Recently my computer has been taking a LONG time to reboot.

I installed this networking program, DAVE 7.1, the other day and thought maybe it was the culprit. Nope.

So I started digging into the Console system log and son of a bitch I found out that my external modem was the last entry in the log, then 4 minutes of NADA then the next entry. Oh, let me say that from the time I hit the power button to the time I started booting into my personal account's GUI was taking 5 minutes! Well anyway, I had moved the modem a while back from the back of my iMac to my powered USB hub. I moved it directly to the iMac and voila, I now go from shutdown and hit the power button and in 30 seconds I'm booting into my account GUI.

Phew!

I was starting to think that I was going to have to do a Windows'esque reinstall of my system to fix things up.

Note to self, the next time I have issues remember to disconnect ALL peripherals and see if that resolves the issue.

Net Applications tracks the market share of computers in use by a proprietary method of monitoring web activity. So these numbers are only as good as their logic behind the data - however, it should give relatively decent numbers in so far as trends go. And the Mac has been and is continuing to trend upward.

I saw the other day that Apple has a 66% market share in computers over $1000, wow - that’s pretty impressive.

All around me I see Apple making inroads, both in notebooks and iMac’s. It’s great to see more and more people realizing how nice an the Mac ecosystem is for us users.

The new MacBook Air is a cool computer, sure I'd prefer it had a gigabit ethernet port and preferably FireWire but otherwise I think it rocks. My friends think that Apple blew it and that they should have closer replicated the old 12" PowerBook which was narrower.

But the Macbook Air is what it is, like it or not.

My question is, would you rather have a MacBook Air 1.8ghz, or a standard 2.0ghz MacBook, an AppleTV, an iPhone, and a 500GB Time Capsule? Because the MacBook Air 1.8ghz actually costs more than all of those other items combined.

Door #1
$2,099 - MacBook Air




Door #2
$2,026 - MacBook, AppleTV, iPhone, 500GB Time Capsule

I would certainly pick door #2.

Have you seen how the OSX86 'Hackintosh' crowd have been successfully running Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard on that new super cheap Asus Eee PC?

If I'm not mistaken Asus OEM's the current MacBook's for Apple, so what in the world is holding The Mighty Jobs from introducing something similar to the Asus Eee PC for the Mac Market. Engadget noted that Asus estimates it will sell nearly 4 million of these PC's next year. I don't know about you, but I'll bet Apple could move a boatload of these babies if they were Mac's.

The cheapest Mac available is the Mini, and it needs a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. The Mini itself starts at nearly $600, add in the other goodies and you're easily over $800. I'm not going to argue the merits of Mac vs PC, but it's arguably a tough to sell for somebody who has always had PC's and they can get a complete Dell system with Windows, keyboard, mouse, and monitor for under $500 on sale.

Throw the dog a bone, offer a sub $500 notebook Mac and watch the masses flock to it.

I'm working on a project in which I need to talk with people who work with US Patents. Preferably a patent examiner. But anybody with involvement with the patent process would be beneficial. I would like to correspond via email to get some information to help with my research.

Please email me directly or pass on my email if you know somebody who may be able to help.

I really appreciate it.

After a few more days with Leopard, I've got a few other thoughts.

1. I really like how the Finder now has a 'Green bar' effect with colored stripes. I tend to show files/folders in my Finder in the list view with is wide, the new colored lines makes it much easier to follow left to right.
2. Spotlight. Oh, I'm so sad about this one that I may have to go get another glass of this fabulous Malbec that I'm drinking. If you click on the Spotlight icon and enter some text to do a search, the resulting window looks the same as it did in Tiger, but if you click the 'Show All' button things are quite different. In Tiger, the Show All was a bigger version of what the initial search displayed, it grouped/categorized the results, but now in Leopard it's a scatter listing much in the same way how Windows search results have been displayed since I can remember. Well, I'm no fan of the non-categorized list. It's really sad that a feature I used many times a day is now gone!
3. Spotlight. Hey wait a second, see that Plus button to the far right on the Show All screen??? You can select document type, date criteria and more. Don't misunderstand, for how I used Spotlight in Tiger - Tiger's Show All page was superior to the new page. However, these new features are good, just not as good as it was to me.
4. Many of the programs I use daily have already been updated by the developers, I have to think that within a few weeks most common apps will have been updated.
5. Time Machine, it's going crazy doing backups all the time - but it's pretty behind the scenes not much to really notice. I haven't tried to restore yet. Also not sure if I'll still use SuperDuper! along with Time Machine or what. The Time Machine backup drive is not bootable, MacOSXhints.com had a good tip on how to make that drive bootable, read more here.
6. I'm liking the new Dock even more, can't believe people are getting rid of the new "3D" dock.
7. Windows Explorer is ugly, but is very good at what it does. Leopard's finder is a nice improvement over Tiger's finder, admitedly it's not as good as Windows Explorer from what, 2001? But it's not bad, I don't get in a huff about it - I've learned to work with it very well. I am a bit amazed though that so many people are in agreement with me that Windows Explorer is still better. Well, that's not what amazes me, but rather than Apple - the king of Human Interface Design hasn't been able to best Windows Explorer after all these years.
8. Doh! My brother bought a new 24" iMac a couple of days ago from Amazon, and it didn't include an upgrade to Leopard - only computers bought from Apple or a subset of Apple resellers qualify for the upgrade. LAME.
9. I'm still having trouble connecting to shares on my WinXP machine on the LAN, and digging to the discussions on Apple's forums have shown that I'm not the only one having this problem. Note to self: next time wait a month after release to install the new Apple OS.
10. On Tiger, using Camino - I was always able to just enter a domain name and hit enter and it would go to it. For example, I could type in the word "ford", hit enter, and it would go to http://www.ford.com however, now if I hit ford, and enter, it doesn't go there. WTF? I do use OpenDNS, I'll have to turn that off and see if anything changes - but I used OpenDNS with Tiger. This sort of backwards functionality rubs me the wrong way.

