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Apple Universe

Top-level category for all Apple, Mac, and OS X related topics.

The waiting game…

Macworld logoIf you read any of the Mac Mania blogs, you probably know I got to play around with a digital SLR--the Nikon D40X--during the cruise. Well, after I got home, I decided the time was right for an upgrade from my pocket digital camera. In a case of wonderful timing, Costco happened to have a D40X kit (camera, two lenses, memory card, case) available during our last visit, so I got my birthday present (and Christmas and next year's birthday and...) a bit early this year.

You can read about why I chose to upgrade, including some interesting comparison photographs, in this Macworld blog. I've only had the camera for a few days, but I'm having a blast with it so far, and really looking forward to taking it to WWDC next week--I have a free Sunday in San Francisco, and I hope to take a bunch of pictures.

One of the things I wanted with the camera was a more powerful zoom lens, so I also ordered a 70/300mm telephoto from Amazon. It shipped on Tuesday for a Wednesday delivery, but a recorded phone call early Wednesday reminded me that a signature would be required. So I was basically locked in the house until the lens showed up. And (eventually), it did:

timetable

Yup, nearly 12 hours into the waiting game, the lens showed up! Urgh. Just in time, too, as I was literally backing the car out of the garage to go pick up the girls at day care when the UPS van pulled up! Now that it's here, though, I love it, though I haven't had much time to play with it. Here's a shot of the lens (with the hood as shipped, not in shooting mode!), as well as two pictures I took--both from about 15 feet away, standing on our back porch one evening. (These were handheld shots, too--the lens includes an image stabilizer that seems to work quite well). Click any image for a larger (640x480) version:

Lens  Lens  Lens

Of course, the presence of the large lens meant that the nice Nikon bag that was included in the kit was no longer large enough to carry the gear...guess it's time to find a nice camera kit backpack!



Vacuous Vista versioning

Macworld logoWhile thinking about the upcoming release of 10.5, aka Leopard, I realized that Apple has yet one more advantage over Microsoft: simpler choices for the consumer who is contemplating an OS purchase. I compared Vista and OS X versions in this May Editor's Notes writeup on Macworld. As a friend noted, it's almost like Microsoft is making it hard to purchase Vista, given the differing versions one must choose between.



Shopping (or not) at the Apple Online Store

Macworld logoI wrote this piece back in May, when the Apple Store was down for about four hours, and for what? To release some very modest speed bumps to the MacBook line. I can't think of any other major online vendor that takes their store down when they add new products, which is what inspired me to write the piece.



Mac Mania VI / Aperture Aura blogs

Macworld logoI wrote a few weblogs for Macworld during our journey to Alaska last week. Here they all are, in order based on our cruise's destinations:

I had a lot of fun on the cruise, though I felt I didn't have as much to offer the attendees this time (as I couldn't discuss Leopard, which was the original plan). For anyone who might be contemplating one of these, I can say that they are quite a lot of fun, for two reasons. First, it's a great way to get some quality instruction in reasonably small class sizes. There's also a lot of out-of-class contact with the speakers, including dinner each evening. Second, the cruises themselves can be fun. I'd never been on a cruise ship before last fall's Caribbean excursion, so I'm quite new to the whole thing. I think cruises are a great way to see a number of places quickly and relatively inexpensively--which can help determine where you'd like to go back for a longer, more personal stay in the future.
[continue reading…]



Home from Alaska…

Macworld logoAs some of you may know, I spent the last week on the Mac Mania VI Geek Cruise, cruising from Seattle to a few spots in Alaska (and one in Canada), and then back to Seattle yesterday morning. (You can read my blog posts about the journey on the MacMania blog page over at Macworld.)

Alaska picThe blog posts contain a few of the images from the trip, but given that I took over 700 pictures, and that our boat's connection speed was slow (and the cost was high), it wasn't feasible to run more than a handful or so in the blogs. I've now looked through the whole batch, and picked 55 that I felt were most interesting, and tossed them into this photo gallery. These are basically unedited images--I haven't done any cropping, color correction, or other such tweaks as of yet. I just thought it'd be fun to share a bit more of the Alaskan and Canadian scenery from the trip--even based on the limited experience one gets from a cruise ship, Alaska really is a most interesting state (this was my first visit of any sort there).

Click the first image to view the larger version of that slide, and you can then use the arrow keys to advance from one large image to the next. (You can also use the Index Page buttons at the bottom of the main screen to just view each of the three index pages.)

If you'd like a full-size version of any of these photos, just let me know the file name, and I'll send you the original (no watermark, either--I just put that there to stop the casual image lifters). My favorite shot is probably the orange sunset, though a couple of the glacier/ice in water shots are interesting as well.

