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.

We have all been bombarded from our favorite Apple and Technology sites about the Jesus Phone 2.0, aka iPhone 2.0.

Just couple things to note from the first day of WWDC 2008.

First is the lower initial price of the 3G iPhone. It is great that the new iPhone cost less money upfront, however, it is a bummer that the monthly service fee will be more expensive than the current Edge Network based iPhone. I don’t know if the 3G service plans being offered for the 3G iPhone are more or less expensie than what other carriers are offering for the 3G phones they sell - nonetheless it’s sort of a drag that the monthly fee is increasing - even if the speeds are better. I’m sure that you’ll likely be better off paying a few more bucks a month and hundreds less for the 3G iPhone anyway.

MobileMe, I’m actually very excited about the upgrades to MobileMe as it replaces .Mac. I recently became a paying user of .Mac, I came around to seeing the value of it but admittedly I was banking on the fact that it would be revamped and upgraded at some point. I didn’t expect the overhaul to come so soon, and neither did I expect it to go away from .Mac and to MobileMe. Time to change my email address with everybody yet one more time...

I have a feeling that the move from .Mac to MobileMe is a very deliberate one. While I know that Apple is extremely proud of their Mac computers, it seems that they are trying to sanitize .Mac from being a Mac only offering. By calling it MobileMe and working with Microsoft’s Outlook they appear to be trying to make MobileMe appeal not only to Mac users but also Windows users who use an iPhone. Given the success of the iPod on the Windows platform it is hard to argue this strategy if it is in fact something that Apple is trying to do.

It does seem to me that Apple should give away a year free subscription to .Mac/MobileMe with every Mac computer purchase, and slash the annual fee from $99 to $49. I’ll bet it would grow exponentially in the number of users, and the profits they make from it.

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.

I recently decided to upgrade the internal hard drive in my iMac. What surprised me was how simple it really is to do, and how much of a performance benefit I gained.

Time Required: About 1 hour.
Tools needed: 1 new large and fast SATA hard drive, screw driver kit with Torx 6 and 8, 2 or 3 suction cups, can of compressed air, LCD cleaning cloth.

iMac ready to undergo surgery

I picked up my current 24" iMac September last year, it has suited me very well. But I've never been pleased that you can't add additional hard drives to the iMac like you can a Mac Pro, or most PC's. I have a couple of externals that I use for additional storage and for cloning with SuperDuper! Finally I decided that I'd be better served with a large drive in my iMac and a large external drive to clone it onto. Just a two drive system, no other externals for extra storage capacity - this is simple and easy and fits my lifestyle better.

Once I realized that a ReadyNAS NV+ really wasn't be best and easiest solution I began to look for information on how to go about upgrading the hard drive in a new iMac, I knew it wasn't a user accessible drive but figured somebody had figured it out. Sure enough - Tom Sawyer over on the MacRumor forums had been a pioneering fellow and posted a tutorial on how he did the deed. I read his write up twice and decided I could surely do this myself.

Tom has written a nice guide, but there were some things that I felt could have been elaborated on a bit more so I am writing up my experience in a guide.

• I'm sure you're wondering if you have what it takes to upgrade the drive in your own iMac. If you have ever put together a PC or maybe swapped out a motherboard in a PC, hell if you've ever watched McGyver I think you're qualified to take on this task successfully. Seriously, all you need are the right tools and some patience and care.

• Before beginning you'll need to get a new hard drive, I chose the Samsung F1 750GB drive which was $140 delivered from Newegg. I would have loved the extra space and outstanding performance of the Samsung F1 1TB drive, but it is almost double the price so I went with the 750GB instead. Hard Drives are like operating systems and religions, people firmly believe in the brands they like. I don't think you can go wrong with the Seagate drives, I'd stay away from the large Western Digital GP drives because they are only 5,400rpm despite being labeled as variable 5,400 to 7,200rpm. The new Samsung drives are getting mixed ratings at NewEgg, but most of the problems are because of some issue with these drives, Vista and nVidia drivers - nothing that affects us Mac users. I've used Samsung drives before and they've always been fast and dead silent, so my choice was easy.

• I read Tom Sawyers guide to doing the upgrade over at the MacRumor's Forums.

• Snagged a screw driver kit for the weekend from our IT guy at work, complete with Torx size 6 and 8, two most used items in the upgrade. You need suction cups to pop the protective cover off the iMac, instead of buying a set of them at Home Depot I opted to use the side window Sun Shade in my car which has two suction cups (happy to save a couple dollars in the process.) You'll definitely want to have a can of compressed air for cleaning out your iMac and getting all of the dust off of the LCD when you put it all back together.

My new 750GB Samsung F1, screwdriver/Torx kit, window shade (with suction cups), and Tom's tutorial

• I first removed the iMac from my office, and placed it lying facing up on my kitchen counter on top of a folded bath towel which was protect the iMac from case scratches.

• Next I attached the two suction cups to one side of the [plastic, not glass] cover on the front of the iMac. Here's one of the first mistakes I almost made. You really need three suction cups, two on one side at both ends, and one suction cup on the opposite end of the screen in the center. When I pulled the screen off with the two suction cups and started to pull it up higher, I heard a bad noise. It turns out that there are pins attached to the underside of the plastic cover, and unless you pull the screen relatively straight off, you can break these pins and or the entire plastic cover. I was working carefully so didn't damage my cover, but this was a close call. You can probably do it with just two suction cups if you pull the one end up only a couple inches then reach over and lift up the other side with your fingers. The red dots indicate where I would put the suction cups, lift with the side with two cups, when it pops up, lift with the third cup to fully remove.

• Be sure to take extra special care to not touch the LCD screen after removing the protective cover.

suction cups attached, ready to remove the cover.



protective screen now removed

• Next you need to use your Torx screw driver and remove all the screws surrounding the LCD screen from the aluminum front bezel. I put red dots on the picture above to show where the screws are that need to be removed to get the front bezel off.

• Remove the memory access panel now.

• Life the aluminum bezel from the top of the iMac, be careful to not lift very far, you need to disconnect the iSight.

iSight cable to disconnect

• After disconnecting the iSight cable, (be sure you removed the memory access panel, keep lifting the bezel from the top and wiggle it a little and it will fully come off the body of the imac. Where the bezel fits at the bottom of the iMac is just a tongue and groove type fit, you may have to push the bezel downward slightly at the bottom of the iMac after lifting the bezel at the top of the iMac. The bezel comes off very easy after disconnecting the iSight.

iMac with the bezel removed

• Next is to free the LCD from the iMac. First remove the 8 Torx screws holding it to the iMac (I show 6 of them with red dots in the picture above, there are 4 screws on either side of the screen.) When you begin to lift the LCD panel away from the computer, I found it best to lift it from the top by the iSight, pivoting at the bottom. When reinstalling the LCD panel, set the bottom in first then carefully put the top back down into the iMac.