It does sound like I'm down on Leopard doesn't it. Well I do like the new bits, but also feel like some of the functions and features that I was very fond of have been reduced - this isn't going over well with me.

1. Stacks (on the Dock) sounded really cool until I went to use them. I'd much prefer that clicking on it opened the folder in Finder, I don't like the springboard or grid options.
2. I see that there are already hacks to axe the Shelf and 3D look to the Dock - I rather like it.
3. Make sure you uninstall UNO before upgrading to Leopard, whoops - live and learn.
4. I used to be able to connect to a Windows machine on my LAN by using it's network name, now I can't do that - am forced to connect to it via it's IP. And I'm having some issue connecting to certain shared folders with full read/write privileges. Not sure wtf is going on here.
5. The expanded use of CoverFlow is really nice.
6. Quick Look is awesome.
7. I'm using Time Machine, but don't have any experience with it to report just yet.
8. Dockless, a great util to keep some Apps from showing up in the Doc no longer works, this saddens me - hopefully it will be updated for Leopard soon.
9. Gizmo Project is not working in Leopard, I'm sure an update is not far off.
10. Spaces is nice, and there are some good things about it. But honestly, I miss some of the features from Desktop Manager, like being able to show the virtual desktops in the Menu Bar, complete with outlines of open Apps. It was a one click affair to change virtual desktops via mouse with Desktop Manager, with Spaces you have to click the icon on the menu bar and then click the desktop you want. This may sound trivial, but it's far more effort if you do it frequently.
11. Partitions can now be re-sized without destructively losing data in Leopard, wow, that's fantastic.
12. I used to use VineOSX VNC server because Apple Remote Desktop wouldn't allow me to connect with low bandwidth settings, and it doesn't work with Leopard. And unfortunately, the new ARD in Leopard also only works if I connect in high bandwidth mode.
13. Preview, I felt this was one of the unsung hero's of Tiger - and it's far improved for Leopard.
14. I'd swear that I read somewhere that Time Machine would give you the option of backing up USER data only, or everything including all system files. I see no such option available, however.
15. The Red, Yellow, and Green buttons on the top bar of windows are higher contrast now and much easier to distinguish.
16. Installs have more graphics when completed, easier to see.
17. iChat now has a tabbed interface, I just wish it were interoperable with other services.
18. Terminal is something I rarely use, but I can see that it's really beefed up. Not only is it tabbed - you can grab a tab and tear it off, move it back to being tabbed. Neat stuff for you command line junkies.
19. Mail.Appetizer no longer works with Mail, guess I'll move to a growl notification for mail.
20. The Menu Bar is better contrast now and easier to see items on it. Also, the Spotlight is no longer a garish blue, but a simple black icon.
21. The new Folder Icons are far better than Tiger.
22. Damn, have you seen Apple's stock price!

I'm not trying to be critical, I like Leopard - a lot. The itemized list above is just some of the observations I had. The connecting to local machine and mounting volumes is my really only issue I'm having right now. There's a lot of great stuff, and more stuff that I haven't had time to explore. But this is a worthy upgrade to Tiger.

My fingers are crossed that it's stable and runs as well as Tiger did.

I was putting together a Keynote presentation this evening, it included a quote that contained the word "whilst". Keynote put the red squiggly line underneath it, indicating that it was either misspelled or that it wasn't in the dictionary. In order to double check the spelling, I opened the Mac OS X Dictionary and it had the word and definition, whilst.

I wonder why it is that the Mac OS X dictionary contains words that are not in the spelling function of programs from Apple? Don't they utilize the same dictionary?

I ran across an article today on the International Herald Tribune about Quiet Computing. It quickly caught my eye because I used to be in the PC Quiet Computing Camp, and I heavily relied on SilentPCReview.com which contributed to the article. In fact, when I switched from PC back to the Mac in February '06, I wrote an article for SilentPCReview.com to talk about, of the many benefits, how incredibly quiet the iMac is.

What is interesting to me is how much money people pay for a nice quiet PC, often up to $5,000! Wouldn't it just be cheaper, easier, and more elegant to get an iMac and run Windows on it if that's the OS of their choice? They'd save a ton of money in the process. If the purpose is for a living room type installation, then the iMac with it's integrated screen may not be a good fit, and it's questionable if the Mac Mini has what would be required.

Anyway, the one sure thing is the iMac is not only a great computer, but it's really quiet too. I certainly appreciate this reality.

Universal Binaries where terrific when the Intel Mac's where fresh on the scene, you know it would be optimized for either platform your Mac was running, but now they're just freaking big, bloated, and unnecessary.

STOP THE MADNESS

Intel Mac's now have almost as large an installed base as PPC Mac's, and by Christmas the Intel Mac's will be the dominate 'guts' of all Mac's out there in existence.

Universal Binaries are huge in comparison to platform specific builds. Please developers, start offering a PPC build, and an Intel build. Save yourself some bandwidth by delivering more svelte applications, and save millions of users the disk space of bloated Universal Binaries.

First two major Torrent Tracking sites, IsoHunt's TorrentBox and Podtropolis sites were banned from traffic in the USA. And now it seems that Demonoid, the second largest torrent tracker site, is at least temporarily shut down.

Here's more information from TorrentFreak.

I read a very interesting article over at the International Herald Tribune which talked about how Apple may have squandered a huge opportunity for the Mac.

snippet:

The Mac was seemingly well positioned for the moment in many ways. The transition to Intel microprocessors was complete. The OS X Tiger was a sleek, feature-rich, polished operating system. Leopard, the next iteration, is scheduled to be released in October.