I'm home for a week, then it's off to see what interesting things are revealed in the "feature complete" Leopard beta that Steve will (hopefully) be discussing at WWDC--and maybe we'll even see some cool new hardware, if recent rumors turn out to be true.



An unexpected accolade

Macworld logoA few months back, I received an email from Macworld's head honcho, Jason Snell, telling me that my multi-part look at the Intel Mac mini had been nominated for a Neal award in the Best Online Article or Series category. The Neal awards are designed to recognize excellence in business media publications, and I guess they're fairly well known in the industry (although I'd never heard of them). I read the email then didn't give it a second thought, other than "hey, that's kind of cool."

Well, last week, Jason sent a quick text message from the awards ceremony: "Holy cow, we won!" I was both shocked (wow, someone actually read the whole thing?!) and thrilled--because the mini piece represents exactly what I wanted to do when I made the decision to join Macworld full time: to have the time to look at things in a more in-depth manner than I was able to when running my site as a hobby.

I was given the chance to delve deeply into a then-new Intel-powered Mac, see exactly how well it did a number of different tasks, compare it to my G4 PowerBook and Dual G5, and then write about my experiences. That the end result was recognized with a Neal award is really thrilling, and speaks highly to the editorial team at Macworld that converted my 15,000 word opus into a well-paced and easy-to-read multi-part series--it's not easy taking a piece that long and making it into a coherent multi-day story, but that's just what they did.

So thanks to ABM for recognizing the article, thanks to the great team at Macworld for making it work so well online, and thanks to the person who submitted it for consideration for the Neal awards. It was a lot of fun to write, and hopefully was useful to those who were interested in learning abou the new Intel-powered Macs.



When updates overlap

On Thursday of this week, we had two interesting software update announcements:

  1. Microsoft released an update to Vista that fixes a problem with Apple's iPod corrupting when ejected.
  2. Apple released the Boot Camp 1.2 beta, which adds support for Microsoft Vista (among other new improvements).

So on the same day, Microsoft patched their OS to prevent Apple's iPods from corrupting on disconnect, and Apple released an update to enable its customers to use Microsoft's Vista on Intel-powered Macs.

I just found it somewhat humorous that both Microsoft and Apple released patches to fix issues with the other's products on the same day...and I'm thrilled that it happened, as it shows that companies realize how important it is for our hardware and software to play well with others. (My own Vista upgrade is in the mail, so I'll see how well the updated Boot Camp works in the near future.)



The limits of Apple’s warranty

Macworld logoLast week, I had an issue with my MacBook Pro--the backlight went out. The machine is about 110 days old, so it's just over Apple's 90-day limit for phone tech support. I think it's pretty outrageous that a $2,500+ machine comes with only 90-days of phone support for hardware issues, and I shared my thoughts on the subject in an opinion piece for Macworld on Friday.

I really think that Apple is lagging with their policies, but some of the feedback to the opinion piece has prompted me to look into it further. I'm not sure if anything will become of it, but it's my plan to look into the bigger names in the PC world and compare their policies with Apple's for similar gear. Just for fun, I'm also planning to look at the major home electronics manufacturers, at least those who sell gear in a similar price range as something like the MacBook Pro.

If anything like an article comes of my great plans, I'll post a follow-up...



An Office 2008 VBA to AppleScript helper

Macworld logoA while back, I wrote about what I thought of Microsoft's decision to drop Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) from the next version of Office. In short, I think it's a short-sighted and stupid decision. Apparently my thoughts had no influence on the folks in Redmond (shocking, I know!), as Office 2008 is set to ship without any form of VBA support.

But it will have AppleScript support, and the fine folks at MacTECH were kind enough to send me a preview copy of their upcoming 150+ page guide to switching from VBA to AppleScript. I wrote a brief preview of this guide for Macworld last week. If you're a serious VBA scripter looking to make the move to AppleScripts, this looks to be a must-have guide. And thanks to some Microsoft support, you can buy it and six-month subscription to MacTECH for all of $10 or so. More info can be found in the link in the Macworld article.



Don’t leave the Windows open

Macworld logoI've been running Windows on my Intel Macs for quite a while now--I have Parallels, VMWare Fusion, CrossOver, and Boot Camp installed on two machines. Across all those installations, I've never done anything to protect my Windows installs from viruses and malware, other than using Windows XP Pro's built-in tools: the malicious software removal tool and the firewall. I wanted to see if Windows really was as susceptible to attack as everyone was claiming it was.

pwned

Yes, it was. I wrote about what happened for Macworld, as it was a most eye-opening experience for me--this particular Windows install hadn't done anything more "risky" than surf to a few well-known download sites, looking for some iPhoto-type applications for the PC. If this is the risk a Windows user faces every day if their machine isn't fully armored against outside attacks, I must ask...why do people choose to use this OS on a regular basis? It also made me quite thankful I've never worried about such things in all my years of Mac usage.