Apple Archive
These posts are all in this one category.
From Apple's site "Introducing the innovative mouse that reinvents the wheel — the scroll wheel. Mighty Mouse features the amazing Scroll Ball that lets you move anywhere inside a document, literally without lifting a finger." - They're charging $49.00 and it's selling like crazy.
It looks cool, but that "amazing Scroll Ball" is pretty small, and the "force-sensing side buttons" are getting negative reviews for bad placement and strange design (both buttons do the same thing). Compaq seems to have solved these problems, many many years ago:
Compaq Trackball Optical Mouse
$9.99
Ars Technicia took apart Apple's new mouse and found that, instead of real mouse buttons, it uses the sort of touch-sensitive plastic found in practially all microwaves today, so to give the user that satisfying "click" sound, the mouse actually has a speaker in it. I love how geeky that is, but whatever happened to "keep it simple" and what about the satisfying click "feel"?
My guess is that eventually users will choose Microsoft's or Apple's operating system just like we choose Coke or Pepsi in any restaurant today.
Restaurants today offer Coke or Pepsi, but never both. Deals and/or discounts insure that. The same thing will happen with operating systems.
When you buy a Gateway, it might come with Windows.
When you buy a Dell, it might come with OSX.
It's that simple, and it's something you don't really even give much thought to anymore.
And if you're in a bind, the "other" OS will be offered as "add-on" - installed to run in a virtual machine, but you won't care, because thanks to abstraction layer frameworks, most programs will be available for both systems, and will look and act nearly the same in both.
One of my friends, Steve, a regular die-hard Mac user, told me he will never buy a Intel-based Mac.
Why? He dislikes Intel that much?
Nope, he says his next machine will be a Dell.
Steve said he's lost faith in Apple. He said the 10.4 Tiger release of OS/X has been the worst Apple experience for him since the buggy days of MacOS 9. After repeated crashes, reboots, and terrible networking compatibility issues, he was finally forced to downgrade to 10.3 just to have a stable operating system on his 17" Powerbook again.
He doesn't blog, so I have nothing to link to. He said he's not alone with this experience, but it's not something I've read before. I know there's a few Mac users reading this site. What's your feeling?
For my Mac friends, The Five Stages of Intel Macs. Click for the rest of the stages.
Steve Jobs announced today that future Apple machines would use Intel's chips instead of the Apple/IBM designed PowerPC chips.
While I always like to see big changes, I'm surprised Apple went with the x86 architecture DOS and Windows users have been using for 20+ years instead of a whole new technology such as Sony's Cell or something new from Intel not tied to the x86 architecture.
It's also interesting that Microsoft's next XBOX is going to be using a specially designed derivation of a triple-core PowerPC chip, a decision that made many Apple fans very excited. Maybe Microsoft foresaw this and is getting the PowerPC chips on clearance.
And where's AMD? Even their popular 64-bit chips weren't enough for Apple?
Scoble: Skeptics can't believe Apple is giving IBM the boot.
Jerome on Technology: Apple is shooting themselves in the foot.
Which would you buy? The Apple monitor or the Dell monitor?
They're both use the same LCD panel from LG/Philips, but Apple's monitor cost $500 more than Dell's. Find out if this translates to a better deal in AnadTech's comparison review of both monitors.
I have tax information from my mutual fund and I don't know where to store it: Should I put it with the rest of my mutual fund information or with the rest of my tax information? In the real world it's hard to store one item in multiple places.
You might have the same issue with emails that you try to categorize using folders. What happens when an email relates to two projects? The same problem occurs with documents, bookmarks, music, and more. Because of the real-world metaphor that an object can only be in one place at a time, you're forced to store in one folder or make a duplicate of the item, which isn't ideal, especially for documents and music files.