• Side note - the main fan had a fair amount of dust in it, so I covered my LCD screen with a clean kitchen towel and cleaned the fan out with a can of compressed air. Look at the visible dust in the first picture, then how much cleaner it is after blowing it with air. Note - I also cleaned the other fan I noticed near the hard drive, I think there is a third fan also but I didn't notice it.

Dirty Fan



Clean fan

• There are two sets of wires that you need to disconnect from the iMac which prevent you from lifting the LCD away from the iMac. I didn't snap a picture of the fist set, but it is a set of 4 wires and they are just to the right of the main fan at the lower left of the imac. I've drawn a red line next to the wires in the picture just above.

LCD DVI connection.

• The next set of wires I think is the DVI connection, it is shown in the picture above, circled in red. Tom's guide talked about this being difficult to put back in upon reassembly but I found that it just snapped right in without any issue at all.

• Tom recommends removing the power connection to the LCD which requires removing a small circuit board, I think it's much easier and safer to leave it connected and work on the iMac with the LCD still connected to the power. If you have somebody to help they can hold the panel up for you, I did it myself, by putting the LCD just inside the lip of the iMac's back plastic case and tilting it up, then I rested the LCD panel on my head while I worked on the hard drive.

LCD panel tilted up



angled view

• The picture above shows where the hard drive is installed, my drive is out at this point but I outlined where it was in red.

• Before you remove the drive, you need to disconnect the thermal sensor, it is under a 1" foam square. Pull off the foam square, and remove the sensor attached to the wire from the plastic mount on the drive. I show a picture of the mount down below.

• To remove the hard drive you need to remove the two Torx screws on the top side of the drive, from the black plastic handle / mount.

• Carefully lift the drive up (where you just removed the two screws). There are two screw/pins mounted on the bottom side of the drive, pull it towards the top of the iMac to remove these pins from the mounts.

• Carefully remove the SATA and Power cables from the drive and lift the drive out of the belly of the iMac.

• Using a knife or screwdriver, remove the thermal sensor mount from the hard drive. I pushed it onto my new drive, and used a little Gorilla Glue on either end to ensure that it would stay put.

Thermal sensor mounting bracket.

• This item I either missed from Tom's guide, or he didn't list it, but on the other side of the hard drive is a small square of foam tape attached to the drive, it's about 3/8" square. I only noticed this after I'd put my iMac completely back together again, but you can certainly transfer it to your new drive now that you know about it.

• Now you being the reassembly of the iMac. Everything goes back together in exact reverse as the disassembly took place.

• One thing I messed up was when I sprayed my LCD panel to remove any dust, I tilted the can of compressed air too much and it sprayed liquid onto my LCD panel! I freaked out momentarily after seeing a reside remaining after it dried. Luckily an LCD cleaning cloth cleaned it up very easily. I would highly recommend you have one of these clothes handy, it's very likely that you will get a small smudge or two on the LCD during the drive upgrade - these clothes make quick work of them. I got my cloth with my LCD TV when I purchased it, but I think it's the same cloth used to clean optical glasses too.

I think I could do the job in about half the time the next time I do it, I was going slowly and cautiously, but it really wasn't as difficult of a job as I had been anticipating. In fact it was darned right easy to do.

Now that it's completed I'm really seeing the benefits. I've got a large internal drive with enough capacity to warehouse all of my data on a single drive. I only need 1 external firewire drive to Clone my main drive for safety (using SuperDuper!). I've decided to just go with a SuperDuper! clone and not use Time Machine.

SPEED, there's the great thing, my new hard drive is far faster than the stock Western Digital 320GB drive that it replaced. My Xbench score on my original drive was a respectable 72.91, the new Samsung F1 750GB measures 93.02, a 28% increase. This change (and going from 3GB to 4GB of RAM) increased my overall computers XBench rating from 151.17 to 164.95, a 9% overall increase. These are benchmarks you say, they don't mean anything! But I am seeing dramatic improvements in speed in real life usage as well. It now only takes about 6 seconds to launch Windows XP in fusion, about 3.5 seconds to close it. I'm seeing DOUBLE the transfer rates when doing the initial clone of my drive to my external FireWire drive. My iMac definitely is faster with disc activity than it was when stock.

I couldn't be more pleased at how easy this upgrade was to do, the increase in performance, and the simplicity it brought to my storage needs.

Thanks again to Tom and his guide for giving me the information and courage to attempt the upgrade myself.

If you are interested, I have posted a 20mb zip file with full size images of all the pictures in the guide.

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.

Red [HD DVD] has seemingly taken it in the shorts recently with Warner Bros. going exclusively with Bluray. But might they both take it in the shorts by Take 2 (AppleTV Take 2) or other video on demand services?

I recently upgraded my entire AV system and a part of that upgrade was the cheapest HiDef DVD player I could find - a Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD player. Admittedly I was pulling for the HD DVD format but it looks like a long shot now for it to become the dominate format over Sony's Bluray.

My consolation in buying the HD DVD is that it was very inexpensive at $140, came with 5 DVD's, and NetFlix has a really decent selection of HD DVD's that I've been watching. After I've watched all the HD DVD's from Netflix that interest me, what is my next choice? I ask this with the assumption that Bluray will be the dominant HiDef DVD format out there.

Well, actually, I don't plan on picking up a Bluray player in the near or medium future. Now that Apple has upgraded the AppleTV software to the 'Take 2' complete with HD movie rentals - I'm quite likely to hang up my long standing NetFlix subscription and simply rent HD movies from Apple directly to my AppleTV. Yes, a Bluray disc would have higher quality than an AppleTV HD movie rental due to the enormous capacity and high bitrates used. However, I have a feeling that the HD movies will look very good via the AppleTV. I've transcoded some HD rips that were on the Usenet, purely in the name of research. The resulting AppleTV compliant HD files are around 2.5 - 4GB in size and look awesome. I'm assuming that the AppleTV HD movie rentals will be encoded in similar or better quality, especially since they aren't going through multiple encoding steps (HiDef DVD -> MKV -> AppleTV MP4).

5.1 Dolby Digital audio will be offered on the HD movies, this is fantastic. As of now we're all waiting to see exactly how this is being accomplished since the MP4 format does not accommodate AC3 sound. It would be great if they are taking a 6 channel AAC audio stream and transcoding it to AC3, this would save a tremendous amount of disc space since AC3 is so very inefficient with regards to size.

The new menus for the AppleTV rental screens are simply gorgeous, well done, I can't wait to check it out very soon and rent an HD movie to scope out the quality.

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.

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.