Read the full article here.

Could Adobe be making the important first move into the world of online video and image applications, much the same way Google Doc's has for office type applications?

Adobe has confirmed that they are working on Photoshop Express, a free online edition of Photoshop. No this isn't full blown Photoshop, but is most likely going to be powerful enough for many users. Adobe has already got Premiere Express, but Photoshop Express is likely to be a much bigger hit.

I'll remain a little skeptical of this until I can try it, on my iMac I'm more than happy using SeaShore, an Aqua implementation of Gimp. I far prefer standard applications to online applications. However, I must say there can be great benefits to online applications, such as your data being retrievable from any place with internet access, and the ability to share and collaborate with others online, this can be very powerful.

Photoshop Express:

Premiere Express:

While I understand that people who were entrenched with iMovie HD 06 feel short-changed with timelines and audio capabilities in iMovie 08 being less robust or missing. However, I think most people will prefer to do their home movies and short movie projects with iMovie 08 over iMovie HD 06. And come on, if you really like iMovie HD 06 that much, it's still there for you to use it.

Here's a note from MacSeven reader Mark in Toronto regarding his personal experience with iMovie 08.

I finally took iMovie 8 out for a serious ride. This weekend I did 2 of the 3 HD video tapes from last months trip to Los Angeles, I made these into movies using iMovie HD 06 a few weeks ago, and now I'm redoing the videos in iMovie 08 for a direct comparison.

I have to say, I really love it.

iMovie 08 doesn’t have all the bells and whistles (where is the audio fade out that the end of a clip?), but it also doesn’t have the idiosyncrasy’s that iMovie HD 06 has. For example, have you ever reviewed your movie, and decided to drop a piece in, or trim a piece of footage in the start or middle only to have all the audio un-sync on the 20 clips that follow? (yes, I know about the “lock audio at playhead” setting, but this still happens). This morning before work I needed to tightened up a little spot on the PCHwy Scenery video. There were at least 30 clips after this edit point, as well as 2 and sometimes 3 audio tracks (with sound effects, music, track audio, etc) of sync’d video. I wanted to set it up to render while I’m at work, but I had to do this tweak, so I figure this would be a good test as I had 5 minute MAX to do everything. I sparked it up, found the 3 or 4 clips I wanted to modify and applied my deletes/changes. To my amazement, the entire rest of the video popped right into place instantly. We’re talking all the transitions, titling, audio… everything! I did a couple quick tests to verify, the hit “Share” and loaded my H.264 presets and began the render. The important thing is the working time on the project: Start time 7:25am, end time 7:30am.

Well done Cupertino

It's no secret what my opinion of Quicken for Mac is [pathetic]. Good news, I was able to get onto the beta for a Mac personal finance competitor - they have an all new version in the works, and I'm pleased to be on the team for it. I won't be able to discuss it as a part of the deal, but I'll tell what I can, when I can, cool?

Wow, two referrals to Engadget in a row... Unusual.

Ross Rubin writes a very good column on Engadget, Switched On. He recently wrote an interesting article talking about Flash and how and why Apple may deploy (and not deploy) it. I've no idea if he's close to the target on this one, but it certainly made sense to me.

Snippet:

One could argue that, particularly with Apple's newcomer status to the world of the carrier-dependent, it wants to err on the side of safety in the case of the iPhone, but Apple TV doesn't have a similar defense. Because Apple TV and iTunes lack Flash, YouTube is transcoding its entire video library to H.264, Apple's preferred codec for QuickTime. A lack of support for Flash weakens Apple's argument that the iPhone does not provide, as its ads claim, "a watered-down version of the Internet."

Full article here.

If you frequent MacSeven you may know that my favorite web browser is Camino. No matter what I try, I never find anything that just feel right the way Camino does.

I recently used Safari for a week or so at work on my Windows machine, one thing that I learned I really liked about Safari is how it does inline autocomplete in the address bar.

Safari has inline autocomplete enabled by default, and Camino, like most browsers, has it disabled by default.

Here is an image showing how Camino defaults, inline autocomplete not enabled:

You can see that as you start typing in a URL, it shows you items from your history under the address bar, you can select from the list. But I much prefer how Safari is by default, with inline autocomplete enabled.

Here is an image showing how Safari defaults, with inline autocomplete enabled:

In the image above I enabled inline autocomplete with Camino and now by typing the same three letters as before "mac" it now autocompletes the URL. As you type more the inline autocomplete will continue to narrow your results. I find this to be a much faster and easier way to get to where I want to go.

To enable inline autocomplete in Camino:

1) open a termainal session, and paste in the following line
2) defaults write org.mozilla.camino "Autocomplete While Typing" -bool YES
3) hit Enter, and restart Camino.

Wow, this downright makes the Airport Extreme look pretty plain Jane. More details on this sweet router with a display over at Gizmodo.

I've been using Camino as my primary browser for a long time on my Mac. Love it!

On Windows at work I used to use CrazyBrowser for a long time which is a custom multi-tabbed interface that uses IE as the core rendering engine. I started using this way back when, because it offered a clean interface with tabbed browsing long before IE did.

I've been running Safari 3 for Windows quite a bit since it was released. It's kind of growing on me. There are certainly things that I wish it had. I have some thoughts on Safari, and a wishlist for Safari for Windows (and Mac):

PRO's:
- Fast rendering, very fast.
- Renders very well, extremely few issues.
- Text looks great

CON's:
- Often times when trying to load a page I get an error "Safari Can't Open Page"
- Clicking on a link from external opens in a new window not new tab


The text looking great is very interesting. When I switched back to the Mac, the way the text looked with the anti aliasing look bugged the crap out of me, now I find that a year and a half later, I prefer it! Holy crap, how did that happen? (I never ran ClearType on Windows)

MISSING:
- Clicking on empty tab space should open a new tab
- Close a tab, and you should go to last viewed tab
- Ability to save USR/PWD for all sites
- Ctrl+click bookmark bar favorites should open in a new tab
- Ctrl_click search box should open in a new tab
- Should restore all tabs open in previous session upon re-opening
- Site Favicons should show up on the BookMark bar and tabs


Text samples. I mentioned how I've grown fond of how Safari renders text. Some pages that I've compared in both Camino and Safari - they look exactly the same. But on other sites the two browsers have a completely different look. I've put some sample pages of a page on Yahoo that looks different, and I find that I far prefer the look of the Safari rendering over Camino and the other browser examples I've shown.

