerned, it comes with a 30 cent a song upconversion option. I’d better watch my wallet. I don’t have that many iTunes store purchases, but I could easily see a large bill if I just blanket-upgraded everything. (Not to mention the hit on my wallet for Complete My Album, but that’s another story.)

So now the remaining question is: how fast will the other labels follow suit in fleeing DRM?

New York Times: Speculation Is in the Air Over EMI and Apple. The obvious answer is: tomorrow, the Beatles will be on the iTunes Store. The not obvious answers are:

• DRM free downloads?
• A Yellow Submarine themed iPod?
• Apple buys its first music company?

…What? After all, EMI’s hoped for private equity white knight backed out back in December. And they were asking $4.9 billion then. According to their last 10Q, Apple had more than $7 billion in the bank—more than enough to pay for EMI the old fashioned way.

Hopefully it won’t happen. We’ve all seen what happens to tech companies that buy content businesses. But stranger things have happened.

Three last notes about the final (?) stages of the Great CD Project, which started with over 1000 CDs plus about 30 GB of digital music across two computers, and ended up with about 400GB of digitized music—over 23000 tracks worth—on a networked hard drive:

1. iPod syncing One of three scenarios I was concerned about was the ability to sync my iPod; since all the music was on the network, I would be gated by how fast the data could come from the remote hard disk. As it turns out, this wasn’t too bad a problem—compared to what I was coming from. I used to have to sync the iPod, a 5G video model that only supports USB sync, with my old PowerBook G4—which only had USB 1.1 connections. So syncing it was terribly slow. Syncing it with the new setup—hard drive over USB 2.0 to my AirPort Extreme, over 802.11g to the MacBook Pro, and then over USB 2.0 again to the iPod—is faster than I expected: it took about three hours to transfer 600+ songs, many of which were ripped losslessly, to the iPod.
2. Ripping CDs This was a big surprise. While nearly every other operation involving moving data to the AirDisk (the big disk connected to the AirPort Extreme) was pretty slow, ripping a CD with the music going to the network drive seemed to happen at a very reasonable speed—about 8.8x. I don’t know how Apple pulled this off—do they cache the data for later writes? If so they need to do the same thing in the Finder, because the performance seemed much more reasonable ripping than virtually any other write activity.
3. Playback This one puzzled me for quite a while. Yesterday was the first time I actually tried to play music through the setup, and it was awful. The sound cut out partway through the second or third song that I listened to, and I couldn’t get it to play again without restarting the whole base station—after which it played one song and quit again. For context, I’m still playing back music through an AirPort Express, so there are now two wireless hops involved—one to pull the music into iTunes and one to stream it back for playback. I did a ton of research and found that by switching the base station to a less crowded channel, and enabling interference robustness on both the base station and the AirPort Express, I suddenly got great performance again.

The best part of the whole thing is that I can use the MacBook Pro as a mobile music console without being tethered to the hard drives, and can use FrontRow to drive the music for a party—very slick.

After last week’s post about the difficulties working with the new Airport Extreme 802.11n base station, I decided to pick up the pieces and put some things together. I ended up going down a path that led to some success:

1. Borrow a 500 GB drive from work
2. Set my library location for iTunes to the borrowed drive
3. Back up the contents of my RAID disk to the borrowed drive using the Advanced | Consolidate Library command
4. Break the RAID set and reformat as two separate drives; connect the 500 GB to the Airport Extreme
5. Set the library location for iTunes to the networked drive
6. Back up the contents of the borrowed drive to the networked drive using the Consolidate Library command

And darned if it didn’t work. There was one directory that didn’t get transferred successfully, possibly because the borrowed drive was FAT32 and the artist name had an accent in it; fortunately it corresponded to a CD I still have.

So now I’m using the set up. Benefits? One iTunes library, one laptop. Disadvantages? Working with changing data on the networked drive is slow; for instance, updating cover art for 30 tracks can take up to five minutes. Based on what I’ve read on line, only part of this is explained by the fact that my first gen MacBook Pro only has 802.11g; a larger part of it appears to be due to very slow write speeds to the networked drive. (This might also explain why the last step in my project took a week.)

