So there you have it. An iPhone sans phone. iPod touch. Surely nice it is, with WiFi and all, but why it is not offered with a 160GB HardDisk (size or energy constraints?) and Bluetooth so you can surf the web and write emails on the couch comfortably using a keyboard, is bejond me.
Wouldn't this be a natural fit? Why would i trade in my 40GB generation X iPod for a 16GB touchpod and loose half of my multimedia library?
So here's hoping for iPod touch 1.1 with harddisk, bluetooth and reduced price ;-)
PS: watching the Stevenote, it makes me really, really sad to watch grown up people (older than 40) freak out over a ringtones feature. What has the world come to?
Because we have outages nearly every day and sometimes twice a day - according to the .mac system status:
2/10/2007
1% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 1 hour. Normal service has been restored.
2/8/2007
.Mac members were unable to access any services. Duration: 1.5 hours. Some .Mac members were unable to access mail on the web. Duration: 1.5 hours. Normal services have been restored.
2/5/2007
1% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 2 hours. Normal service has been restored.
2/5/2007
2% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 1 hour. Normal service has been restored.
2/4/2007
2% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 1 hour. Normal service has been restored.
2/4/07
Due to scheduled maintenance, some members might not have been able to access .Mac Mail for 20 minutes or less between 10pm PST on 2/3/07 and 1am PST on 2/4/07.
1/22/2007
4% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 3.5 hours. Normal service has been restored.
1/21/2007
4% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 30 minutes. Normal service has been restored.
1/16/2007
3% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 10 hours. Normal service has been restored.
1/15/2007
3% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 45 minutes.
1/11/2007
2% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 2 hours.
1/10/2007
3% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 1 hour.
Here's my little christmas gift to all of you having either Saft or any SIMBL PlugIns installed and want to work with the WebKit nightly bulilds without crashing or having to manually disable the above mentioned PlugIns:
OpenWebKit
is a simple AppleScript App, that just does the following:
- Rename /Library/InputManagers to /Library/xInputManagers
- Start /Applications/WebKit (the nightly build you have installed)
- Rename /Library/xInputManagers back to /Library/InputManagers
Installation notes:
Download, unpack and doubleclick.
Note: as this script needs to rename a folder in /Library, it will only work when you have Admin rights for your Mac!
Tada! No more hassle.
Enjoy!
PS: i wonder why the nightlies do not just already disable all input managers so we don't have to.
My Mighty Mouse recently arrived and i must say. Very well done. The nipple works perfectly fine - much better than traditional scroll wheels which tend to give you carpal tunnel and such. It is actualy a moving part, not just a sensor. The mouse also has a "real" mechanical click like the previous one. The sensors sense if you intended a right or left click.
Only the side buttons are not perfect for me if i am in nipple mode. Because when my hand is in the scroll position on the nipple, my thumb is way to far back on the mouse to reach the left side button. Apple should have made the side buttons wider (almost double the width). Also IMHO one needs to press too hard onthe side buttons to actualy make them do anything.
Minor grief also with the scrolling speed. Prior to installing the Mighty Mouse Drivers, i could adjust scrolling to a decent speed of my liking. After installing the driver, it got a little slower. Especially horizontal scrolling could be faster.
Even with the normal mouse (is that tiny mouse now), i would have always preferred to adjust the mouse (pointer) speed bejond the limit the OS offered me. Same now with the scrolling speed.
And now for some glitches with the current Apple Driver for the Mighty Mouse:
It doesn't care (or cares too much) about context. Imageine you're looking at a webpage which includes a TEXT AREA with scrolling content. When you move your mouse pointer over the Text Area, the nipple will scroll the text area which is fine - but once you reach the top or bottom of that textarea, the whole webpage suddelny starts scrolling. This is a major usability issue as it makes scrolling to the top or bottom of a text area nearly impossible. IMHO, reaching the top or bottom of a text area should just stop the scrolling - scrolling should NOT continue bejond the boundaries of the text ara. See the movie below for an explanation.
Another weird thing is related to quicktime content. Try loading an MP3 file embeded via the QuickTime Plugin into a Webpage for example (any podcast should do) and move the mouse pointer over the QuickTime Controller displayed in the Browser (I tried with Safari). Now scroll right/left. Here what happens to the volume? But the left/right scroll doesn't actualy change the controllers volume but rather the volume you could adjust via the movie properties in quicktime pro - which could lead to terrible distortion.