IMAP is great, it's one of the mail reasons I've been using one of AOL's free email services, AIM for several years - free IMAP support.

If you're not familiar with what IMAP is, it's a setup where you keep your email on the main server, you don't download and delete from the server like POP. Gmail was accessed via a web browser, which is stored on the server like IMAP. But with IMAP protocol you can use the email client of your choice, say Mail[.App] or the iPhone two name a couple...

Great stuff. The news is currently breaking everywhere, but this is big for a lot of people so I'm posting it here.

From EngadgetMobile:

It's absolutely no secret that Google has a few humble fans of their email service, whose prayers have finally been answered. G's giving its users free -- yes, free -- IMAP access to their inboxes; great for desktop users, sure, but the people most likely to benefit from this development are those on mobile email clients (especially those unable to use the Java Gmail app). Hell, Google knows it and even whipped up an iPhone setup page to help Apple users get the real Gmail experience (instead of that crap out of box implementation someone so wrongly thought we'd be satisfied with). How do you get IMAP enabled? Well, if you don't see it in your Gmail options, log out and back in again. Still don't see it? Wait. Wait, and check the blogs, friend.

While Apple's stock is reaching stratospheric levels and everything is firing on all cylinders. The new cat, Mac OS X Leopard 10.5, is about to be [officially] released at 6PM this Friday. However, sources have confirmed that the final version of Leopard can be found on both the usenet and torrent sites as of today.

Microsoft monitors the uploading of their software and contacts people's ISP's, Apple could be following suit. In any event, support our favorite computer and OS developer, do the right thing and purchase it.

By the way, if you are a student, or know one, in the USA college and university bookstores will be selling Leopard for the nice price of $69. If you don't qualify for the education deal you can order it for $99 plus reasonable shipping here.

I did my first Keynote presentation the other day, then came the fateful moment... How was I going to play this on the Windows based Dell at school.

It turns out that Keynote does a bang up job of exporting a Keynote presentation to a Quicktime movie. The cool thing is that it acts much like it would playing it back in Keynote, you advance and back through the slides, all the effects how and everything. It's really pretty awesome. The only real downfall is that the files are much larger because it's a movie, and you can't quickly back up or go forward multiple slides.

If you want to check it out, here's a link to the Keynote Presentation that I did, I exported it to a small 320x240 size to keep it small, 7 megs. open the file and it'll start in Quicktime (Mac or Windows) hit enter or click on the screen to start it, you can keep clicking or use the right arrow key to advance, left arrow key to reverse.

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.

September 2007 Keynote Address: Everybody has seen all the news on todays Apple Event going over the refreshed iPod line and the new killer $399 price on the 8GB iPhone.

Huge stuff. Not just the new iPod's but the pricing on the Nano blew me away, significantly cheaper than before. I think Apple is keeping the heat on the competition. Sure we can nitpick, where is FM tuning on iPods (no, really, where is it?), where is the ability to record to your iPod using a high quality microphone or other low level source, etc. But in general, these are really impressive devices at very reasonable prices.

I am not, however, interested in upgrading my trusty iPod RED Nano 4GB that I got for Christmas last year, still love it, and plan to continue using it for the the foreseen future. The new Nano is cool and all, but my Nano suits my needs very well.

DAMN, $399 for the 8GB iPhone which was previously selling very well at $599, that's going to tempt a lot of people who were on the fence. And it has already pissed off a lot of people who paid $599 for the same phone. Come on Apple, the least you can do is credit those people with $200 in their iTunes account.

Check it all out, Apple has now posted a decent resolution video of todays event (480x270).

I'm glad to see that Microsoft doesn't look to be monopolizing the new "open office" document format standards, in my opinion it should be with a group like the OpenDocument Foundation, not Microsoft. Mark one up for a good practice.

From the International Herald Tribune: The fight over the standard, while technically arcane, is commercially important because more and more governments are demanding interchangeable "open" document formats for their vast amounts of records. Currently, the only standardized format available to government purchasers is OpenDocument Format, developed by a consortium led by International Business Machines, which the ISO approved in May 2006.

Full Story from IHT

ThinkSecret posted some commentary on the latest build of Leopard OS X 10.5 build 9A527, and many great screenshots, this is well worth a few minutes to read the text and few the gallery.

The MacBU has just sparked up a new site for Mac Office users, Art of Office. Art of Office is a place for people to submit artistic and/or useful content made using Office applications (Word, Excel, or PowerPoint). Whether it’s creating pixel art using Excel (a la our Post-it Notes) developing an animated short story in PowerPoint or artistic pieces in Word, this online community allows you to share, rate, remix and discuss user-submitted content with other Mac Office users around the world. It’s a fun way to show unique applications of our product and helps people think of Mac Office in ways they may not have thought of before.

Uncle Walt [Mossberg] did a nice quick video review of Apple's newly updated iWork suite, now complete with a spreadsheet application.

He sums it up very nicely by saying that if you're a Mac user and you want a nice Office suite and you aren't primarily a power Office user, then iWork may well be a great option for you.

Apple Insider did a nice review of the new aluminum 24" iMac. I found that I was very much in agreement with their review on most every point they made, except their final rating.

Despite the fantastic package that the iMac is, it's new lower price point with a faster system, AppleInsider only rated the new iMac a 3.5 out of 5.0??? This seems quite odd to me, 4.5 would have seemed more in line with the review.

Sure I would prefer a matte screen, at least the option, but other than that I don't think there is much to complain about with this machine, in virtually everything you look at with this new iMac - it excels very well. It's an amazing machine at a very reasonable price.

Maybe they were secretly disappointed that Leopard did not come pre-installed?

I read through the Engadget liveblog of today's Apple event like a junkie looking for a fix. And I certainly wasn't let down.

The highlights are (you can click on the images for that page at Apple.com)

An all new iMac [Pro looking computer.] Gone is the 17" from retail, 20" and 24" both in glossy screen formats, drat, I really prefer the Matte finish. The base 20" iMac is now $1,199 - wow, incredible computer for the money! Other goodies like an all new aluminum case, aluminum flat keyboard with MacBook type keys, FireWire 800, the 24" can even be ordered with a 1TB drive and a 2.8ghz Intel Extreme. I would rather they not focus so much on how thin the iMac is, I'd much rather see it be able to hold two internal harddrives.... As sweet as this baby is, I'll be sticking with my shiny white 20" Intel iMac for a while to come, it's not that outdated just yet.

