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iCloudy with a 100% chance of stupidity

I use a lot of cloud services for file storage, primarily Dropbox, but also Box and (begrudgingly, for certain shared projects) Google Drive.

I also use iCloud, but not in any way that would be considered a true cloud file storage service. I use it strictly as a sync service for contacts, calendars, reminders, notes, Safari; I also use Back to My Mac.

But that's it; I don't use iCloud for cloud-based file management at all. Why not? Because iCloud in its current implementation is chock full of the stupid, at least for those of us who still use and rely on OS X.

Stupid #1: Not enough free space, and too costly for more

A quick comparison chart shows just how far out of line iCloud is with other cloud-based services:

ProviderFreeTier 1Tier 2Tier 3
GBGB$/Yr$/GB/yrGB$/Yr$/GB/yrGB$/Yr$/GB/yr
Box10100$60$0.6001000$180$0.180------
Dropbox2100$100$1.000200$199$0.995500$499$0.998
Google Drive15100$24$0.2401,000$120$0.12010,000$1,200$0.120
iCloud515$20$1.33325$40$1.60055$100$1.818
Pricing sources: Box • Dropbox • Google Drive • iCloud
Note that you can get additional free space on Dropbox through referrals and uploading images; Box occasionally offers a promo with 50GB of free space.

Kirk McElhearn covers this price and space issue in more detail in his blog post, Why Does Apple Only Offer 5 GB Storage with iCloud?.

I agree with him; if iCloud wants to attract more users, it needs more free space, and more competitively priced upgrade plans.

Read on for more of the stupid…

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How to: Simplify value pasting in Excel

I tweeted this over the weekend, but thought it might be worth a bit more explanation here. By default, when you copy and paste something in Excel, Excel defaults to pasting everything from the copied cell: the formula, shading, borders, font, style, etc.

Excel dialogSometimes this is OK, but often I just want the values from a cell or range—either because I'm using them in another table with different formatting, or to convert a formula into fixed values.

Out of the box, if you want to paste just the cell values in Excel, you have to select Edit > Paste Special, then navigate the world's busiest dialog box (as seen at right), click on the tiny Values radio button, then hit Return.

If you're doing a lot of value pasting, this is a royal pain. Thankfully, it's pretty easy to fix this design stupidity.

How you fix this depends—for the first step—on whether you're running Excel 2008 or Excel 2011.

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My horrid Minecraft purchasing experience

Summary version: I bought the Mac version of Minecraft via credit card. This led to my card being put on a fraud hold, and the company that handled the charge asking me to provide personal and private information via email. Ergo, my recommendation: do not use a credit card to purchase Minecraft.

Updated on Sept 5: Skip to the end to see Skrill's response to my refusal to provide identity theft documents.

Detailed version: Recently, my daughter started playing Minecraft with a friend of hers. At first, the iOS version was all she wanted to use, and she played that for quite a while. But then her friend upgraded to the desktop version, and after some discussion with her and figuring out how she could help pay for it, we agreed to buy the Mac version.

So I went to the Minecraft site, and followed the steps to pay by credit card. When you do so, your payment is handled by a company named Skrill (previously Moneybookers). Googling on either of these will provide some interesting tidbits, such as default opting-in customers to casino partners and their blocking the WikiLeaks donation site. I only wish I had Googled before I purchased. In my defense, it's only noted in a small line at the bottom of the payment screen:

If I had gone my homework ahead of time, I would've switched to PayPal, but I didn't.
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How to use Safari to track The Masters leaderboard

In general, I don't use Safari—mainly because I'm addicted to the add-ons I get with Chrome and Firefox. (Yes, I know Safari has extensions…but they're underpowered and feature limited compared to what you can get in the other browsers.) However, during Masters week, Safari has a key role in my following the tournament, thanks to one key feature: web clip, i.e. Open in Dashboard.

While The Masters has an excellent iPad app, I don't like having the iPad locked into one app for hours at a time. So, to follow the leaderboard, I turn to Safari's Open in Dashboard feature, along with a favorite old Mac OS X Hints hint that allows me to drag widgets out of the Dashboard. Using these two things together, I can view the full Masters leaderboard, floating in a window all its own.

Best of all, the interactivity of the leaderboard is preserved, so I can re-sort the list, expand a player's scores, and do all the other things I can do on the actual leaderboard page.

Note that you'll need some spare monitor space for this trick: the dragged Widget floats over every other window, so it will get in the way if you're using, for instance, an 11" MacBook Air.

If you'd like to do the same, here's how…
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Use Mountain Lion in VMware Fusion with Tools

Note: As of VMWare Fusion 4.1.2, this hack is no longer necessary. I've left it here mainly for those using older versions of Fusion (though you may not be able to install newer Mountain Lion previews on those older versions of Fusion).

