Wingedpig.com - Mark Fletcher's Blog

Yesterday, I bought a MacBook Air. It's an amazing little machine. I went for the model with the hard drive, not the SSD. With that purchase, my conversion from a combination Windows/Linux environment to an Apple-only environment is complete. Over the past year, I have bought 3 Macs (Pro, iMac and Air), 4 Apple TVs, 2 Airport Extremes and 1 iPhone, and have been almost completely satisfied with everything I've bought from Apple. (Yes, I actually liked the first version of Apple TV, and now with Take 2, it's even better.) For the most part, things just work, and I really appreciate Apple’s focus on design. In general, their products just work better than the competition's.

So, it really stands out to me when something doesn't work as well as it does in the Windows world. There are three things about OS X that bug me in this way. The first is the menu bar, which is the widget that has the 'File', 'Edit', 'Help' and other menu tabs in it. In OS X, the menu bar for each application always appears at the top of the monitor (if you have multiple monitors, it appears at the top of the main monitor). In Windows, however, the menu bar appears at the top of each application's window. This is a much better solution, IMO. The menu bar is where you need it, at the window, where your mouse pointer, and attention, is. You never have to take your concentration off the window you're working in, in order to access the menu. This is especially bad if you have more than one monitor and the menu bar is in a monitor you're not working in.

The second thing is the behavior of the red, yellow and green window buttons. These, I think, are for closing, minimizing and maximizing a window. But they don't always do that. Or at least the green button seems to act differently for different applications. Be consistent people!

Finally, and related, there's the behavior of closing an application. In Windows, if you close the main window for an application by hitting the little X button on the window, it closes the window and quits the application. Simple. Expected. In OS X, if you hit the red button on the application window, the window disappears, but the application still runs. Why would I want that? If I'm closing the main window of an application, I want the application to end. Don't leave applications running without a window. That doesn't make sense to me.

So, there you have it. Am I wrong? Have I missed any? Tell me in the comments.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (20)

A really annoying bug with my iPhone is that oftentimes it won't show up as a camera device when I dock it with my Mac Pro. This means that iPhoto cannot pull images off the iPhone. I'm not the only one who's suffered from this bug, but I'm not sure how wide spread it is. For my own future reference, and to help others, here is a list of things I've done to fix this problem in the past:

• Open iSync, click Preferences, then click Reset Sync History
• Under the home directory, in Library/Preferences, delete the com.apple.iPhoto.plist and com.apple.ImageCaptureApp.plist files, if they exist
• Using the Disk Utility, repair disk permissions (I don't recall this directly ever solving my problem, but others have reported that it works for them)

Hopefully Apple will fix this soon.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Like countless others today, I bought an Apple iPhone. It replaces my 2.5 year old Treo 650. Wow, what a difference. The keyboard is going to take some getting used to, but this is one heck of a phone. Web surfing is great on this device. Email is great, especially being able to view attachments. The iPod seems to work fine, with the exception that the DVDs I've ripped for my Apple TVs don't play. I'll have to look into that. The voicemail system is lightyears beyond any traditional cell phone voicemail system.

One confusing thing had to do with the activation. I am replacing my Treo, so I wasn't able to select a particular voice plan. When I go to the AT&T web site to look up what plan I'm on, I now get an error. I'll have to look into that.

Now, Apple needs to create an SDK and open up the phone to 3rd party developers. Web apps will only get you so far and don't lend themselves to a seamless experience. But even without that, it's a huge improvement over my old Treo.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 09:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I just bought my third Apple TV. This is the device that acts like a video iPod connected to your TV. While it has some shortcomings, it's already replaced my beloved Squeezebox for distributing music (and now video) throughout the house. Critics rightly point out that it's missing some key features: no 5.1 Dolby Digital sound support in software, you can't access the iTunes store directly from it and iTunes doesn't sell high-def movies. Another criticism, that it has too small a hard drive, is, at least for me, a non-issue (see caveat later). My aTVs are set up to just stream from my main iTunes. My computer is on all the time, and this works great. It's my guess that an upcoming software update will fix the surround sound issue and add the ability to access the iTunes store. It's also my guess that a criticism I have of iTunes in general, that it doesn't allow renting of movies, will also be fixed soon.

I will be upgrading the hard drive on the aTV that I just ordered to a 160GB Seagate drive. This is because I plan on placing this aTV in my place in Tahoe, and will be setting it up to sync from my main iTunes, instead of stream, like the others. The reason I need to configure this aTV to sync is that my home DSL line does not have enough upload bandwidth to support streaming over the Internet. I'll also need to configure a VPN so that this aTV thinks it's on my local home network, because iTunes doesn't permit sync'ing over the Internet. The result of all this work will be that I'll be able to access all my movies and music in Tahoe, without having to worry about keeping things in sync. It'll just happen automagically.

With all the current shortcomings noted, this is the future. I can now easily watch any of my DVDs at any time on my TV. I can purchase movies and almost instantly start watching them. We are inching towards a future where all media is available all the time, and not just on computers.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

getting an email saying that the Mac Pro I ordered on Wednesday has shipped. I should have it by Tuesday. Yes, I'm making the switch. My main desktop has been Linux for at least 10 years now, with a backup Windows machine for a few things. But I got tired of the bugginess of Fedora. And with the development of Parallels and other VM systems, it's now possible for me to consolidate my two main desktop machines (I'll still have one or two server boxes for development). I can't wait.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 08:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Normally I don't pay too much attention to Apple's press events; I've never been a Mac user (there goes my geek cred). I do have an older 40gb iPod, however, and I've been thinking about getting a Nano. I've also been thinking about digital media. With that in mind, I paid attention to the announcements today. First things first, I've ordered an 8gb Nano. I'm not thrilled with the iPod-mini looks of the new Nano, but that wasn't enough to deter me from ordering. I also upgraded my copy of iTunes to the new version. What was interesting to me is that Apple insists on an iTunes account if you want to take advantage of the new album art feature. This is very smart. It's a good way for Apple to increase iTunes accounts, which benefits Apple in several ways.

I was also interested in the iTv announcement. I recently cancelled my Netflix account because I never watched the DVDs. A set of DVDs I had added to my queue months before would sit around for a couple of months until I felt guilty and returned them (causing another set to be delivered, which would then sit unwatched, etc). People want instant gratification, and that's a problem with Netflix. If the iTv device works as promised, I'll be one of the first in line to buy one. With one caveat; Apple needs a rental option. One other thought I had was that if and when iTv (or something like it) becomes popular, expect to see video podcasts to expand and become much more mainstream. And that could be very interesting.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 07:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)