The bastard step child Mac Mini finally gets Core 2 Duo's and faster speeds of 1.83ghz and 2.0ghz. Man would I love the new Mac Mini powering CenterStage for my home entertainment. If only CenterStage were prime time....

iLife '08 finally emerges with a complete new iMovie and very updated iPhoto. Count me in!

iWork '08 adds Numbers, a new spreadsheet program that can read and presumably write Excel files. Number's isn't aimed at the Excel power user, but the casual user, and it looks to have great flexibility in formatting and generating nice looking spreadsheets, something that Excel doesn't, well, doesn't excel at.

dot Mac gets a big improvement primarily in the area of sharing photos. Major integration with iPhoto '08, you can even send photos from your iPhone, and alloted space is increased from 1 to 10GB. I'll pass on this one at $99.95 per year - but glad to see improvements all the same.



Other news...

Steve said of the AppleTV" "..., we'll have some news for the Apple TV soon, but nothing to talk about today."

This is news that was most important to me, I seriously hope that the direct the AppleTV towards full HD and 5.1. It's almost laughable how the AppleTV requires a high end TV but yet doesn't officially support HD content and high definition 5.1 or 7.1 sound. Let's get the AppleTV HD party started!


Engadget has great coverage and details of all the Apple Event items today. Check it out here.

Back in February I panned the new Airport Extreme for only having 10/100 ethernet switch, it needed a gigabit switch, especially when all Mac's ship with a gigabit ethernet connection.

Well today Apple finally corrected the problem!

I hereby grant Extreme status to the Airport Extreme. Now if it only had a 5 port instead of 3 port integrated switch we could refer to it as the Airport Uber Extreme

IGG Software's upcoming iBank 3 won the runner up for the best designed Leopard Application, behind Delicious Library 2.

Previously I've talked about how I found the Mac personal finance applications lacking and that I'm still running Quicken 2007 for Windows. I had looked at iBank, but the main drawback to iBank 2 for me was the fact that it doesn't directly download your data from financial institutions. Rumor has it that version 3 will be able to do this.

This could be very good news for a lot of people, there is a lot of talk on the internet similar to what I have said about the sad state of affairs for Mac personal finance.

Instead of just bemoan the situation, I'm going to see if I can get onto the Beta, possibly even the alpha for this project, and see if I can help in some small way to influence it towards a world class application that we can be proud of the fact that it's a Mac app.

Here are some screenshots of iBank 2, you can click on the large thumbnails for full a size view. You can see that it is a very nice looking application. Hopefully if direct downloading happens, and a few more features come into it, this could be what Quicken should have been on the Mac.

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'm not going to read you the riot act, downloading illegal software is not the right thing to do.

But out of interest to all the Mac fans out there, you may find it interesting that the WWDC released version of Mac OS X has hit your local bittorrent network.

I wonder if Apple put unique identifiers embedded into each of the copies of Leopard that was handed out at WWDC. If so, somebody is going to get in big trouble for their copy showing on up bittorrent.

It just seems that "never enough" applies to hard drives. I clearly remember back around 1990 when 20MB (yes Megabyte, not Gigabyte) drives were the most common at that time, I spent a lot of month getting an 80MB drive in hopes that I would never outgrow it's capacity. Yeah right.

My iMac has an internal 250GB, I've got (2) 320GB External FireWire 400 drives connected to it. My Media Center Edition 2005 (Windows) computer which currently powers my AV system has (1) 160GB drive and (2) 500GB drives. I won't count either my wife's or my work notebooks into the mix. That's a grand total of just over 2TB of raw drive storage (less actual space after formatting, that and the fact that hard drive manufacturers use 1000 base calculations when they should be using 1024 - a binary versus decimal argument but at the end of the day a drive rating in GB from the manufacturer is overly optimistic because it's using 1000 instead of 1024 in determining the capacity.)

I've been pondering a NAS unit for some time and gave it a lot of thought today. If I go the NAS route the Infrant (NetGear) ReadyNAS NV+ looks like the top choice. The box without drives is about $650. The option that I may opt for instead is to build an inexpensive Windows XP box (or migrate my MCE box when I move to a new AV media serving platform) and run a RAID 5 array in a PC based NAS box. One big advantage in my opinion is that client computers don't have to load any drivers to access the NAS like you have to with NAS specific boxes like the ReadyNAS.

There are plusses and minuses with any solution. Some will argue that a large external drive is a great solution, but I shutter to think if the drive failed. I'm not comfortable with a LAN network storage solution that isn't a RAID solution.

The Drobo is a cool solution, and it can plug into an Airport Extreme. However the ReadyNAS is significantly faster than the Drobo, and only $100 more money, and it has far better connectivity options. It depends on how you intend to use it.

I'm going to end up staying with my current setup for now, but when the time comes I guess I am leaning towards a NAS RAID box built on a PC as it's the most versatile solution and it's still cheaper than a ReadyNAS, and I already have most of the pc parts to get it up and running already. Then again, there is something to be said about appliances, and a ReadyNAS NV+ just sits there and does it's job without the hassles of being a full blown computer.

Windows Home Server is coming out later this year, but I don't see much advantage to it over a ReadyNAS or a generic PC with RAID.

And while talking about data storage, please please please backup your data. I use SuperDuper! and with a paid copy of it, you can automatically do nightly backups. I have a "Clone" external drive of my Machintosh HD, it updates nightly. And it has saved my ass a couple of times already. You can't be too careful when it comes to backing up your system. An offsite copy of your backup is a must also, I do this on DVD's today, but will probably just buy another external drive for the task.

One question I have about Leopard and Time Machine is whether Time Machine can backup to a NAS and not just an external hard drive.

There is a cool new BART Widget from WorryDream to help you with San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). Maps, routes, schedules, fares - it has it all.

There is also an official iPod BART QuickPlanner that is put out that can be very helpful if you're not at your computer (or soon to be released iPhone.)

In the WWDC Keynote Address Steve showed how Leopard has Stacks, and how there is a new Download folder where items that you download from the internet will reside. Music to my ears, I to the same thing today without the assistance of having it setup by Apple, and without the fancy dock folder that Stacks / Downloads offer.

Running Tiger, I have my system setup with a similar function. This helps me to keep a [slightly] less cluttered desktop, and it allows me to have a single folder that I monitor for virus via ClamXav. (I don't feel the need to have ClamXav monitor everything - just things I download from the internet.)

I have a folder on my desktop named Web Downloads.

And I have also added this folder to the left bar in Finder for easy access:

At this point you may just want to wait for Leopard, but then again, in less time than it takes to read this article, you can setup a similar setup for yourself.

The 2007 WWDC Keynote Video is now available.

I wasn't going to read the live WWDC Keynote blogging today, but I couldn't help myself... if you missed it (even if you didn't) the Video should be following soon.

With every website out there detailing the WWDC Keynote speech by Steve Jobs, I don't feel the need to recap everything, but I would like to point out a few surprises that I didn't expect in the keynote.

