Category Archives: Apple

Supersize Me

24-in. iMacFinally. Finally! Last December I walked into Tekserve, my local Apple retailer and my favorite place to buy anything Macintosh related, with a credit card in hand, ready to buy myself a brand new iMac G5. At the very last moment, I demurred a bit, frozen, for some reason unable to commit to buying the machine. Ultimately, I left empty-handed. Something in me was shouting out loudly, “This is not the time to buy a new computer.”

Ever since, I’ve been waiting for Apple to release just the right machine. The Intel-based iMacs they shipped earlier in the year seemed intriguing, but for whatever reason I still felt disinclined to commit. Now, today, they’ve upgraded the entire iMac line and even added a new model: a super-sized, 24-in. iMac with a healthy Intel Core 2 Duo processor at its heart. I came across the news this morning, when I sat down at my desk after a very early meeting that lasted several hours, and I knew — somewhat instantly — that this was the one I had been hoping Apple would release. I placed my order just after lunchtime. Now, the trick is to wait for it to arrive.

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Message to the Messengers

AdiumIf there’s an indispensable kind of software that helps me keep my work and personal lives balanced during the day, it’s instant messaging. It’s absolutely integral to making impromptu appointments, clarifying questions, asking for quick-hit reactions, and planning my social calendar. Because of this, I take a very conservative view to altering my instant messaging tools in any way — I generally don’t like it. Whenever the software I use changes — whether a feature is modified or a new one is added — it can take me weeks of grumbling about its newness before I can get accustomed to it.

For the most part, my program of choice is the superb, open source Adium. As an instant messaging client, none of the others can touch it; Adium is elegant on the whole, extremely pliable in its customization options, satisfyingly capable of talking to multiple I.M. services, and a high bargain at the price of free. I also make it a habit to use Apple’s iChat while at home, more so that I can keep an eye on what Apple’s doing with their instant messaging platform than anything. If I had to choose between the two, Adium would win, hands down.

It’s likely going to stay that way, too, because I’m not particularly encouraged by what I see coming for iChat 4.0, the next major revision scheduled to ship next year with Apple’s Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system update.

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Please Return Your Battery (If You Can)

Dear Apple Customer: Thank you for checking our Battery Exchange Program page for the eligibility of your 12-inch PowerBook G4’s accompanying battery for replacement. According to our records, your battery is is covered under this program.

So congratulations, it stands a better-than-usual chance of blowing up! And when we say “blowing up,” we mean it in the old school way, not in the way that young kids were bandying about five years ago as a euphemism for “getting really popular.”

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Stick a Database in It, It’s Done

For months now, I’ve been using the superb Kinkless Getting Things Done system to manage my to do lists. I like it a lot. It’s a beautiful hack of the excellent-in-its-own-right OmniOutliner Professional that uses ingenuity and a healthy dose of AppleScript to turn that program into a fairly robust expression of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” philosophy of personal time management.

Yet it’s still a hack. Ethan J. A. Schoonover, the author of what᾿s commonly abbreviated as “kGTD,” has done a tremendous job of turning OmniOutliner into a malleable repository for categorizing and manipulating reminders and to do items. As good as it is though, I’m rarely able to forget its limitations when I’m using it; the fact that OmniOutliner Pro wasn’t conceived from the ground up to handle this kind of data and the way users interact with it is often too easy to see.

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Stick a Database in It, It’s Done

For months now, I’ve been using the superb Kinkless Getting Things Done system to manage my to do lists. I like it a lot. It’s a beautiful hack of the excellent-in-its-own-right OmniOutliner Professional that uses ingenuity and a healthy dose of AppleScript to turn that program into a fairly robust expression of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” philosophy of personal time management.

Yet it’s still a hack. Ethan J. A. Schoonover, the author of what᾿s commonly abbreviated as “kGTD,” has done a tremendous job of turning OmniOutliner into a malleable repository for categorizing and manipulating reminders and to do items. As good as it is though, I’m rarely able to forget its limitations when I’m using it; the fact that OmniOutliner Pro wasn’t conceived from the ground up to handle this kind of data and the way users interact with it is often too easy to see.

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Ubuntu for Dummies

UbuntuHaving had my curiosity piqued by recent, high profile defections from Mac OS X to the Ubuntu Linux distribution, I decided to see if I could get it running on my old Titanium PowerBook G4. Ubuntu bills itself as “Linux for human beings,” designed in a “it just works” fashion that brings the open source operating system as close as it’s ever come to being as simple to set up as, well, Mac OS X — the operative word being “close.”

To be sure, I know almost nothing about Linux, nothing about the functional distinctions between distros and desktops, nothing about sudo or the command line or how to install packages. That said, I’m reasonably savvy when it comes to technology. I have no trouble getting around the thornier corners of Mac OS X and administering it short of entering commands into the Terminal, and I can generally acquire most new technical concepts fairly easily.

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What Went Down at WWDC

Mac OS X LeopardApple’s 2006 World Wide Developers Conference, taking place in San Francisco as I write, seems to have disappointed a lot of people with its relatively paltry array of cool new announcements during Steve Jobs’s keynote speech. Many Mac fans, it seemed, had expected to see one or all of the following: an Apple-branded mobile phone, an iPod with a larger, wider display for viewing movies, and a new version of Front Row incorporating TiVO-like features, finally transforming it into what it so obviously wants to be: a fully-fledged home media center solution. None of it happened.

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Blockwriter Big in Britain

The GuardianBlockwriter, my concept for a reduced-functionality word processing application that acts just like a manual typewriter, is slowly but surely inching its way to reality. Just two weeks ago, an editor from the Britian’s Guardian newspaper asked me to write about the idea for their Office Hours section, which runs on Mondays. The article ran in today’s edition of the paper with the somewhat over-promising title “Strokes of Genius.”

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Mirror, Mirror

A design flourish whose time is clearly now — or maybe it was fifteen minutes ago — is reflectivity, that very popular style of making objects cast a reflection on a horizontal plane directly beneath them. The most notable example of this, and to my mind, the apex of the trend, is Apple’s iChat AV release from last year, which renders video conferences of three or four people as if the concurrent screens are arranged in a virtual room. Beneath each of the video conferencing screens is a beautifully rendered, dynamic reflection.

It’s a very slick look that creates a dramatic spatial illusion — the kind of illusion that, in the recent past, digital design has been skittish about. The conceit of virtual spaces — rooms, cities, etc. — being used as metaphors for information display is something that fell out of favor with the passing of CD-ROMs as a viable medium; three-dimensional space in user interfaces became cheesey, basically, and we’re only now starting to think of the approach as not cheesey. But it may be too late.

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Overcoming Roadblocks to Blockwriter

Here’s an update on Blockwriter, my concept for a text editor that’s as reductive and productive as a typewriter. After a fair amount of reader interest, I was disappointed to find that no Cocoa developers actually stepped up to claim the idea and run with it. Of course, it’s presumptuous of me to assume that any idea I throw out there will ignite a flurry of developer activity, but still, you can’t blame me for hoping a similar application would magically appear on Version Tracker one day.

Then I got a note from David Goodman, a MetaFilter reader who liked the idea enough to post it to Ask MetaFilter, in the hopes that someone could point him to a similar product for Windows. A respondent to that post, apparently, decided to take up the challenge and, according to David, has begun to code a prototype in Python.

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