As you can see from the screenshots it is clear that OmniWeb uses the same rendering engine as Safari, it looks nearly identical to Safari.

Hmm...

SAFARI


CAMINO


FIREFOX


OPERA


INTERNET EXPLORER



OMNIWEB




Alright, why do you suppose it is then, that the following page look nearly identical in Camino & Safari? Both have the anti aliased text rendering that I suddenly realize I'm so fond of, but in the previous examples, only the Safari based browsers have the same look.

SAFARI



CAMINO

1) I installed the VMware Fusion 4.1 beta today. I've never used Parallels or VMware previously. I did try Q which is a freeware alternative, but they don't have virtualization working on it yet so it's much slower, probably more like VirtualPC was.

VMWare installed very easily, and installing Windows 2000 Pro on it went smooth as silk. I installed a Virus program and a few utilities, all seemed to go well. Although after I adjusted it to use more of my system memory, it seems to really slow down my entire system - yeah I know that may happen, but here's the odd thing. After I closed out of VMware my system was still really sluggish. I didn't have time to go back and retest, it could have been NeoOffice or something else that was the culprit. As I get more time to play with it, I'll post my experiences.

2) It has been a very long time since the last update, so the new Plaxo for Mac which came out today was a much welcomed update. Plaxo is fantastic. Consider it one more reason why you don't need to pay the .Mac tax.

3) I may have to shoot somebody if the iPhone fever doesn't end. The iPhone is either going to be the most successful new [electronic] product ever released, or the biggest letdown in history. I certainly hope it is a huge success, however it goes, we'll know soon enough.

I talked about RAID NAS options the other day, and I couldn't help myself, not leaving well enough alone I kept researching and thinking about my home data needs and different options and solutions. What was niggling me about the RAID NAS solution was this - if your RAID box has a failure then you are f*cked! Seriously, even though a RAID box has some level of protection against one of the drives failing, if the NAS box itself suffers a dire fate, you're hosed. And believe me when I say that I truly feel so sorry for those who have suffered a RAID failure and permanently lost important data.

I read an article talking about why RAID's aren't a good option for SOHO environments, and it confirmed the doubt that I was having about that solution. So instead of going with a RAID solution, I'm going a different route because if I lost my digital pictures, digital music, personal documents, and other digital treasures - I would be up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

With a RAID, I was planning to use it sort of like our work network storage - it would have been my main repository for stuff. Now I'm thinking a different strategy. Use my computers main internal harddrive as their main places for data, and then automate backups from these computers to a Network Drive. The main differences being 1) The primary copy of data resides on the computers hard drive not the RAID box, and 2) you have a complete and full duplicate copy of your data. With a RAID solution as a Network drive you only have 1 copy of your data.

Fortunately I found a great deal on a 1TB Gigabit Ethernet drive solution from LaCie for a very respectable $285 delivered from Buy.com Seriously, you can't buy two 500GB drives and a case with USB2 and Gigabit Ethernet for the price of this Big Ethernet drive from LaCie. By the way, because this drive has both a USB2 and a gigabit ethernet interface you have some options. You can connect this drive to your router and have an instant network drive. You can also connect it to your Apple Airport Extreme USB2 port and have an instant network drive that way. Or of course you can connect it directly to your computer via a USB2 connection. I'll be connecting mine directly to my gigabit ethernet switch on my LAN so that I get fast speeds to my wired computers.

If I decide that I really would rather use a network storage device as my primary repository for data on my LAN, then I can always buy a second LaCie Big Ethernet 1TB drive and clone my primary drive on the secondary drive.

I feel very good about this new solution, it offers me a high amount of data safety at a very reasonable cost.

I was over on Yahoo Apple/Macintosh News today. I couldn't help but notice that there were a LOT of iPhone articles, so I took count. 18 of the 30 stories on the main page were in fact about the iPhone. Wow. It stuns me at how much hype the iPhone is getting.

I certainly hope that the iPhone is worthy of all the attention that it is receiving (before average users even get to lay a finger on one...)

But there will be no iPhone for me for quite some time. The Cell Phone Soup Nazi has told me, No iPhone for you! when I recently got two new Motorola Razr's for my wife and I. I committed to a 2 year commitment to get the phones really cheap. I'm not so concerned about this. The iPhone is bigger than I'd like in a cell phone, but more importantly it's far more expensive than I'm willing to pay for a cell phone - even an iPhone.

Maybe in two years when my commitment is up the iPhone or its newer variants will be in the sub $300 range. That might interest me more.

I went to look at my Dashboard this afternoon and noticed that I haven't rebooted my iMac in over 16 days. Sweet! I wasn't even trying for a long uptime - just turned out that way.

I can't count on all my fingers and toes at how many error messages Windows would give me back when I tried not rebooting for several days.

Ah, stability is a blessing. Thanks Apple, OS X Tiger rocks!

John Dvorak is saying that the time has come to short Apple's stock (bet that it's going to drop) because the iPhone's keyboard is bad. So bad that 20% of people who buy an iPhone will return it because they hate the virtual keyboard.

Time will tell, but it's an interesting read nonetheless.