1) No announcements for anything hardware or iLife.
2) Games for the Mac.
3) Safari for Windows

Games for Mac is very exciting and I think healthy for the Mac platform. Even if you can dual boot into Windows, or run it virtualized, not everybody wants to. And the Mac ecosystem would be better off overall if good games where available natively. I was just telling my brother a few weeks ago that I wish Apple would invest some of their billions into a game division.

Safari for Windows. "So what" you say. I think this is a bigger announcement than some may, the reason is that if Apple can increase Safari's market share from ~ 5% to 10%, 15%, or even higher - this is a great enticement for web developers to stop creating browser specific code. Far too many sites don't comply to standards based web protocol. If FireFox and Safari (and others like Opera) can take a bigger chunk of the browser market share, then it is a bigger incentive for web developers to go standards based. This will make browsing a better experience not only for Mac users, but anybody who uses an alternative browser. I say Hurray!

By the way, I've been using the Safari on Windows XP for an hour or so now, and it is still beta, but holy cow this is a fast browser. They didn't hype up the speed, it is for real. Now if I could only get KeyChain on my work XP machine...

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!

My iMac 20" (Core Duo Intel Mac) has Firewire 400 ports, and USB ports. No Firewire 800 or eSATA ports.

While the theoretical limits of eSATA are extremely high, in reality it's faster than Firewire 800, anywhere from the same speed to about 35% faster depending on what test you look at. I was wondering how my interfaces compare for speed so I did a little test.

My home network includes my iMac and a Windows XP Media Center 2005 computer. These two computers are connected via (2) 100' ethernet cables and a NetGear gigabit router.

I wanted to see how fast my Firewire 400 external drives compared to saving files over the gigabit ethernet network to my Media Center computer. I also ran my external drives in USB2 mode just out of curiosity, I don't ever run my externals via the USB2 interface, I only did this for a comparison.

There is a certain amount of overhead in moving files, so I ran the speed tests on a single large file, and then next test was on thousands of small files.

Here are the results of the single 3.83GB file transfer:

The gigabit ethernet connected drive actually tied my external Firewire 400 external drive to the second. This rather surprised me, I just assumed a locally connected harddrive would be much faster than what is essentially a NAS drive connected via gigabit ethernet. While the Gigabit and Firewire 400 drives each took 165 seconds to complete the transfer, the USB 2 connection took 280 seconds. In other terms, the Gigabit and Firewire 400 connections moved the data at an effective 23.77 megabytes per second, while the USB 2 connection moved the data at an effective 14.00 megabytes per second.


The next test was moving 3,114 jpg files which was 2.21GB:

This time the Firewire 400 drive took a slight advantage over the gigabit ethernet connected drive, and the USB 2 drive still lagged considerably.
The Firewire 400 drive moved data at 19.67 MB per second.
The Gigabit ethernet drive moved data at 18.55 MB per second.
The USB 2 drive moved data at 11.61 MB per second.


You can see there was a lot of overhead in moving thousands of files versus a single file, here's how the three interfaces transfer speeds were reduced with the overhead of more files to deal with instead of 1 large file:

Transfer rate slowed down by:
Firewire 400 17%
Gigabit 22%
USB 2 17%
The external drive slowed down by the same percentage regardless of being connected via Firewire 400 or USB 2, the gigabit connection suffered a little worse with the overhead, but still turned in very respectable transfer rates and nearly equaled the Firewire 400 connection.

This tells me that if you like a clean and quite setup, a NAS box or Ubuntu file server in your closet, connected to your Mac via gigabit ethernet will offer you very respectable transfer speeds. Firewire 800 and eSATA are even faster, and the gigabit wouldn't compete with them, but many of us don't have those as an option anyway.



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

As reported a week ago, the AppleTV was hacked in no time at all. Progress is being made, the guys figuring it all out have figured out the menu structure, they even have added a file browser. The USB port can be enabled for Keyboard and Mouse (no external storage just yet), of course other video types like XviD are playing.

AwkwardTV.org is a great spot to monitor progress on all the work.

The state of the hacks is all pretty heavy developer type stuff in my opinion. But fortunately people are working towards making all these mods something that you'll be able to do without ever even cracking the case open.

Speaking of cracking the case open, Engadget has a great DIY page on how to upgrade the harddrive in the AppleTV.

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

Uno makes your Mac look unified and gorgeous. Now it's updated for the first time after iTunes 7.1 was released.

Head over to their site now to download.


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

I was following this thread today, some guys have figured out how to play XviD and some other video formats on the AppleTV. It would seem that the AppleTV has not been locked as many of use would have expected.

Also, the Roque Amoeba guys realized that any TV with component inputs will work with the AppleTV, it doesn't have to be a widescreen TV.

And lastly, somebody has already upgraded from the 40GB drive to a120GB drive.

Interesting developments for the first day or so.

Tell me that it's a fully functioning DVR and I'll be a happy guy.

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

Lately I have been thinking about computer based DVR systems, and to a larger extent Media Servers. I have been using Microsoft Media Center Edition (MCE) for several years now to serve my AudioVideo system TV, Movies, Music, and occasionally pictures.

As AppleTV is now shipping, this seems like a good time to bring up this topic. I've talked about AppleTV in fair depth previously. To sum it up, I think it is a neat product if you want to bring your iTunes Music and your iTunes TV Shows and Movies to your TV. My main issue with AppleTV is something it doesn't do, and that is DVR function. I'm a single source kind of guy. Meaning that I prefer a single source for my Live TV, Recorded TV, movies, music, etc.. This is something that Media Center does very well. 

I'll talk more about music another day, but I'm looking at my Media Server more from a TV and Movie perspective now, not so much music. Currently my main source of content is Cable TV, standard definition (SD), DVD's, both disc's and ripped to my MCE. My TV is a 1994 35" tube TV which does a pretty darned good job with SD content. With my SD TV, and my SD Cable TV I've been hesitant to move to the realm of HDTV until it became more ubiquitous. It damn near kills me when I go into Costco about every week and have to walk past that huge area now devoted to flat panel TV's. But an HDTV necessitates HD content to benefit from it's capabilities. HD Content means I've got to either record HDTV from Over The Air (OTA) which is all the main broadcast channels for free in glorious HD with my MCE2005 based system, or go with a new DVR / Media Center solution.

The options. Tivo, I don't like it, for one thing I don't like the subscription, and the cost of a Tivo3 is high enough to make me want to stick with a computer based solution so that I can also have Movies not just TV. Cable Company DVR has about the worst GUI that I've ever encountered (at least the offerings from my Cable provider.) AppleTV has no DVR but it does do movies. Then there are other PC based solutions similar to Media Center. The next gen of MCE on Windows Vista does HD via CableCard. My two problems with that solution is 1) you can't use commercial detection and skipping software with CableCard recorded media, this is a function that I'm not sure I can live without after having it for so long now. (Tivo lacks this too.) 2) There are no version 2 Extenders for VistaMCE yet (Xbox 360 works as an extender, but I have no interest in a 360 or it's price.) Moxi by Digeo has a new retail DVR solution coming out this summer if all goes well. One variant will be CableCard based, the other an OTA based setup. This is interesting as I've always thought the Moxi GUI was beautiful.