Outlook 2003
Outlook 2003 has a great feature to help with this called Search Folders. A Search Folder is contains the results to any search you specify. I have a Search Folder for all unread email across all of my folders, another one for Flagged Items across all folders, and several others. The Search Folders act like real folders, so I can forward, delete, and move items as if items in the Search Folder are in a real folder. Unlike a typical search feature, the contents of Search Folders are updated as you receive or organize your email.
While not hard to set up, Search Folders are not perfect for every situation. I'm not going to set up a Search Folder for every possible category, mainly because it's still much easier to drag emails to appropriate folders or use the Rules Wizard.
More info: How to use Search Folders in Outlook 2003.
iTunes
iTunes has a similar feature called Smart Playlist, which is very well described on Apple's web site. With iTunes you can have Smart Playlist of music in your collection that you have never listened to and optionally have it update as you add more music.
Smart Playlist differs from Search Folders in that (as far as I know) you can't organize or delete the actual music files from the Smart Playlist view because you are looking at entries in a play list, not collection of files. In my opinion this isn't ideal because the user is still required to go back to the normal view organize and delete files. Apple may change this behavior.
More info: Smart Playlist video.
Windows Media Player
I use Windows Media Player for playing music. I've never bothered to create a playlist and instead I just rely on the folder organization on my hard drive. Windows Media Player has a built-in Smart Playlist-like feature which choices like "Fresh Tracks", "Tracks I listen to on Weekends", "Music I haven't heard recently", and several more.
Unlike iTunes you can't customize these searches, nor build a playlist out of a custom search. Windows XP can show metadata from music files such as Artist and Album name in the Windows Explorer (right click on the column name), but you still can't use Find in Windows to find music using the metadata.
More info: Unofficial Windows Media Player FAQ
Longhorn
Longhorn is Microsoft's code name for their next major revision to Windows, and is expected to be released in June 2061 (but could be as soon as 2005 if the European Union forces Microsoft remove a feature or two). Longhorn's file system is very different than the file systems we use today. Files are not stored in folders, but instead are assigned a folder or folders. (Basic techie details: the file system is implemented using a database; files and folders are stored as records; folder contents are the results of SQL queries).
So finally with Longhorn a file can easily live in multiple locations. Plus folders also work like Search Folders/Smart Playlist, showing the results of some complex query of metadata.
The technology for this feature is called WinFS, and Longhorn does not limit WinFS to the file system (so I'm not sure what the FS stands for). One example is that WinFS is used to organize your contacts in Longhorn, so if you have a contact that is both a friend and a co-worker, so put them in both places at the same time.
More info: Longhorn and WinFS video.
Conclusion?
Once Longhorn comes out and applications like Outlook, Windows Media Player, and maybe even iTunes start taking advantage of features like WinFS, I think we'll finally start to get away from the broken mental model that items on your computer must live in just one place. Until then, I'm still not sure how to best organize all my financial paperwork.
A friend of mine just got an Apple laptop to supplement his PC. Here's some Apple news in his honor:
- Apple has applied for a US patent for elements of the iPod user interface. This patent includes obvious features that all mp3 players have had before the iPod came out, such as forward, back, stop, play, and organizing music by category. If you think that's silly, you should know that last August Apple received a patent for a staircase design they use some Apple stores. Is there anything they won't patent?
More coverage: NeoWin, Slashdot, MacObserver
- Last November, the UK's Independent Television Commission found that Apple's ads that said their machines were "the world's fastest, most powerful personal computer" were false advertising and they must stop posting those ads. They stopped using those ads in the UK, but continued in the rest of the world. Now the Better Business Bureau in the US has told Apple to cease those ads as well, plus their claim to be have the "world's first 64-bit processor for the personal computers," which came out to be not true either.
More coverage: ActiveWin, NeoWin, News.com.
- Not really news, but I like to post in three's. Unlike most other MP3 players, you cannot change the battery or hard drive in the iPod without sending it back to Apple for "repairs." ThisIsBroken.com has a screenshot of the repair bill for a first-generation 5GB iPod with a faulty hard drive, which at $255.95, is about the same price as a new 10GB iPod. It's also mentioned that when you send an iPod to Apple, instead of repairing that one, they send you back a refurbished one and don't even copy over the content from iPod you sent in.
