Category Archives: Apple

A Glass House on Fifth Avenue

As an Apple fan, I think the company’s retail stores are awesome in theory, but I’m not the kind of guy to spend hours hanging out within them, nor the sort to make dutiful treks to their openings, like many Apple fans do. Still, I thought it was worth stopping by this evening’s grand opening for Apple’s new flagship store on Fifth Avenue, here in New York. It’s not exactly on my way home from work, but the fact that the company had decided to put such a huge, public stake in the ground in such a high-end retail district, and with such a prominent architectural statement… well, my curiosity was piqued.

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Why Didn’t They Call It the MacBook Amateur?

As replacements for Apple’s iBook line of consumer notebooks, the just announced and released MacBooks look like they’ll do nicely. They update yet another spot on Apple’s product matrix to Intel-based technology, and they’re quite attractive, to boot. That’s true especially in the super-sexy black model, which has a seductively evil look to it — more K.A.R.R. than K.I.T.T., if you know what I mean.

Like a lot of people, though, I’m disappointed that Apple has effectively mothballed the idea that their professional notebooks ought to ship in a compact form factor too, as there’s nothing in the current product line that inherits the niche filled by the now obsolete 12-inch PowerBook.

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Why Didn’t They Call It the MacBook ?

As replacements for Apple’s iBook line of consumer notebooks, the just announced and released MacBooks look like they’ll do nicely. They update yet another spot on Apple’s product matrix to Intel-based technology, and they’re quite attractive, to boot. That’s true especially in the super-sexy black model, which has a seductively evil look to it — more K.A.R.R. than K.I.T.T., if you know what I mean.

Like a lot of people, though, I’m disappointed that Apple has effectively mothballed the idea that their professional notebooks ought to ship in a compact form factor too, as there’s nothing in the current product line that inherits the niche filled by the now obsolete 12-inch PowerBook.

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Dear Apple, Please Cell Out

Treo 650Caveat lector: This is a rant, and it contains no facts.

Seemingly forever, there have been persistent and vague rumors that Apple is going to build some sort of handheld device — based on the Palm operating system, based on the iPod, based on the Newton, based on smoke and mirrors, whatever — and I’m sick of them not being true. There’s even recent evidence that certain Apple patents strongly suggest a forthcoming announcement of some sort. The time for a truly user-friendly portable device is now and that device should be, at least in part, a mobile phone… mostly because all of the mobile phones now in the market are just terrible.

I have a Treo 650 that’s bulky and over-featured, but the only reason I hang onto it is that it’s truly the best of the worst. It has a reasonably good user interface for call management and text messaging, but the only crucial thing it does really right is integrate my contacts on the phone with my contacts from Apple’s Address Book, via iSync. For me, that’s the whole ball of wax.

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Blockwriter

As we all know, the surfeit of distractions available on a personal computer these days can make it exceedingly easy to get nothing done. There’s the constant haranguing of emails, the intrusions of instant messaging, and the endless nagging of countless other attention-hungry applications and utilities.

In looking for ways to defuse this, I noticed a few years ago that some serious writers, at least in the early drafting stages of their work, were turning to manual typewriters as a method of sidestepping all of those distractions. It’s a great solution: what better way to thwart a computer than to step away from it completely? There’s no email to check on a typewriter, no beeps and pop-up reminders from other applications, and no access whatsoever to the Internet and its tantalizing abundance of productivity-killing diversions.

What’s more, a manual typewriter is a powerful antidote to authorial dawdling, that propensity to continually re-edit a sentence or a paragraph — thereby imparting the feeling of working without really working — instead of continuing to write new sentences or paragraphs instead. Unlike word processors or even the simplest text editors, manual typewriters don’t allow you to easily re-edit, insert and revise a sentence once it’s been committed to paper. This makes for an entirely different writing experience: the ideas come first, and the act of finessing them, of word-smithing, comes after all the ideas have been set to paper.

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Das Boot Camp

Boot CampHere was my first reaction to Apple’s announcement that they are now officially enabling, if not supporting, the ability to boot Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system on their new, Intel-based hardware through a software utility they call Boot Camp: “Holy shit!”

This is a momentous move for Apple, something representing a real break from the nagging case of N.I.H. syndrome that’s dogged the company like a lingering cough for years and years. The world outside of Apple’s many legions of overboard devotees seems to think so, too: this afternoon, the Boot Camp story made it into the prized top-left slot on our home page at NYTimes.com (I swear that I have no influence over such decisions), and when the market closed today, AAPL was up by over six dollars.

My second reaction was to email a friend who actually works inside the Apple Computer ‘mothership’ in Cupertino, CA, and ask him how he could ever keep a secret like Boot Camp — indeed how he manages to keep all of Apple’s juicy, expletive-inspiring product secrets — to himself. His response was, “Every day is a trial, man. Every day.” He’s twice the man I would be in that situation, to say the least.