MythTV is a Linux based solution which has some interest to me. It can operate on a Server / Client mode, where a Server does all the recording and can store all the media, then a client pc, even a Mac Mini running an OS X MythTV front end can be used to access everything including Live TV. This has a lot of appeal to me. I would consider this solution and even consider dropping my Cable TV altogether and just going with OTA HDTV and DVD's. I can always snag a show I miss from bittorrent if I'm really jonesing something that isn't available OTA.

Ideally I'd prefer a native Mac Solution. There are some projects and applications to this end, such as Media Central, XHub, and Center Stage. But they just simply aren't to the level of something like MCE is today. One reason I really like my MCE Extender is that it is an appliance, not a computer, that is great. I like a 10 foot experience, not a computer in my family room.

I've decided to stay where I am for now. With my MBA program I don't watch as much TV as I might otherwise be inclined to watch anyway. I'm hoping that better computer based DVR solutions may crop up in the next year or so. Maybe MythTV will progress even further than it currently is. Maybe Apple will shock us all and enter the space. Maybe third party solutions like from ElGato will improve.

There is always hope, but I need some more working solutions.

It shouldn't be that hard to come up with a kick ass Media Server solution that is affordable with today's technology.



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

We ran a HowTo on publishing your iCal Calendars to any website a while back. Click here for the full story.

With the recent upgrade of Mac OS X to 10.4.9 iCal had an update which causes one of the programs necessary for the iCal publishing trick to no longer function. Hopefully the author of Scalp will be able to update it so that it works again.

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

A month ago I bemoaned the fact that the new Airport Extreme didn't have gigabit ethernet, thus not so Extreme...

I've now got my new Linksys WRT54GL tuned to Extreme now with the Tomato firmware upgrade that I talked about.

This is a great setup to consider if you don't need N wireless. It's a lot cheaper than the Airport Extreme and has more configuration options. The interface is much nicer than the Linksys provided firmware, and the features are never ending.

Here are some screenshots of before and after. I'm not going to shoot all the pages, it would be many, but this will give you an idea of what it is like.

Here are some images: 1) Original Linksys router homepage, 2) Upgrade to Tomato 1.04 is successful!, 3) New Tomato router homepage, and 4) Tomato Last 5 Hours Bandwidth Usage.

The image below shows the bandwidth usage activity for the past 5 hours. Tomato allows you to view real time usage, a graph of the past 5 hours, daily, and monthly.

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

I was just over at Apple's website looking at the specifications for the brand new Airport Extreme.

Why in the world does this wireless router have local wired LAN ports which only support up to 100 Base-T Ethernet, when the iMac's, MacBook's, MacBook Pro's, hell - even the Mac Mini - they all support 1000 Base-T.

It makes no sense to me whatsoever to support fast speeds on all of the computers, but then not make it possible to connect at the higher speeds because the router caps at 100 Base-T.

I was honestly considering getting the Airport Extreme, but now I don't know that I can consider it with the speed limiting LAN ports.

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

When I ran Windows XP I would frequently have odd things happen to my system, after a while it just became a fact of life. However, since running on my iMac since February 2006 I have run almost completely free of odd happenings.


Last night I was struck by some odd behaviour that I can't figure out how it happened. I rebooted my iMac for the first time in about a week, and when I rebooted the Time and Date which is always displayed in my Menu bar had dissapeared. Also missing from my Menu bar was Menu Meters. I only had to go into the System Preferences and click the option buttons to redisplay these items. I can't understand how they mysteriously were no longer being displayed after a reboot.

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

It sure does look nice doesn't it! The new Apple iPhone was announced today.

I'll be very interested to see first hand reports on the new iPhone, especially how well it fares for battery life and durability. Damn this is one sexy phone! I especiallly like how it has rounded edges, I don't like how my RED Nano has sharp edges to it.

Check out all of these fabulous pictures of the iPhone that Engadget is showing.

iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. So it ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, completely redefining what you can do on a mobile phone.

Tell us what YOU think.
........................................................................

I've been a fan of MacAddict Magazine, which has just been transformed into Mac|Life magazine. They have a nice new website that just went live. Hopefully it will prove to be a useful Mac resource.

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

I think this challenge for a .Mac replacement is awesome, check it out.

The goal of the notMac Challenge is to create the incentive for someone to make an alternative dotMac solution available for the general public. Since this is something that could benefit a large number of people in the Mac community, I figure what better way to create that incentive than to invite anyone interested to contribute to the reward.

Tell us what YOU think.
........................................................................

I've used Plaxo for years, it's a fantastic service to help you keep all your addressbook information sync'd.

The Mac client has been out for a while now, it is Universal Binary and it works great.

Integrates with OS X Address Book
- Syncs with all your other clients
- Lightweight and easy to use
- The Plaxo Toolbar for Mac synchronizes your Mac OS X Address Book with your Plaxo Universal Address Book. Wherever you install a Plaxo toolbar, your address book will be consistent and stay up-to-date automatically. You can also access your address book on the web through Plaxo Online.
- No need to learn any new programs; the Plaxo Toolbar for Mac synchronizes with your built-in Mac OS X Address Book.
- Your Plaxo Universal Address Book is a single address book that goes with you, wherever you have Plaxo installed - your data will always stay consistent and update itself automatically.

Your Comments appreciated.

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

I love my iMac 20" with Intel power. The other day I was thinking how nice it would be to replace the 250GB drive with maybe a 500GB drive. So after a bit of searching around I found a step by step instruction on how to do this.

Holy cow, this is involved, check out how this is done here. Another option is to have an Apple authorized service center do the swap for you for around $75, seems like the prudent way to go.

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

Here is a list of the different Key Combinations which can be used when starting your Intel Mac.

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

This guy in the UK has Apple Service Manuals for several of the more recent Mac's posted on his site like the iMac, MacMini, and MacBook Pro. (Yawn, and also most older Mac service manuals too.)

Grab now before Apple sends him a cease and desist.

Your Comments appreciated.

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

I've mentioned UNO on the blog before, if you haven't checked it out I urge you to. It really enhances and unifies the look of apps on your Mac. Looks do matter! And Darling, your Uno Mac looks marvelous.

UNO derives from the Latin word for one and stands for "as one".

UNO is the root of Unity.

UNO is a theme that brings the sunken unified toolbar/titlebar look&feel to every single window on your system (cocoa or carbon, metal or aqua and already unified windows as well).