I think Apple has some great looking products, but I feel that the quality and uniqueness of their products are overstated by press that loves them and their great marketing tactics. Every time anything new happens with the iPod, news appears in every major paper as if it's some life-shaping event. Apple's web site and stores do great justice to the Apple products, making it seem like each introduction of a new product is a life-shaping event. The iPod alone has a dozen screens of easy-to-read information, plus diagrams, pictures, videos, and more. Compare that to a popular competitor to the iPod, the Creative's Muvo2... it has has one small pitiful paragraph on the web site. After looking at Apple's site, it looks as if Creative doesn't even want to sell their devices. Creative isn't alone. Even big shots like Dell and Gateway have hardly anything on their web sites, especially compared to Apple.
Check out l (as in llama), they've copied the Apple web site to some success. Too bad their vague name will prevent them from ever being more than something that's just fun to look at.
Another day another security problem. This time the victim is anybody with Apple's QuickTime player. The security hole lets hackers run malicious code on your machine when you visit a web site that references a devilishly hand-crafted file that QuickTime attempts to play but the file instead exploits either buffer problems or other issues with the player.
It's been two weeks since this problem has been discovered by security group eEye, but Apple has yet to release a fix or even announce the details of the problem. That means those of us with QuickTime installed have no idea what to do to protect ourseleves other than uninstall QuickTime.
Possibly to help keep that "Apple is secure" image going, Apple has no mention of this on the QuickTime site or the very unApple Apple Product Security web page that seems to be void of any helpful information.
A similar security hole was found in QuickTime last April which effected QuckTime versions 5.x and 6.0.
iTunes for Windows has been getting a lot of press today. And for what? Apple didn't follow the Windows Look and Feel Guidelines, or their own OS X Guidelines, instead going for their new pseudo steel look which probably looks cool to everybody who's still into chroming every part of their engine.
From NeemaNet Daily:
I don't know much about Mac software so when I saw iTunes released for Windows, I got excited. I've been using iTunes for Windows for 5 minutes. It's crashed 3 times. This is the most frustrating thing ever. It can't seem to add the mp3s from My Music. Firstly, they 'bundled' QuickTime with iTunes and installed the shortcut on my desktop. Then, they have this iPodService.exe running all the time when I don't even have an iPod. Then, the thing crashes while adding MP3s but on the next start, it doesn't know about the ones it added BEFORE the crash. Then, it's reconfigured my mp3s to be played with iTunes when I love Winamp2. Go Apple, you suck.
There is no pattern to its crashing behavior - I can't fix the problem because its crashing at seemingly random times. It runs one time and processes an mp3 fine then crashes the next time I run it on the same mp3.
Read on: http://neemanet.com/blog/archives/001276.html
Other comments: http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/posts/32313.aspx
iTunes Exploits Musicians: http://www.downhillbattle.org/itunes/ (kinda funny)
So how can Apple call iTunes The Best Windows App Ever?
From Slashdot.org... It took less than a day for somebody to figure out the many ways that Apple cheated to make their newly announced G5 computer seem faster than a random Dell workstation. Apple used specialized code on their machine that doesn't work in real-world environments, disabled normally enabled features on the Dell, and only tested integer math, not floating point (decimals) math. It ends up a $1800 Dell machine still outranks the newly announced $3000 64-bit G5 Apple.
Unrelated, the Apple G5 requires nine fans to be on at all times, two of which must be running at full speed 100% of the time. No wonder the entire front of the case is covered with breathing holes. This also means a G5, after a week of use, will be full of dust bunnies and other dirt, assuming you can put up with the noise for that long.
Well, like most Apple products, at least it looks cool.
Update: Apple put out an email that claims that they did no wrong. Apple fans across the world shout in joy.