After a particularly infuriating search effort for the Curious George soundtrack at the iTunes Music Store, I wrote this editorial about the store's messed up search functions. Oddly enough, the very day we ran the editorial, Apple updated the store's search functions, and the new functionality addressed every single issue I had raised. Talk about bad timing!
When I decided to purchase a new MacBook, I knew I'd struggle with one decision: black or white? One was $200 cheaper; one was much cooler looking. So which way did my wallet vote? Here's how things went a couple of days ago at the local Apple store.
A 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.
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:
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?!
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...
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!
We've lived in our present home for a bit more than two years, and we're generally quite happy with it. However, the floor has always been very squeaky, especially in the carpeted areas. When someone was walking around, it really did sound like a haunted house at times, what with all the eery squeaking from the floor.
Although the noise annoyed me, it never did so enough to merit moving all the furniture, pulling up the carpeting, and fixing the problem with some nails. Nor was I much interested in trying to solve it from below, in our roughly 18" tall crawl space. So I just put up with it. Until this week.
A while back, someone told me about this ingenious device that would help you fix squeaky floors without pulling carpet or entering the crawlspace. I was doubtful, and just never seemed to have enough time to investigate further. But with some time off the last couple weeks for the new child (and family in town to help babysit), I finally tracked down the device at Home Depot. It's called (I am not making this up) Squeeeeek No More, and it looks like this (click for a larger version):
So let's assume you're a big, powerful, corporation, generally viewed as "customer centric" with very cool and useful products. Sometimes, though, you have the occasional 'what we're they thinking?' moment with a product. Let's further assume your name is, oh, I don't know, how about...Apple? Here's yet another of those moments they seem to have with some regularity:
That, in case you're not familiar with it, is the button in iPhoto toolbar that lets you publish a selection of images to your .Mac homepage. Click it, and a wizard comes up that helps you select the theme, layout options, and other features for your photo page. You then click Publish, and presto, your images are published on your .Mac homepage, complete with a very nice slideshow feature. Presto, bango, simple!
So what's the problem? Well, that button (and the wizard it launched) has simply vanished in iPhoto6. There's no discussion about it in the manual, nor in Help, nor in the Read Me, nor in the Knowledge Base. It has simply disappeared into the ether.
Instead of using the handy wizard, you're now supposed to send all your images through iWeb, which will then force you to create an actual site, just to contain what should be a simple slideshow page. Yech. There is a workaround, which I'll write up in detail for macosxhints next week. (Short version: export and resize to 800x600, upload the folder to your iDisk, then use the .Mac homepage to create the photo page.) But the workaround is a far cry from the ease of use of the old wizard.
Now personally, I never used this feature, as I don't use .Mac for my photo pages. However, after recommending the iLife upgrade to my mother, I definitely got an earful about this "new and improved" iPhoto when she found her single most used feature missing in action! Since I feel responsible for the problem she now faces, it's the least I can do to try to help spread the word about this, and hope Apple can see fit to return a basic feature to the application.
I'll probably be writing about why this is a Really Bad Thing on macworld.com next week, but I wanted to get something up about it now, while it was fresh on my mind. Of course, based on Apple's treatment of the discussion I linked to above, I don't have a positive feeling about the chances of this feature's return...
Perhaps, though, if enough people make enough noise about it, they can bring back what was a powerful and easy-to-use feature.
I saw this as I was downloading Firefox for Windows XP (running in Parallels Workstation on my Intel mini). Needless to say, given the horror stories I'd heard about Windows' security, my first thought was 'my XP box has been hacked!' A bit of research, though, proved that this is a legit Firefox mirror...albeit one that may cause issues for those downloading from, say, government agencies, large companies, or anyone else likely to have an Internet filtering solution in place.
BTW, if you have an Intel-powered Mac, do yourself a favor and check out Parallels--it's really pretty amazing being able to run any number of guest operating systems at near-native speeds, all within the friendly confines of OS X. I wrote about my experiences with it for a recent Macworld piece, and included a video that shows XP's speed on the Core Duo mini. Today's release of Parallels beta5 included basic USB device support (flash drives only for now), as well as the beginnings of a nice shared folder solution for sharing data with the host OS X machine.
For the past few years on April Fool's Day, I've run some sort of prank announcement on macosxhints.com--everything from switching to WindowsXP hints to the triple-CPU G5 Cubed to running OS X on an iPod to this year's 30th Anniversary Mac.
When thinking about what to do for this year, the Apple Music/Apple Computer lawsuit was getting a lot of press. Using that as the setup, I thought I'd run a cool story about a new Apple/Apple agreement that would finally put Beatles music on iPods. I even went so far as to mock up a line of special edition iPods created just for the occasion. Ultimately, I trashed the concept and went with the Intel/PowerPC Mac, but I thought I'd share the Beatles Special Edition iPod designs here (click the image for a larger version):
I had written up most of the story, too, but that's long since gone. The only other thing I have left is the sales flyer sheet I put together with some specs on the units--you can see the full-size flyer by clicking on the small image at the top right of this story. You'll see a full view of each iPod, along with some tech notes about the units. Be aware that the full-size image is a 173KB PNG file, so those with modems (are there any of you?) may wish to avoid doing that.
In the end, I felt the Intel/PowerPC thing would be more interesting, so that's what I went with. But when I look at the custom iPods, I think "geez, if Apple offered some sort of custom iPod image silkscreening feature, I'd probably buy one." I think they'd look much more interesting than the current plain black or white versions, based on looking at even my relatively poor Photoshop work. And it'd be a nice way to customize your unit, by including an image of your choice directly on the machine itself.