On an higher level, UNO's main goal is to enhance aqua interface consistence, by making all elements look&feel "as one".

UNO is aimed to those who want a clean and un-osbstructive interface while keeping the best of Aqua.

The unity level proposed by UNO does not compromises overall GUI contrast: UNO and UNO shade can be mixed up in order to achieve that usability goal.

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

Those cookie lab techs over at ran some tests and verified what some people had suspected, the release of 10.4.8 brings big improvements to Rosetta.

This is great news for you Adobe CS2 users on Intel, or those wanting to move to Intel.

Virtually everything I run is Universal Binary or Intel specific build so while I think it's great, it really doesn't improve anything for me.

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

The Sunday Times Online reported that Apple's business in Europe is booming! The fiscal year just ended earned apple more revenue than did the years 2002, 2003, and 2004 combined. Apple's European head said that the iPod is generating a Halo effect on Mac sales in Europe.

I'm in the USA, not Europe, but to some extent I'm seeing a movement too. In this calendar year I've switched back to the Mac, my brother switched back to the Mac, my sister in law switched to her first Mac, a good buddy in Toronto, Mark, switched to his first Mac, a friend in Vancouver BC, Alex, switched to his first Mac. I'm seeing a movement around me, and it's not to Vista... It's going to be interesting to see how things go when Vista & Leopard are both available.

Your Comments appreciated.

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

This is great news for a healthy Mac community:

Not only was it the best Macintosh quarter in Apple's 30-year history, but a little more than half of the 323,000 computers sold in Apple's retail stores during the period were to people who had never owned a Mac before, Apple's chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer said during an analyst conference call. "We were thrilled by that," he said.

I mentioned the other day about how Notebook computers is an area where I feel that Apple needs more choices, that was confirmed again today when I went out looking for a new Windows Notebook for my father in law. I was drawn to the Sony Viao laptops which, by the way, look very Mac like. Very affordable also, just that darn problem about them running Windows and not OS X... But as I was looking at the many notebooks, they have then in 14" and under screens, 15", 17" - all for similar prices to the MacBook, and then they came in many different preconfigured varieties - and that was just Sony, there were many others as well. I'm not down on Mac Notebooks, I think they're great, but I also don't think that Apple should force people to buy a MacBookPro if they would like a 15" or 17" notebook. Keep the Pro line for the heavy duty user, give the more casual and maybe more price sensitive Mac user more options, I guarantee they will sell well. Don't forget about that 12" MacBookPro Ultra Portable too. My offer still stands to beta test it.

Out for now.


-Ed

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

I would like to apologize for not being more active posting lately. I've been completely overloaded in my MBA program and less frequent posts have been a side effect.

Recently I've wondered what will happen to the recent market share gains the Mac has been enjoying when Vista is released. Mac desktop and notebook sales are seeing very healthy increases relative to PC sales which has largely coincided with the combination of Tiger and Intel Mac's. Hey it got me to switch back over to the Mac!

As an Apple and Mac fan, I would like to think that the Mac will continue to gain market share over Windows after the release of Vista. However, the pessimistic view is that Vista will put a major damper on Mac sales. I think more people have switched to the Mac recently because Windows XP sucks in many ways, not because OS X looks neat, they like their iPod and figured what the heck, that Mac sure looks cool, I'll make the switch. It's not a painless thing to switch platforms, people don't make the change lightly. I could believe that the current lack of virus and spyware on OS X could attract people.

I've gone over this in my head several times, with several different scenarios and while I don't have the ability to predict what will happen with any certainty, my gut feeling is that the Mac will hold or lose some market share for a while after the release of Vista - maybe even up to 12 or 18 months and then the Mac will begin to pick up some steam again and slowly start a climb up the market share ladder.

I don't have to have the Mac market share increase for me to feel good, justify my computer or anything like that. I'm just thinking purely of myself here, if the Mac market share grows from where it is today to something larger, that will mean more developers writing applications for the Mac, bigger economies of scale for Apple in terms of hardware pricing - in other words I want the Mac market to be vibrant and large enough to bring benefits in terms of software and hardware pricing. 10% - 15% of the computer marketshare is a number where I would love to see Apple reach, of course this is a far cry from the current less than 5% share. But it could happen, and that would virtually ensure the viability of the platform down the road.

I really don't want to have to run Vista on my iMac, so encourage your friends and family to by a new Mac instead of a new Dell or HP with Vista next year. Trust me, supporting your parents PC troubles is no fun!


My thoughts on Windows XP and OS X.
Windows XP was a vast improvement over Windows 95, however, and I would argue that Windows XP is largely a 'home' version of Windows NT. Regardless, in the PC world, Windows XP has become the dominant OS not because it was the best, but nonetheless it is the standard OS. I've not ever used Linux, Solaris, or other OS's, but in most ways I absolutely find OS X to be superior to Windows XP. There are a few areas where I think that Windows XP excels over OS X:

-The Finder is lacking, and I think Windows Explorer is far superior
-Key commands Home/End and Ctrl+Home Ctrl+End are much more logical in what they do than the equivalent on the Mac (This is actually my biggest single complaint is that I can't go "PC" for these key commands on my Mac)
-If you're a hardcore gamer look elsewhere, OS X isn't THE platform, though Apple could influence this and they don't for some unknown reason.
-More choices for notebook computers. There is such a wide variety of available computers, I think it's much easier to find a notebook that suits you and often at better prices than what Apple offers. The MacBook should have discreet graphics and 1GB of ram for the price, many people don't need or can't afford a MacBookPro, but they shouldn't be stuck with bad integrated graphics because of that. Even though Apple has a limited line of Desktop computers, I think they cover the bases very well here, I don't see any major gaps on the desktop like I do with the notebook. What about people who want a 12" MacBook or MacBookPro, why in the world isn't this available?
-Greater selection of Applications on Windows, granted not all of them are that great, but there are some nice Apps that aren't equivalent on the Mac. I hope to see this equalize over time.
-Media Center Edition. I still have a MCE box which powers my home audio/video system. Fantastic DVR and I have an addin to strip out TV commercials from my viewing automatically. iTV is a very limited niche product, MCE is capable of powering a whole home AV setup, I am very excited about Vista, not for my desktop, but for my home AV system, VistaMCE is what I'll be buying some time next year. Please don't send flame mail on this topic, I've tried front row/iTunes, and trust me, it's not even in the same ballpark as MCE when it comes to powering a home AV system.