If you're a Mac developer with access to OS X Mountain Lion, you might want to use it in a virtual machine. This is simple in VMware Fusion, but if you try to install VMWare Tools, Mountain Lion will kernel panic. Unfortunately, using virtual OS X without VMware Tools installed is painful—no screen resize, captured and laggy mouse, etc. So here's a workaround to get Mountain Lion working with VMware Tools (this assumes you have Mountain Lion already running in a virtual machine):

  1. Make a snapshot of your current setup!
  2. Run the VMWare Tools installer, but do not reboot when it's done. Just leave the installer running onscreen.
  3. Navigate to /Library > Application Support > VMware Tools.
  4. Delete vmmemctl.kext and vmmemctl
  5. Edit (you'll need root power) services.sh in that same directory.
  6. Comment out these two lines (they're shown commented out, via the # in front of each):

  7. Save the edited file, quit the editor, and now (via the still-running Installer) reboot the virtual machine.

The initial reboot may take a long time, but it should work. If it doesn't, you're on your own, as I've now exhausted all my knowledge on the topic.



How to not upgrade to iOS5

If you follow me on Twitter, you're probably familiar with my iOS5 installation difficulties. Two days into the process, and I've still not been able to update either my iPad (first generation) or iPhone 4. This is—by far—the most frustrated I've been with any Apple upgrade, ever…and that covers a lot of history!

Simply as a means of venting, and perhaps to save someone else from going through what I've gone through (though note that I haven't yet solved the problem), here's what I've gone through to try to upgrade my iPhone and iPad.

Update: On my 48th attempt, my iPhone 4 successfully updated to iOS5. Now, on to the iPad…

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A look at how OS X tips spread via Google

When iTunes 8 came out, one very annoying change was the removal of the "Show iTunes Store arrow links" preference -- in previous versions of iTunes, you'd toggle this setting to remove the link arrows that appear when you select an item in your Library.

I never use these things, and they bother my eye, so as soon as I got my hands on iTunes 8, I started looking for a solution (here's how I do that). With some help from Kirk McElhearn, we soon found the solution in a hidden preference value -- a variable named show-store-arrow-links.

After a quick test, we confirmed that it worked, and I wrote it up as hint on Mac OS X Hints. At the same time, I ran a Google search for 'show-store-arrow-links', and came up with no matches.

Note that this does not mean Kirk and I were the first people to post about this workaround -- more than likely, it had already been posted elsewhere, but Google hadn't yet indexed those sites (we were doing this shortly after iTunes 8 was released).

Still, I thought this was a perfect chance to see how things propagate across the internet, as I could repeat my search for show-store-arrow-links over time, and see how quickly the hit count increased. Given the uniqueness of the term, any matches would definitely be people either linking to the hint on some other site, or actually posting their own version of the hint.

Within two hours of the original hint's posting, the hit count was up to five. After seven hours, 137. At 24 hours, 384. At that point, I grew bored with tracking the increases, and tabled the study. Today, though, after 12 days, I ran the search again, and there are now over 1,000 sites that contain the hint (or a link to it) on how to block the iTunes Store arrow links in iTunes 8.

I think that's a good measure of how many people dislike these arrows, and who really wish Apple would have left that preference in place. (Sorry iTunes for Windows users; preferences are stored differently in Windows, and I'm not sure anyone's figured out how to make similar modifications on that platform.)



New Macworld video posted…

Macworld logoIt was my turn on the Macworld video blog-go-round again this week. The topic I chose is "working with multiple Macs in one home." The end result is a 10-minute clip covering a number of third-party tools that make the process easier, and a couple of general usage hints.

Due to the huge number of downloads, the size of the macworld.com video is 320x240. But if you want, you can see grab the original 640x480 version right here. Warning, it's 185MB in size (I didn't work very hard to compress it, so the quality is good, but it's huge).



Review: VMware Fusion

Macworld logoYou may need (or want) to run Windows, or other operating systems, alongside Mac OS X, and Parallels Desktop (4 mice) is the best-known of several programs on the market for that purpose. (Full native Windows support, of course, is also available via Apple's Boot Camp, but it requires you to reboot out of OS X and into Windows.) A new-to-the-Mac player now brings a formidable challenger to the arena, however. VMware, an expert in x86 virtualization—that is, the ability to run one or more x86 operating systems as 'guest' under a 'host' x86 operating system—has released Fusion 1.0, its first OS X offering. Like Parallels, Fusion allows you to run many versions of Windows and other operating systems from within OS X. And unlike Boot Camp, you don't have to log out and restart in order to use it.

VMware Fusion supports more than 60 operating systems: Windows coverage extends from version 3.1 to betas of Windows Server 2008. If Linux is your cup of tea, you'll find support for Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE, Mandrake, and more. You can also install Novell Netware, Solaris 9 or 10, FreeBSD, and MS-DOS systems. Even 64-bit releases of Windows and some families of Linux, such as Red Hat and SUSE Enterprise Linux, are supported.

Read my Macworld article, Review: VMware Fusion, for the rest of the story...