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Camino Es Real

CaminoThe scrappy, unwavering spirit of the Camino team pays off in a big way today with the version 1.0 release of that Web browser. In the wish list of browser features I wrote last December, I had unfairly disregarded Camino, even though I had it installed on my own system at the time. This is probably owing to past experiences with earlier versions that were a bit bumpy, but this latest release is smooth, polished and very solid. It’s a true Macintosh product, having painstakingly brought the Mozilla group’s refined Gecko rendering engine into Apple’s Cocoa framework.

The result is a browser that’s rivaled perhaps only by Safari in how native it feels to the Mac OS X computing experience. I’ve been using it for several days, and it feels fast and reliable — but what I like most of all is its integration with Mac OS X’s Keychain password utility, which is invaluable for convenience and peace of mind. Unfortunately, Camino is missing a few features that I’m becoming increasingly used to having at my disposal: session saving and the ability to force all new windows into tabs.

That doesn’t stop it from being an amazing piece of work though. It may be true that Camino’s open source cousin, Firefox is a wonder of coordinated, selfless efforts joining together to produce a surprisingly usable and elegant end product. But Camino is an example of similarly dedicated and truly passionate engineers and designers putting that same brand of selflessness to work creating something truly beautiful. It’s the closest an open source project has come to producing art that I’ve seen yet.

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Old Kid on the Block

Mac OS XLate last week, I picked up my PowerBook from Tekserve, where a new hard drive was being installed to it after my last one died. I’m very happy to have it back, but the task of getting everything installed to it again has been a real pain. Every time I sit down to take care of a particular task on my computer — paying bills or writing a blog post or sending an email — it reminds me of at least one or two other bits of software that I haven’t yet installed. It’s remarkable how many little programs and utilities I’ve become dependent on over the past few years.

Well, I guess this has always been the case, because even back in the pre-historic days of System 7, Mac OS 8 and 9, I always had a surfeit of Control Panels and Extensions installed on my system, their icons crawling across the screen in a lengthy parade with each start-up of my Mac. I was thinking back to how I delayed the process of switching over from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, a stalling tactic based largely on how ‘indispensible’ a lot of those add-ons seemed to me at the time. I didn’t want to move over to the new operating system without them, but now I use almost none of them, and perhaps only a small number of programs with equivalent feature sets.

Then I realized there’s probably an entirely new generation of Macintosh users today who have no idea how the Mac OS worked before Mac OS X, no idea what those utilities were and how they functioned. At about five years old, Mac OS X is getting to the point where any vestige of newness is quickly fading away. It’s no longer new at all, it’s an institution. All of which made me feel a bit old.

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Living with Chronic Hard Drive Failure

Hard DriveThe portent of doom implied by my hard drive failure scare from several weeks ago turned into an ugly reality this past Saturday morning: I woke up to a locked-up operating system. When I tried to reboot, the resulting sound coming from beneath the laptop’s keyboard was loud, whirring and not very confidence-inducing. By then I had more or less made peace with the fact that the hard drive was dead, and another long walk to Tekserve confirmed it.

The PowerBook is still under AppleCare extended warranty protection, and it will be back within the week (I hope). I feel very fortunate, though; immediately after the first signs of trouble, I quit my procrastination and scheduled full backups of the hard drive on alternating nights to two different external FireWire drives — aided in no small part by the sheer awesomeness of Shirt Pocket Software’s invaluable SuperDuper! product. As a result, I lost less than a day’s worth of work; not perfect, but it could have been loads worse.

SuperDuper! made it exceedingly easy for me to create a complete, bootable mirror of my hard drive, which actually allows me to continue to use the same system — with all of my files, preferences and software tweaks intact — with another Macintosh. I pulled my old Aluminum 15-inch PowerBook G4 out of retirement and booted it from one of the backup FireWire drives. This allows me to continue to be productive — in theory. It’s a trooper, but this old PowerBook is painfully slow, and the whole setup is just a shade too far to the dangerous side of fragility for me to be willing to do much work on it. All of which is to say that, until my PowerBook returns from Tekserve, I’m doing only a minimal amount of extracurricular computing, surfing, blogging, etc. I hope to be back on my feet again next week.

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Sudden Slow-Down

Is it just me or did things just get really slow all up in here? It’s probably true that the usable speed of any given computer, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, is ninety percent mental with the other fifty percent being megahertz. Which is to say that if you think your computer is slow, then it’s going to start feeling slow. This is especially the case if Steve Jobs announces a brand new computer, claiming that it runs twice as fast as its predecessor, which itself ran probably twice as fast as the computer you’ve been slogging away on for the past two years.

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