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Convert your G5 to Intel power!

I use iChat a lot--it's one of the ways the far-flung Macworld editorial staff keeps in touch with each other, for instance. My iChat info also winds up in a lot of iChat screenshots--some I take, and some taken by others. Most of the time, this isn't a problem. But sometimes, the user taking the photo might have my actual iChat ID visible on the screen, or I'll mess up and have it visible in the header of my buddy list. As a result, my iChat ID isn't a great secret--and since I have a .Mac account, it's actually very easy to figure out.

I used to leave my iChat sessions open, and would chat with whomever stopped by, as I love talking to other Mac users. But as the site's popularity grew, these random chats began to take up more and more of the day, so I eventually had to lock iChat down to only allow chats those on my buddy list (iChat Preferences -> Accounts -> Security tab). Now if someone wants to chat with me, they have to send me an email first. Not nearly as friendly as before, but at least I have time to work again :).

In any event, when I set up my recently-purchased MacBook, I forgot to set up the chat restriction. I didn't notice at first as I didn't have any third-party chat requests come in for the first couple days. Then I started getting chat requests from unknown users. Before disabling unknown chats again, I thought I'd take a few minutes and chat with at least a couple of the requesters, just to see who they were, etc. One of them turned out to be a high school student (or a friend pulling my leg; I'm still not sure which) who seemed to be the ultimate Mac power user--he claimed to own something like six Macs, including a PowerMac G5, MacBook, and MacBook Pro. Although that sounded suspicious to me ($10K worth of Macs while in high school!?), I kept talking with him. That is, until this exchange took place (my lone entry is in green, somewhat obviously):

chat log

So it seems all the industry experts have been wrong for all these years--apparently the PowerPC G5 and the Intel Core Duo CPUs are pin-compatible; just yank the G5, drop in a Core Duo, and your G5 is now a Boot Camp-capable Intel-powered Mac. Hmmm...why haven't I read more about this on the net?! :)

I chose that point to exit the conversation, and then immediately blocked future chat requests from non-buddies. So if this was a friend pulling my leg, you got me. If it wasn't, then this is clearly the most out-there liar I've ever had the "pleasure" of chatting with.





MacBook gaming: A graphics concern?

Macworld logoI wrote up my perspective on playing games on the just-introduced (and video-card-lacking) MacBook. There were some encouraging results, and a lot of not so encouraging results. Overall, I thought the MacBook did a passable job with older titles, a better-than-expected job with some games in Rosetta, and an abysmal job with the few current 3D games I tried.



Just the iPod facts, ma’am

Macworld logoLast Friday, a relatively huge article in the Living section of The Oregonian caught my eye. As you can see in the picture at right (hover and click for a larger version), it was hard to miss this article.

Paper imageExpecting to find a shocking exposé on the hidden faults of the iPod, I started reading...and started getting angry. The article was nothing more than a writeup on one user's connectivity issues between her iPod nano and a Toshiba laptop. That alone would have been fine. But the article attempts to bring in other "evidence" of iPod nano flaws, and that's where I feel it overstepped the bounds of reasonable journalism (even for something in Living).

So I wrote up my thoughts for Macworld's site, as I felt it was unfair to let something like this sit without some form of response. I have also sent the paper a copy of my writeup, though I'm not expecting much in the way of follow up.



We’re sorry, but…

Online banking screen

...but at least my identity is secured by VeriSign while I don't use the online banking system!

OK, not terribly broken, but I found it moderatly humorous today when I tried to logon to do some online banking.





It’s so … black!

MacBook pictureA new MacBook has joined the stable here at macosxhints' HQ--this one's all mine, though, not a Macworld asset like the mini! And yes, I chose to pay the $150 color tax, and bought the black one (five bonus points to the first reader to identify the source of the title of this post). I chose to upgrade because, with two kids in the house, I'm doing more work from my laptop in various rooms of the house, and the 12" PowerBook G4's 1024x768 resolution can be quite limiting. I was tempted by the 15" MacBook Pro, but the one I would want was well over $2500. When the MacBook came out at $1,500, I decided it was time...

I had two major concerns prior to purchasing--the keyboard and the glossy screen. It took but a couple seconds of typing in the store to allay the keyboard issue. The keys, though they look decidely non-standard, have very standard spacing. I had no troubles at all with touch typing, and I loved the amazingly solid feel of the keyboard.

