Category Archives: Apple

Deliciously Indulgent

Delicious LibraryOver at Ars Technica, there’s a terrific review of Delicious Library, the hotly-tipped new media collection management software just released last week. It’s actually a fantastic review, the kind that manages to give a larger context to its subject, and shows how Delicious Library is a testament to the dramatically different mindset of Macintosh programmers. I wish I could find the time and the skill to write that kind of review, but in fairness to myself, John Siracusa’s many other articles for Ars Technica clearly demonstrate that he has a singular and probably God-given talent for ambitious, far-reaching essays on technology. Some geeks get all the breaks.

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The Hub of the Matter

USBThe USB 1.1 standard, which in theory allows ‘hot swapping’ of scanners, mousing devices, external hard drives etc. without necessitating the reboot of your Macintosh, has always been a frustrating experience for me. With three or four USB devices for each of my computers, I rely heavily on the hubs that I own — two cheap Belkins that I bought at Staples a few years ago — to get all those devices working properly so that I can get my own work done.

But every time I hot swap a device — like my digital camera — I get over-current error messages. And not all of my devices seem to dependably register each time I start up; I regularly have to unplug and re-plug my Griffin iMate-enabled ADB Kensington TurboMouse in order to get my Mac to recognize that it’s attached. The implicit promise of this standard is that working with these peripherals should be painless, but it’s far from the truth.

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Name That iTune

iTunesThe current generation of iPods can be had with a hard drive as big as 40 Gigabytes, and the iPod Photo can be had in a 60 Gigabyte model. If you don’t limit yourself to the storage available in a portable digital music player, you can have an exponentially more capacious warehouse for all of your MP3s on your computer’s hard disk — a desktop computer with a 250 Gigabyte internal drive is not uncommon these days. That’s a lot of music. So it occurred to me this morning, when the chorus of some half-remembered song popped into my head inexplicably and then haunted me all the way to the office, that iTunes and iPods — or whatever substitutes you care to name — still don’t allow you to find that one song that goes something like “Doo de dum de doo…” You know the one I’m talkin’ about?

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Picture Imperfect

iPod PhotoWhether or not I really have a use for an iPod Photo or not is unclear to me, but seeing how I’m in the market for a new one of these things, there’s a decent chance I’ll own one by the end of the year. However, I still have a quibble: I like the fact that Apple is continuing to expand the feature set of its increasingly important digital device, but I’m frustrated by the company’s apparent unwillingness to just go the whole way — how much longer must we wait before Apple just makes the iPod what it so obviously is: a true multimedia portable digital assistant? Most of the groundwork for this is there; all that’s missing is a touch screen screen. With these photo features, the iPod Photo amounts to one big tease. Anyway, all I know is the U2-edition iPod is really dumb.

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Lost: 5,000 Songs

iPodWhat an exhausting week I had last week; I was burning the candle at both ends trying to get some work out the door, and it completely drained me by Friday night. In fact, when I was taking a cab home late that evening, I was even too tired to notice that my iPod had quietly fallen out of my jacket pocket, and now it’s lost to me forever. There’s a tiny candle of hope that I hold out for finding it, somehow, through the good graces of Mayor Bloomberg’s 311 information line, which, in theory, is working overtime to help me make a connection with the cab driver (luckily I got a receipt) through the city’s Taxi & Limousine Commission. The emphasis there is on tiny. I mean, would you try to find the owner of an iPod you found in a taxi cab?

The whole episode pains me to even think about it. I really don’t want to pay another few hundred dollars for what I still consider to be a grossly over-priced product, but I’ve become so attached to the thing, it seems untenable to consider doing without one. That’s a sign of a captive consumer, right? Anyhow, the iPod I lost was a 20 gigabyte, second-generation model from 2002 — so it kind of irks me too that, though the newer versions are slimmer and feature larger hard drives, they have basically the same feature set as mine, with few improvements. At least, not enough improvements to justify spending another large chunk of change on one when, just last week, I still had a perfectly good iPod in my possession. Feel me?

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The New New NetNewsWire

NetNewsWireFor a few days now, I’ve been using the beta release of Ranchero software’s NetNewsWire 2.0 RSS aggregator. I’d tried it before in its 1.x release, but its relatively straightforward approach to organizing subscriptions left me unimpressed, so I gravitated to the arguably more creative NewsMac, first, and then PulpFiction, which I’ve been using day in and day out for months. PulpFiction, which in many ways remains one of the cleverest pieces of software of its kind, allows a powerful level of control over subscriptions, which is something I really liked a lot. However, though it has improved over time, it unfortunately remains dogged by speed issues and, on my PowerBook at least, regular crashes.

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Set My Firefox

FirefoxIn spite of my continued enthusiasm for OmniWeb, I’ve found myself using the 1.0 Preview release of Firefox more and more often. I spend about half my day in each browser, and it makes me wish that I had a system-level utility that would intercept every link I click on to let me decide whether to send it to OmniWeb or Firefox. Surely, somebody has already whipped up something like that, and I’m missing it, right?

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Smaller, Lighter, Better

Media Reader for iPodThanks to a still-valid half-price deal at Belkin.com, I bought myself a Media Card Reader for iPod last week — so that, during an upcoming trip my girlfriend and I are taking to Italy later this month, we’ll be able to offload photos from my digital camera onto the relatively spacious confines of her 15GB iPod. At its full price, I doubt I ever would’ve bit on it, because it seems like a kludgy solution to the problem of limited digital camera memory. Prices for a one gigabyte flash memory card are coming down, after all, and I’m not sure when I’ll ever take that many photos. So in all likelihood, I’ll eBay the gadget when we’re back and recoup some of the cost.

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I Keep Going, and Going, and Going…

The ups and downs of this election are really wreaking havoc with my emotional health, and I’m almost at the point where I can no longer afford to devote this much attention reading a dozen weblogs and a dozen news sites every day. It’s the same way I feel about high-stakes sporting events: it takes a tremendous strain out of me to get too invested in something over which I have very little, if any, control. This weekend, at least, I’ll get a little bit of a break, as I’m heading out to the airport right now for a trip to see some of my family in Oakland, California. Internet access will be intermiitent, so there will be few if any posts until I’m back on Monday night or Tuesday morning — and maybe few if any chances to follow the race.

PowerBookGoing off on kind of a wild tangent: I’m on the train right now, and when I popped open my PowerBook and booted it up, I was reminded of a question to which I’ve long wanted to know the answer. That is, when embarking on a trip with a laptop, does it save more energy to shut down before unplugging and leaving home and then booting up, say, two hours later while on the road? Or, instead, is it more energy efficient to put the laptop to sleep first, and then simply wake it later while on the road? I would assume that booting up off the battery is more energy consuming than keeping a laptop in sleep mode for two hours, right? See, I’m already starting to focus on less weighty issues…

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