"The keyboard is a disaster, and people are going to return the phone in droves. I'm guessing 20% will go back."

Read the full blog post here.

Sun's ZFS file system has been rumored to be included in Leopard for quite some time now. Today Sun gave indication that ZFS will be a part of OS X 10.5. Ok, so what? That news in itself isn't very informative. Several months ago the Machine Check Exception Blog had a great post on why ZFS will matter to: Laptop / Desktop users, to Workstation Users, to Server Admins, and even why it won't matter. If you're curious about ZFS give this a read. I've put Why ZFS Will Matter to Laptop / Desktop Users below since that covers most of us.

Why ZFS Matters to Laptop/Desktop Users

People with iBooks, MacBooks, Powerbooks, Mac Minis, and iMacs all have generally the same storage setup: a single hard disk with capacity ranging from 40-500 GB. A lot of the magic of ZFS does not become manifest until you have several disks, but even with one, you can benefit in several ways:

Filesystems can be compressed. Unlike a compressed disk image, a compressed ZFS filesystem is read/write. Moreover, the compression flag can be turned on and off on the fly. New data will be compressed (or not) as per the flag, and old data will be left as is. Compressed filesystems are great for data that you don’t access very often, or data that compresses very well.

Filesystems are nested and making them is as easy as making a directory. This in itself is not very interesting for laptop/desktop users, but combined with compression, this means that you can effectively turn on compression for just a subfolder on your drive.

Every block of data on the disk is checksummed so errors can be detected during read operations. Many common hard drive failures are catastrophic, and painfully obvious when they happen. But it is possible for your data to be corrupted on disk in ways that you, and the hard disk, will never notice. While checksumming will not allow you to recover your data, it will let you know when you should go retrieve a file from your backup. (You are backing up, right? Go buy an external Firewire disk and SuperDuper!, and start doing it right now. It is easy, fast, and you’ll thank me later.)

Space-efficient and fast snapshots. A snapshot allows you to see your filesystem as it was some time in the past. ZFS is designed to snapshot a filesystem in constant time, no matter how much data you have, or how frequently you snapshot it. Moreover, the snapshot is very space efficient. Identical blocks are shared between snapshots and the live filesystem until they are written to. The space required for snapshots is therefore mostly a function of how quickly your files change, and not so much how often you make a snapshot. It’s like version control for your entire computer!

Apple’s much discussed Time Machine feature in OS X 10.5 is a great example of the interface possibilies when you have snapshots available. However, Time Machine does not appear to require ZFS, which means that Apple had to bolt snapshots onto HFS+, a complex and awkward task. Snapshots in ZFS are cheap and easy.

I am a big fan of RapidWeaver, I use it for both MacSeven and my personal website. RapidWeaver (RW) allows to very quickly and easily build an entire website yet it is not a GUI design like iWeb. With RW you enter all of your information more in a form like environment, choose your theme, hit publish and presto it's done. There are GUI pages, and a great add-on called Blocks, but for blogging and photo type pages the stock RW style of entry is great and very efficient.

Ok, that was a 2 second reason why I like RW. Now for what bothered me this past week.

I have paid for RW, I think it was 3.2 when I bought it. A couple of days ago RW 3.6 came out and it has some really nice upgrades that I'm happy to see. It turns out that RW 3.6 is a $25 upgrade unless you have purchased 3.51 in which case it is a free upgrade. In general I don't like when there is a cost to upgrade unless it's a full version up grade, e.g.: 3.6 in my opinion should be a free upgrade from any 3.x version, and 4.0 should be a paid upgrade. You may or may not agree with my feeling on this, and that's fine - it's just my opinion. I actually paid the $25 to upgrade, I'm not thrilled about it, but I want to take advantage of the upgrades to I'm paying the price - after all in the scheme of things, $25 isn't too big of an amount to get me all worked up.

Here's what really bothers me about the $25 upgrade for RW 3.6. In recent months and weeks RealMacSoftware (makers of RW) have had RW on sale at places like MacUpdate Promo and MacZot, they have also given away a lot of free versions of 3.5. Then lo and behold it turns out to move up from 3.5 to 3.6 there is a $25 upgrade fee. Certainly somebody who got a free version of 3.5 can continue to use it, they are not forced to upgrade. But it smells sleazy to me to tempt people with discounted versions of 3.5 and even free versions to then tell them that they have to pay to upgrade to the next dot release.

I still like RW, I support the company, but I really question recent events / promotions of RW. I feel like they lured people in and then slapped them with an upgrade fee, and it doesn't sit well with me.




........................................................................

The Linksys Tomato Firmware released an updated firmware to version 1.05.

Enjoy the goodness that is known as Tomato Open Firmware.

........................................................................

SlimDevices was kind enough to send us a brand new all Black SqueezeBox so that we can review it. The review will be several weeks out, it will be a non-traditional review in that it will be two people doing the write up on the unit. And we may not see eye to eye.

audioengine USA was kind enough to send us a pair of their AudioEngine5 powered speakers. A review will be coming on these as well.

I just got the new NeoOffice 2.1 which supports Macros from Microsoft Word and Excel. I'll report on this after I have time to test it out better. I can say that NeoOffice got a sprucing up and it looks much more modern than it's stodgy by comparison version 2.0 variant.

Also I just received a copy of the yet un-released Aqua OpenOffice (no X11), this isn't prime time yet and there is some terminal work involved in getting it to run. After I figure that out I'll give a quick report on it's progress. I'm very curious to see how Aqua OpenOffice and NeoOffice compare with each other.

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Linksys WRT54GL Wireless Router:

I would really like to get an Airport Extreme, but I don't need 802.11N so I'm very hesitant to pay an additional $100 for it compared to a regular 802.11B/G router.