Tags: mighty mouse
So we recently attended yet another "Sommerfest" organised by WEKA Verlag (we're placing ADs in their magazines) in Munich and since Munich is a 2 and a half hour drive from where we live, we decided to stay a day longer and have some fun. After having a Weißwurst Breakfast at the Viktualienmarkt, we attended a georgeous exhibition in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. It was the Frei Otto exhibition - you know - the Guy who developed the funny tent like roofs for the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
Besides all the fascinating Frei Otto concepts you could see, i was blown away by - what i discovered on second sight - were various multimedia shows running off some Mac Minis hanging on a wall including Apple Cinema Displays and all... Nice use of a Mini heh?
Excuse the quality of the images, but they were taken with a Nokia 6630 Cellphone.
I've seen some interpret this as petulance or spite -- that this switch is just Jobs picking up his ball and leaving for another playground because he feels IBM has embarrassed him. That interpretation is foolish. I really think Jobs was just being honest, or at least as honest as he could be in a public statement.
Now i think if he would have realy been honest, then whole thing would have been rephrazed from "We're switching to Intel" to "We're now adding Intel to our Processor Portfolio". This would have left all doors wide open and with the universal binary, we'd all have the choice to use whatever processor we'd want.
Seeing that this didn't happen, leaves a sour taste of his Steveness once more being pissed off by someone and being stubborn and walking away in a huff.
So what the fu__ is going on here? I believe as long as IBM can supply sufficient numbers of processors, we're just fine. We don't necessarily need no stinking 4Ghz or such. So is Apple just out for World domination by trying to get OS X onto every X86 out there. That would be a real silly idea. Or do i just not get it?
See also: this
Here's a little help for all of you who fail to install tiger due to a corrupted disk - aka when diskutility reports it can't fix a broken disk.
Boot into singleuser mode by pressing APPLE-S when you turn your machine on.
When the System comes up with a textprompt, type:
fsck -fy
and hit enter.
You'll now get some output about errors fsck will find and apperantly try to repair (which it proved it can't in diskutility run by the Tiger installer already).
In the output, you'll notice it will print some numbers to identify bad files - something like:
Fixing bad file (1234567D)...
Write down all of these numbers (excluding any trailing LETTER - we only need the plain number - no A-Z).
Now type:
reboot (and hit enter)
to reboot into the OS already installe don your Harddisk.
By knowing these secret numbers reported by fsck, we can now find the actual files which cause the problems. After finding the files, i recommend to copy them to some external disk or a server as we are going to delete all of them!
To find those files, open Terminal.app again and type:
sudo find / -inum NNNNNN
where NNNNNN needs to be replaced by one of the secret numbers you wrote down previously.
The find comand will search for a while and finally output the real path and filename of the bad file. With this information, you can easily locate and delete the file from the finder.
Repeat the above "find / -inum NNNNNN" thing for as many of the secret numbers you had written down and delete all of the files "find" will find.
Now, you can boot into singleuser mode again (APPLE-S) run fsck -fy and it will fix your drive. Run fsck twice and when it is done type:
sync
type:
reboot
hold the "C" key to boot into your Tiger install DVD (in case it is still inserted) and you should be on your way to tiger.
Now if you mess up your machine, don't blame me!
[The above steps are not written for Geeks so i didn't combine the find and delete steps like a geek would have done ;-)]
Daring Fireball: The Tiger Details List: "I’ve been using the final developer build of Mac OS X 10.4 for the past few weeks, and I’m compiling a list of observations and interesting details. Things that are new, things that are different."
And here's what i found during the first hours of using Tiger:
Installation:
You need lots of available Space. I ran a little short on the harddisk of my 12" and sure enough, the installation stopped with an error. If i wouldn't have been as knowledgable as i am, i would have lost my previous USER-Data as i did an archive install.
I need a new installer optionCurrently you have these options:
- Updating the Current System
- Archive Install which does a clean install but can preserve your user-settings and such but archives the Old System in a folder called "Previous System". Allthough this prev. System can not be used anymore (as written inthe installer help), it is archived and wastes space
- Super Clean install which formats your Harddisk and cleanly installs the new OS.
I had just used the "Update prev. System" for the last couple of updates. My gut tells me however that a clean install will always result in a more stable system, so this time i picked the Archive Install to have a clean install but still keep my user settings. Now if you don't have huge harddisks or have the habbit of always filling them up, this Archive Install requires far too much harddisk space, as it needs to fit the NEW OS and the OLD OS on the same harddisk (you can't archive the old OS on another drive). Now i didn't have enough space available.
This gives the desire for a new INSTALLER option which either lets me archive the previous system to an external HD (not many people will be able to use this archived old system anyway) or even offers me to just OVERWRITE the old system and only keep my User-Settings (old home folder...) which would be my preferred way. This way, we save a couple of GIGs which is otherwise wasted by the archived and useles old System.