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Hide iDVD? I think not!

Last week, for the first time since installing iLife '06, I had an excuse to use the newest version of iDVD. In general, I love it. But someone at Apple made one seemingly insanely poor decision involving the "burn progress" screen:

DVD burn image

That's the screen that appears when you start the encode (if not yet done) and burn of a final DVD. In prior versions of iDVD, this area was a separate tab within the main iDVD interface. Now it's been attached to a drop-down sheet, as seen above. Within that sheet is a progress bar and a ticker that counts off how many items have been processed.

So far so good, though a progress dialog in a sheet is a somewhat unique concept. But the other change that came with this new sheet is incredibly unwelcomed--you can no longer hide iDVD in any traditional manner. If you try Comamnd-H with iDVD in the foreground, it just beeps at you. If you switch it to the background and then do "Hide Others" from some other app, everything except iDVD hides, and you'll hear the beep again. I even tried AppleScripting it, with no success.

OK, fine, I thought, I'll just minimize it to the Dock. Nope. That doesn't work either. Argh!

Since the sheet is dynamic, my screensaver won't kick in if it's visible. So it seems you're just plain stuck with the iDVD box onscreen, which is an amazingly poor decision on Apple's part. I finally managed to at least make it non-visible by using Backdrop, a utility that lets you drop a desktop picture (or solid color) down as a layer. So I ran Backdrop, set it to display a nice picture, then switched Backdrop in front of iDVD. iDVD was now hiding behind Backdrop, and since Backdrop takes up the whole screen, I couldn't accidentally activate iDVD by clicking its window. I could still switch to it with Command-Tab, or by clicking its icon in the Dock, of course. But at least it was out of sight, allowing me to more easily work on other things while it rendered away in the background.

Why oh why can't we just have Command-H work again, as it did before?!



Why isn’t macosxhints.com a wiki?

A couple mornings back, while browsing my collection of feeds in NetNewsWire, I came across this entry about macosxhints.com in Chris Clark's excellent blog, decaffeinated. Chris writes:

MacOSXHints is a community-driven site operated by Mac Publishing LLC (of Macworld and Playlist renown) whose sole purpose is to collect and archive--wait for it--hints pertaining to Mac OS X...little tidbits you probably won’t find in the help files or product pages.

... ... ...

What we have is a thriving community site that houses a great number of hints, some percentage of them broken or redundant, most of which could be improved upon (and are, if you bother to read the comments) with the aid of a few dozen eyes.

This isn’t what blogs are for. This is what wikis are for.

So why isn’t MacOSXHints a wiki?

An interesting question to read, especially just after waking up. And it would have been interesting to reply in a comment on Chris' site, but...it seems there's no ability to do so. (Perhaps I should post a story about why decaffeinated should really be a blog that takes comments? :) ). So I'm posting my reply here, in case anyone's interested in the answer to the question.

The question about macosxhints.com is a valid one, and one that's potentially even more interesting when asked at a higher level...

Important note: The following thoughts are my opinions (and historical knowledge) only. They are in no way associated with any official MacPublishing, LLC company policies or plans. Anything I write about what I'd like to see on macosxhints.com is just that--what I'd personally like to see happen to the site going forward. They are not statements of official plans by MacPublishing for the macosxhints.com site (but we are discussing many of these same things internally).

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We all make mistakes…

And Macworld (the printed version) had one in its June issue. For a challenge, see if you can find it--hint, it's somewhere between pages 50 and 60, but if you find it on your own, I'd be quite impressed. I didn't spot it myself; it was noted in a thread on a forum site.

If you don't have the magazine, or you can't find it, or you just want to see exactly what it was we did wrong, I wrote about the mistake on Macworld's new MacUser site. Suffice it to say we'll probably never see another product with a similar result!

The MacUser site is long gone, of course…but archive.org captured the writeup. Basically, a Canon camera was rated 5.5 out of 5 mice.

In the above article, I also cover what I consider to be the most amazing typo I ever saw--right on the cover of PC Magazine. To save you the read, this was it...one year, the cover of PC Magazine's annual Technical Excellence awards issue consisted of an image of a large gold medallion. On that medallion, in large print, were the words "Tehcnical Excellence." Whoops!