My 4 or 5 year old SMC wireless router has been a real champ. Nice GUI, it has served me well for a long time. Recently it has needed to be rebooted about once a week though, and I reached my breaking point with the necessary reboots. I probably would have bought the new Airport Extreme even with the premium price for it's 802.11N support if it had a 4 port giga-switch built into it instead of a 100Mbps. But I just can't see paying $180 for it when I don't need the 802.11N and it can't speed up my wired LAN to giga-ethernet speeds.

The timing was right this morning when I ran across this deal on a Linksys WRT54GL for only $38 delivered after a Linksys and a Paypal rebate. and jumped on it. You may be wondering what makes this Linksys so cool. Clearly it doesn't look very cool and is obviously not designed by Apple. The Airport Extreme is the nicest looking wireless router I've ever seen, the Linksys looks like a Radio Shack experiment gone bad. It's not the looks, but the ability to update the firmware with great OpenSource firmware that adds numerous feature to the router. One such feature is the ability to turn up the power for better connections. Great stuff.

It would take a long article in itself to go over all the neat things that the two non Linksys firmware offers for this router. You can find out more about them at their websites, and on Wiki. DD-WRT web page, and the Wiki page. Tomato web page, and the Wiki page.

I'll be flashing my router with the Tomato firmware, it looks simply awesome.

Maybe I'll post screenshots in a few days when it is up and running


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I ran across this video on TechCrunch, it's pretty funny.




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Uninspiring Vista is a short article from from a long time Window user who in testing Vista switched to the Mac.

Inspiration comes from the strangest places, in this case from "Technology Published by MIT Review"

The article is titled: How Microsoft's long-awaited operating system disappointed a stubborn fan.

By Erika Jonietz

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The Apple TV is a great add-on device for any computer user who uses iTunes to manage audio and or video content, and they want to bring that content to their home AV system. Lack of support for DivX and XviD is not good, and the frame rates listed in the specs are less than ideal for TV content - but I'll reserve judgement until I see one in operation first hand.

FrontPage on steroids is how the Apple TV interface looks to me. I would like it if Apple updated FrontPage to have the same interface.

I will not be buying an Apple TV though. Why you ask? Simple, I am looking at solutions that replace my home AV system, not for a device which is yet another component to add to my system. Apple TV doesn't even have a DVD player built into it. You may be shocked to hear this as somebody who is a Mac and Apple fan, but my home AV system is powered by Microsoft Media Center 2005, and it's a great setup. Vista MCE a huge step forward making it even better.

As nice as Apple TV looks, it doesn't target the same features and functions as MCE. Our family uses an 'MCE Server' running in the office and we access all the content through an extender. It is our single source for Live TV, Recorded TV (MCE has fantastic DVR functions), photos, music, and more. Single Source, those are key words for me.

I only hope that Apple TV is the first entry into the home entertainment market for Apple and that they decide to take on MCE. Similarly to how Apple only operates music as a pay per song model instead of also offering a subscription service - I see Apple staying the course with their current model in regards to TV and that is to continue offering pay per downloads instead of serving the DVR market. Maybe Apple will see the light, I would certainly be extremely happy with the possibility of running an Apple based MCE'esque system powering my home AV system, as good as MCE is, it still runs on Windows which does cause me some concerns and actual problems from time to time - I have to think an Apple Mac OS X based 'MCE' system would be more stable and secure and hopefully more elegant.

Now take my dream Apple TV DVR unit, and bake it into a 37" or 42" LCD monitor and I'd be in heaven.

-MacSeven


Tell us what YOU think.
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I had expected an announcement at some time for a Video iPod, and a separate announcement for an iPhone which would resemble something more like an iPhone Nano - much more basic in function than the iPhone which Apple introduced at the 2007 MacWorld Expo.

In a few words, the iPhone completely blew me away. It is an amazing unit that in many respects makes the current competing units look pretty barbaric by comparison. But I don't think that the iPhone is the end all either. Outlined below are some of my Pro's and Con's on the upcoming device.

PRO's:

* The iPhone is an amazing unit.
* Fluid design and integration of functions
* Beautiful design and display.
* Very well thought out features.
* Spectacular execution of features.
* Volume slider on the side is a great idea, I wish my Nano had one.
* Answer/disconnect switch built into the headphones is a great idea, I wish my Nano had this for Play/Pause.


CON's

* This unit is aimed at the very high end consumer market which has a limited audience. I think they may come out with an 'iPhone Nano' type device at a later time which would be smaller, with less features at a lower price point which would make it more accessible to a larger market. The iPhone can wow them and then the iPod Nano can close the deal for those of use who cringe at the thought of paying $600 for a phone, even if it is an iPhone.
* The lack of support for Exchange and Notes serves, a la Blackberry, pretty much excludes the iPhone from serious consideration by Corporate America.
* The lack of support for a Word and Excel viewer also pretty much excludes the iPhone from serious consideration by Corporate America.
* No voice recognition! I can't believe nobody else seems to be talking about this. While the implementation of the virtual keyboard looks pretty good to me, I would much rather talk to an iPhone if in a situation where that wouldn't be disruptive. Rather than scrolling down a list of music just say "Stone Temple Pilots", or say "Call John Smith" instead of poking around to find that contact. Similarly, for emails, SMS's, etc. Wouldn't it be much easier and faster to say your message rather than hunt and peck it out on a non-tactile keyboard? Who knows, maybe this will happen and it just wasn't ready for the demo but I would consider it essential for this device if it were to win me as a buyer.
* No user replaceble battery. Boo, this just isn't good.
* No user installed applications, ouch. This slams not only the users, but the Mac Developer community. Bad move and I hope Apple gives serious consideration to opening it up.



It is going to be interesting to see how the iPhone plays out in hands on reviews in the months to come, and whether or not Apple releases other phones to accompany the iPhone.