Other issues? The drive apparently falls off the network every now and then; in fact, it’s not accessible via the AirDisk utility at all. I have to browse to it directly using the afp:// protocol. This may be a broader problem with Bonjour on this network; AirTunes isn’t working right now either. Curious how all this stopped working when I dropped the new AirPort into the network…

My new Airport Extreme (the 802.11n model) is set up and humming, and everything looks good—better range, easier setup, better form factor. So why am I extremely disappointed?

Because it won’t share my RAID disk, and Apple won’t help me figure out how to make it happen. In fact, I had to go to their support forum to find out that the base station appears to have issues with RAID disks.

The good news is that I don’t have even 500 GB of content on the RAID disk, so theoretically I can back up the data, break the RAID set, and rebuild everything on the 500 GB volume.

The bad news: Back up the data to where? Hopefully I can find a way to move the music to a loaner disk or something.

And of course that’s just the first step. Next comes moving the iTunes library file off the old PowerBook, rebuilding it so that it points to the new disk—hopefully without losing all my playcount data this time! Then testing: synching the iPod, ripping a disc, copying music to the remote disk. The real question is, how many iTunes scenarios are bearable with a remote disk across an 802.11g network? And: will Apple or someone else come out with an 802.11n compatible card for the first generation MacBook Pro so that I can actually use the 802.11n features of the base station?

What blows me away, of course, is that this was a completely avoidable thing. The Mac has had support for software RAID for many years, and with a lot of people embracing digital lifestyles thanks to Apple, the likelihood that there are going to be a few people caught by this is pretty high.

Monday was a really crappy day: my Passat factory tape deck stopped auto-reversing and would only play side A. This was a Big Problem because I only listen to my iPod in the car and the tape adapter that I use only plays on side B. And of course the Passat factory radio doesn’t include an aux in.

Originally I had hoped to wire the iPod to the head unit directly, but I simply don’t have that kind of time right now. So, with some trepidation, I decided to see if I could find an FM transmitter that would work. I’ve had bad luck with these devices in the past. I bought one in 2001 for my first generation iPod, but after I almost ran off the road trying to tune the frequency to an unused station I stopped using it. The problem, too, was that the unit was underpowered—even when I found a relatively clear spot on the dial it would get swamped by static. I had the same trouble with a Griffin iTrip and my second iPod.

This time I bought a Monster iCarPlay Wireless Plus. This thing has no problem punching through static on empty channels, though there is still intermittent bleed through of noise. It’s also easier to tune. I noticed that the sound isn’t as clean as what I used to get through the cassette adapter, but that’s my only complaint. Nice product.

I have found the first product I’ll buy from Apple after this week’s keynote—and it wasn’t even mentioned in the keynote. At MacWorld, Apple quietly announced a next-generation AirPort Extreme base station that supports a draft of the 802.11n protocol, meaning that it’s up to five times as fast and up to twice the range of the existing 802.11g base station from Apple. This is frankly a secondary feature for me, though, compared to the news that it supports sharing a USB2 hard drive over the network.

This is a Big Deal. The original plan for The Project, the big effort to move my over 1,000 CDs to a hard drive, called for placing that drive on the network as network attached storage. I didn’t want the drive to be permanently anchored to my MacBook Pro—which would kind of defeat the purpose of having a laptop. But the only solutions I could find for sharing a network USB drive didn’t support Mac disk drive formats. That’s way the capability of the new AirPort Extreme to share a USB hard drive out of the box is so cool.

In fact, the only fly in the ointment is that the AirPort Extreme’s included 802.11n Enabler, which upgrades the AirPort cards of currently shipping Macs to 802.11n, does not extend to my first-generation MacBook Pro, since that model doesn’t include what Engadget called the “secret draft-N cards.” But I think it will still be worth it. I can 86 the old PowerBook that currently powers my music, move the RAID array into the stereo cabinet along with the base station, and free up a lot of space in our guest bedroom.

And…and this is the ironic part…I won’t have to buy a Mac mini to do it, which was my original plan.