Spotlight:
I love spotlight and was really waiting for such a feature to finaly be available in a usable manner. It works pretty well but here's one minor glitch i wonder if this couldn't be a little bit more cleverly aproached.
It seems spotlight doesn't INDEX any of your iPhoto Libraries Metadata which i find strange. For example i have tons of photos taken on my various trips to Bali, Indonesia. The images of course have these weired filenames like "DSC00133.jpg" which doesn't mean much for indexing. However, all these images are nicely filed into an iPhoto Album called "Bali" and lot's of them even have keywords assigned. This means i had already taken the time to add META DATA to all the images. Sadly this META DATA is simply ignored by Spotlight as NONE of my Bali-Images is found when i search for BALI in spotlight. Some room for improvement.
So today is Keynote day again! This is usually the day when we religious like mac fans attach our eyes to the screens and worship our Macximo Leader, his highness Steve, talk to us.
This year it's gonna be different. In the past, we were all equal - wether we were fortunate enough to be live at the show or back home behind our DSL lines, as apple was broadcasting the event live into the internet. This seemed so important to Apple, that they even started live broadcasts of WWDC-Keynotes - which used to be a closed event only accessible to participants having signed an NDA - to the public.
This year however, Apple was so upset about some information leaked to the public before the event, that it reacted like a 6 year old and left in a huff.
Now i ask you, how can a company like Apple react so silly? Why do we, the users, the followers, the crazy ones, the ones who change the world have to pay the price for something bad some roumor site may have done?
We are the ones buying the products, being fanatically loyal. What if we'd react childish and would say: "No Apple, you've been mean to us, we're not gonna play with you anymore"?
Now if Apple would have said: "Due to smaller budgets, we are unable to present a live feed of the Macworld Keynote anymore" or alike, i would not even dare to think about it, but looking at the current situation about the "missing live-stream" just smells terribly cheesy.
Apple: grow up please and give us our Keynotes back! I mean live Keynotes! The ones which are so essential to our über-culture, that you even named a software package after them.
Google Keywords: Macworld 2005 keynote live stream, 2005 keynote broadcast, steve jobs, quicktime streaming
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I mean - come on - what would happen to AAPL if anything other than the above letter would have been published.
So here's hoping that Steve gets better soon and that his illness was food for thought about how to continue the corporation we all love so much - and care about - without him.
Some think Jonathan Ive would be the man for the Job. I don't know. It would be hard to find someone - not just to fill the Keynote Sessions - but also to have the necessary vision. Let's just hope the best for now...
BoingBoing just posted a link to a .torrent download of Xcode, stating Apple's distribution network is "slow and poky".
Now i'll have to ask: How is Akamai slow and poky? And if the download is not distributed via Akamai, but only via the ADC site, aren't you violating the NDA you signed to get access to the ADC site to pull XCode and put it on .torrent?
Just curious.
Funny enough just shortly after the show was over, there was this huge X over SFO. Can you spot it?
It's been once again a fun and exhausting week here at Apple's WWDC 2004. The reality distortion field seemed even stronger than usual. Lot's of marketing-driven presentations. We really shouldn't have to listen to company profiles during such an event -- hint, hint! Me mainly taking the Enterprise track would have preferred much more "real world" examples rather than have the speakers repeat the marketing mantras over and over again (myth vs. reality). Can't go into details due to the NDA most of us had signed.
Maybe the quality decreased a bit due to the large number of attendees?
Also i missed the espresso-carts very, very much. I'll post some photos to my gallery soon.
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Sure it was nice of Steve to give an iSight to each of us. Damn nice piece of hardware for sure. Much appreciated!
However, calling iChatAV "revolutionary" as lots of us Mac aficionados do, is - well - biased.
Being the first WWDC with an "Enterprise" track, here's what an "Enterprise" user like me feels is missing from iChatAV:
- NetMeeting compatibility since this would also make it compatible with our professional video-conferencing system.
- One To Many Conferences, since most of the time, a conference is really involving more than 2 persons.
- Integrated whiteboard and screensharing in order to show others presentations and such.
Now all this isn't new and even exists on the Mac Today (more or less mature). For instance there is a promising looking video-conf App, which indeed is NetMeeting compatible, called ohphoneX.
Even a real interactive conferencing app incl. whiteboard and such is there. Never heard about it before i met the Developers on one of the couches at WWDC: Marratech.
To sum up: iChatAV is a nice start and i enjoy being able to chat with my Girlfriend here in Germany while attending WWDCs, but there's potential for much, much more...
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