-MacSeven


Tell us what YOU think.
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I sold my Apple stock a while back at $89, at the time I felt it was a good price - no regrets. But a week or two ago when it came down to $81 I thought about buying 100 shares. On Monday I again thought about it but it was already up to $85, so I thought I'd wait a day or two, then today it pops up over $6 per share to $92. Damn, that would have paid for a new iPhone had I pulled the trigger.

Oh well.

Woulda, shoulda coulda.

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Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, to you and your family.

When I saw this picture of my son, I just new it was the time to try out the program Comic Life which was bundled with my Intel iMac.

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As the end of the year rapidly approaches I realize that my tax refund isn't too far away. If you generally get a refund from your tax filing, how do you plan to spend it? A new iPod nano? maybe a MacBook or a MacBookPro? No? Maybe an iMac 24" (be still my beating heart.) Are you more prudent than that, maybe you're going to save it for a rainy day?

I actually fall into that later category. I'd love to rush out and get a new gadget like the iPhone if it ever comes out, but realistically any refund I get is going into my savings account. Boring, yeah maybe.

How about you?

Tell us what YOU think.
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I think Google Earth is a cool program, although it's mainly a curiosity with me. I don't have any real need for it other than using it for the occasional diversion to look at some place on the globe. The fly by feature is cool. I know many people use it for cool uses like mapping out routes, hikes, motorcycle rides - as well as commercial applications. All great stuff.

MSN has a nifty online satellite photo web portal which is nice in that you don't have to install a 100GB program like Google. It's called TerraServer. If memory serves, Microsoft has a Google Earth competitor called Virtual Earth, though I don't think it's Mac compatible like Google Earth is.

When I checked my installed Google Earth, it was from July 13, 2006. I probably missed a few updates along the way, but an update was just released 2 days ago.

Download the latest version here.

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This is a fantastic price on a refurbished 24" iMac, they come with full warranty and you can purchase AppleCare too.

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Apple stock has been on a tear lately. New highs were hit several time last week. I decided to hit the register Cha-CHING! and I sold the Apple stock that I've been holding. Sure it has room to keep moving higher, but I feel that the recent prices are more speculative based, so it could just as easily fall back a little.

If Apple stock retreats a bit I just may buy some back if I think it has a good chance of moving upward again. But even if Apple stock doesn't fall back, and it keep moving upward - I won't be too disappointed that I sold; Apple stock has been very very good to me, I've earned enough on it to pay for my entire new system... and my entire new next Mac system.


Your Comments appreciated.

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Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

MacSeven

I'm heading out on holidays for a few days, I'll be back in town November 19th (just in time to catch the World Rally Car's in New Zealand.)

See you then, and I'll have more Mac goodness upon my return.


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I saw a post over on The Unofficial Apple Weblog earlier today, the post was saying how Mail.app and .Mac mail suck because they broke a few things. Many people in the comments talked about either how no, not so, it's great, or others more politely saying how Mail.app does have some flaws.

For some time now I've been meaning to post my thoughts on Mail.app, I guess now is that time.

Mail is a great looking program, the interface is one of the nicest I've seen on a mail program. This is always a good thing, and more or less expected by people on a Mac. There are many issues that I run into with frequency with Mail though.

First let me say that I use AIM email service, formerly MailBlocks. It's a great service, better than Gmail in my opinion. (Side Note, some of the things I like about AIM: Ajax, 2GB account, integrated Plaxo, IMAP access, fast searching, free.) I use AIM via the web interface at work on my XP machine, and I access it at home with Mail via IMAP access.

-Often times mail crashes on me for no apparent reason. I'd say at least twice a week.
-Frequently I receive email with attachments which don't show up in the email at all, or show up as mime looking text, I have to log into my WebMail to access the attachment.
-Mail doesn't download the body of emails so I can't search my email for context within the email (major drag)
-Mail doesn't update the messages in folders other than the Inbox unless I click on that folder.

Elegant interface notwithstanding, Outlook Express is a far superior email client in terms of functioning as an IMAP client.

I sincerely hope that when Leopard is released with the new version of Mail, that Mail has received some much needed improvements, not just new features like Notes, To Do Lists, RSS, and Stationary - these are all great additions, but clearly the "core" Mail functionality needs improvements before more goodies are added on, this sounds more Microsoft like than Apple.


Your Comments appreciated.

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It is cool that Apple got on board with Bono's RED campaign, helping to fight AIDS in Africa is definitely a worthwhile cause, and those RED iPods are pretty cool looking. But don't think that the iPod is the first or only RED product out there.

My employer, American Express, joined the RED efforts back on March 1, 2006 with the awesome looking card below. Also shown is the RED iPod, it sure looks nice, I may have to break down and get one.

Your Comments appreciated.

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I started out in the computing world on a Mac Plus. Wow, that was a world ago. After many PC, mostly DIY I've come full circle and in Feburary 2006 switched from my WinXP system to a new Intel based 20" iMac. (oh how that 24" tempts me - the hardware junkie in my dies hard)

So here's my question I pose: After converting back to the Mac, I left that Apple stock was attractive, and I bought some of it with idle funds. My Apple stock has now appreciated more than the iMac cost me. Does that make my new iMac free?

Tell me what you think.

Cheers,

Randy

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After the "It's Showtime" press event from Apple today some friends and I had a few emails back and forth to talk about what took place.

You can view the press event straight from Apple here.

I'm sure you've seen this already but just so you know, Apple today introduced a new 5.5G iPod, version 2 of the iPod Nano, a new iPod Shuffle, iTunes 7, updated QuickTime, a Movie download service, and they previewed a new media device the iTV.

As the group was talking about the many items from the event, my brother voiced his dissatisfaction with the pace of development in the iPods. He wants that cool touch control Video iPod that Engadget and all the rumor sites have been predicting for over 6 months now.

My response was that Apple, in the position of the dominant player in the portable music player market, is in no need to rush development of new players. Apple is far and away the main player, and all they need to do is keep a modest pace of new players with decent upgrades. My brother is upset because people like Cowon have had features, and far better sound quality, than the iPod's for over two years now, and some of those features are still not in the new iPod's announced today.

When the Video iPod does come out, it will make a lot of people happy, and maybe forget about their other wishes for a while. And don't forget also that in Apple's position, they have an advantage to things like accessories, most new cars having iPod connectors, etc.. This sort of thing can only come for the big player(s).

This is the market in action. The smaller competitors have to be more innovative and offer higher quality than the dominant player for them to have any hope of gaining share. The other approach of course is to compete solely on price, but this is a tough long term strategy.

Apple will continue to progress the iPod products at a pace to keep them with as much market share as they reasonably can. If you think about it, this isn't so different than the approach Microsoft has taken in markets it dominates like Windows and Office.

I think what bothers us the most is that we know without a doubt that Apple could make an iPod killer themselves. One that would blow away even the most demanding customers. We almost expect Apple to do this and appease us. But when Apple already has around an 80% market share, why would they do that, things are going pretty well already.

Let's look at this line of thinking in relation to desktop computers and the Mac OS. Apple Desktop computers, whether it be the iMac's, Mini, or Mac Pro's (even the Notebook line) all of these computers are at the cutting edge of hardware. Have you seen a Mac Pro in person, wow, it is a masterpiece, such attention and design went into this computer. The iMac is a piece of artwork which you happen to be able to use as a computer. ; ) And the mini pushes the envelope for it's performance in such a tiny package. And all of these wonderful computers now run on Intel. Let me tell you, in case you think this line of computers was easy to develop and put into the market place was a simple task, you are wrong. This was a monumental effort. Why is Apple pushing so hard on the computer hardware front? Of course great industrial design has long been important to Apple, but also because Apple and the Macintosh computers are far far away from being the dominant player, so they have to do things better than the market share leaders in order to help attract more customers. Ditto for OS X compared to Windows.

I have more to say about iTV, but it will have to wait for another day. I'll leave you with a hint... I have bitter sweet feelings about it.


Your Comments appreciated.
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The Open Document Format, ODF, is gaining some momentum lately. The European Union, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Belgium, , Norway, and Denmark have all recent adopted ODF. Denmark officials believe that the country will save nearly $100,000,000USD by adopting Open Document Format, and OpenOffice.

The decision in Massachusetts to move to ODF was at first assumed to be a move from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice, however, Massachusetts officials have recently made it known that for now they will stay with Microsoft Office with a plugin to support ODF. It will be interesting to see to what degree OpenOffice is implemented in the near and long term.

I think it's great that an organization has developed an open set of document standards, and is now being successful in seeing it achieve some adoption. Office Suites with support for proprietary formats only are quickly going to become a thing of the past. Whether or not the free office suite solutions like OpenOffice and NeoOffice can make a dent in the Microsoft Office dominance is the question. Recent activity indicates that they will. Additionally there are more and more online office suites cropping up which put even more pressure on Microsoft Office.


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I'm spending several days at Cannon Beach Oregon, USA (see picture below.) This will be a welcomed brief break from the heat of Phoenix, Arizona. (see the Phoenix link for a good laugh.)

You can look forward to MacSeven.com updates on August 17.

In the mean time, don't be shy, sign up for the forums and lets get some good Q&A and commentary going.

Thanks.

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WWDC 2006 kicks off today hopefully there will be a lot of exciting news for the Mac faithful. I'm not going to play the guessing game about what Apple is going to announce, I can wait a day, or over the next week, to find out. Instead of speculating on what Leopard may or may not have and which computer or iPod products may be announced, I've decided talk a bit about memory for the Mac.

Many people talk about the 'dot Mac' tax and how much of what Apple displays on the Mac and iLife require a .Mac account for full usefulness and features. I for one don't pay for .Mac, I find that I'm very happy with my AIM Mail (formerly MailBlocks), I get great inexpensive web & ftp hosting elsewhere - so I don't see why I would need .Mac. I think the syncing feature between several Mac's is really cool; but I only have 1 Mac and even if I had multiple Mac's I'd probably be inclined to use a LAN sync option rather than .Mac.

Enough of that, this commentary wasn't intended to focus on .Mac it just fell into the fray. I mentioned the .Mac tax because it is a widely accepted argument that .Mac is a quasi tax to Mac users who want the simplicity and ease that .Mac and it's integration to the Mac offers.

Instead of talking more about .Mac I want to point out is the Mac Memory Tax. I think it's a disservice that Apple sells new Mac's with only 512MB of memory. Mac's are always being compared to the PC's in terms of features and price, the new Mac's compare very well to the current name brand PC's. But a big difference is in the memory, most of the machines I see have 1GB of RAM, double the amount that the Mac's come with. The price of RAM from Apple is terribly expensive also. I think the new Mac's are wonderful, and need to ship with 1GB of RAM to keep people happy with their machines, and to prevent the end user from having to spend around $300 per GB of ram.

Mac's are wonderfully designed computers, they are a wonderful computers for novices and professionals alike. Mac's need and the customer deserves to have 1GB included with these machines as the base memory.

Stop taxing us by making us purchase additional RAM, include 1GB in the base configuration.

Until Apple gets more liberal in dolling out the memory. Check elsewhere for memory, you'll find it much less expensive than buying directly from Apple. When I received my new Intel powered iMac I bought 1GB to add to the factory 512MB for a much better amount of 1.5GB.

I bought my memory from MemoryToGo and I've previously bought memory from Crucial. Do yourself a favor when it's time for more money and shop around for a better deal than Apple offers.

You can discuss this topic here.
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