Those are the areas where I find that I still favor Windows XP over OS X. But virtually every thing else I far prefer OS X over Windows, and these items I weight more heavily.
-Stability!!! I've been on my new Intel 20" iMac for around 10 months now, and I use it heavily. From past experience I can assure you that I would have already had problems with Windows XP that would have crippled some functions of the OS or applications which would necessitate a clean install of the OS to remedy the situation. Meanwhile my iMac with OS X is running just as well today as when I installed it!
-Less things to tinker with. On Windows XP I felt like I was a part time system administrator. On OS X there's just less administrative stuff to have to muck about with.
-iLife. This is a killer App for me, I love iLife, nothing like it on Windows comes even close.
-Shareware, I have found some incredible shareware for OS X, and the creme de la creme of freeware apps on OS X seem to be head and shoulders above what is out for Windows XP in my opinion.
-While some people complain about Spotlight, I find it to be an extremely powerful tool that I use daily. Sorely missing from Windows XP.




Your Comments appreciated.
........................................................................

Here is a summary of some recent highlights in the software world of Mac.

Bumpercar 2.0: Bumper has a minor upgrade this week, in itself not worth writing up. However, this reminded me to put a plug in for Bumpercar. I consider it an essential program if you have kids in your house. The way I use it is I have a logon on my iMac for the kids, and when goes into the kids user account Bumpercar launches automatically. You can define settings by your kids ages, I'm still on the "preschool" setting which is wonderful.

BumperCar: the Mac OS X Web browser just for kids. Offering unparalleled content-control and customization features, BumperCar is the most powerful Web browser for concerned educators and parents on the Macintosh.

ffmpegX 0.0.9x: ffmpegX is what I lovingly refer to as my video toolbox. It is a great tool for converting video. The author of ffmpegX, Major, has done a very commendable job in both offering a great deal of controls and settings in the program while keeping it easy to use and navigate through. I do have a short list of suggestions on how to improve and make this an even better video utility, but it's pretty darned useful as is. By the way, this is about the fastest encoder I've run across.


Microsoft Messenger 6: I have a several contacts who use Messenger exclusively, and it's a pretty good IM, especially on Windows. This marks the introduction of Messenger as a Universal Binary on the Mac. While Messenger now has ties to Microsoft Live there doesn't seem to be many changes to the actual GUI. An item of particular interest though, I was scouring a blog post on Microsoft today which talked about this new release of Messenger, and it sounds like AV is likely to be introduced on the Mac version of Messenger sooner than later. It will be really great to be able to have AV chats to Windows Messenger users. Now how about that UB version of Remote Desktop...


Apple's iTunes 7.0.1: While I have had no issue with the recently introduced iTunes 7 myself, I'm particularly troubled that Apple released this new version of iTunes and so many people seem to be having troubles with it. My hopes is that this is not a trend, and that Apple releases more applications without thoroughly debugging them. There is a large software company in Redmond Washington which has already perfected this habit, let's not infringe on them when it comes to releasing software that isn't ready for public consumption.

Apple's Aperture 1.5: Not more than a few months ago the Apple Rumormill was positive that Apple was disbanding the Aperture team and getting ready to abandon the application. Overall it has received very high marks from indepth reviews. As a newcomer to this space it seems to me that Apple has done a fantastic job in a short amount of time. I use and very much enjoy iPhoto, but I would dearly love have the money to buy Aperture, and the training to use it effectively. Most likely I'll wait for iPhoto'ture... aka iPhoto7, or maybe iPhoto8 or 9... etc. Editing images is an area where I think iPhoto needs improvement, and in using the industry standard IPTC tags, both items Aperture does of course.

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

PC Magazine just published the results of their annual Reader's Choice survey. This is the 19th annual reader satisfaction survey by PC Magazine. Yes, I said PC Magazine, not Macworld. Why is this article here on MacSeven? Read on.

To quote the article about the Desktop survey: "Steve & Co. score better than every other desktop vendor in every category - by a wide margin. The most amazing part? The company's repair rate is down to just 8 percent."

PC Magazine says about Notebooks: "Yes, Apple is the king of the notebook world, too. As with desktops, the company's notebook scores are far and away the best of the survey. Its overall score is a 9.1 out of 10. The next highest score? An 8.4."

Here are some links to the article: Desktop Survey, Notebook Survey, Printer Survey

MacSeven: Given Apple's exquisite design and attention to detail I can't say that these results surprise me - except for the fact that they came from PC Magazine readers. I think Apple has a golden opportunity in the near term to really increase their market share in the computer world. Recent hiccups with the notebooks notwithstanding, they have make huge advancements moving to the new Intel line up.

Hey Steve, how about a sub 3.5 pound ultra portable ok? Yes yes, I'll do a review of it for you when it's ready.



COMMENTS
........................................................................

Microsoft in addition to the well publicized 5 year extended firm commitment to support the Mac platform with Office has recently made a few other tasty promises.

1) There is a new Universal Binary version of Remote Desktop en route. Nice! I like this one, I access Quicken for Windows off my MCE machine almost daily, I'm glad to hear some UB activity is in the works here. I'm anxious and ready to try it out if somebody at M$FT would like to through a beta version this way.

2) Microsoft Messenger 6.0 for Mac is in the works. Like many people, I started out in the IM world using ICQ, migrated to MSN Messenger and pretty much stayed there until I switched back to the Apple Macintosh, now I use both Messenger and iChat. While I do prefer iChat, I still use Messenger also, so I'm quite happy to hear that Microsoft is working on an update. It's well past due.

3) Microsoft Business Unit has some Mac Mojo with a new blog, check it out for all the MSFT / Apple developments.

COMMENTS
........................................................................

Not only does it come with a wonderful 24" screen, but it's running the Core 2 Duo at up to 2.33ghz.

WOW, I'd love one of these babies.

The fastest iMac ever, the 24-inch iMac provides professional performance along with the convenience of an all-in-one design. Like its 17-inch and 20-inch siblings, it features the new 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo processor with speeds ranging from 1.83GHz to 2.33GHz. The new processor delivers up to 50% more performance than the previous 20-inch iMac. It also doubles the amount of L2 cache, the twin cores sharing 4MB between them.(2) The result? Turbocharged performance, making it easier — and more fun — than ever to work with digital photos, movies, music, and the web.

Click on this picture for details at Apple

Is this what you've been waiting for with the new Intel Mac's?

Are you going to upgrade? Talk about it at the forums, link below.

You can discuss this topic here.
........................................................................

I ran across an article this morning which outlined why they believe Apple to be a very good investment opportunity right now. In fact I recently bought some Apple stock, I'm in agreement with their opinion.
 
Here are a few highlights from the article:

• Apple's stock is volatile
• Analysts are bullish on Apple's growth potential
• New, upcoming, iPod products should keep Apple out in front in this market
• The iPod / iTMS ecosystem is loved by consumers
• Mac sales have been strong with double digit growth rates, fueled by Apple's OS and Applications
• Stock outlook is good, but risky with a PE Ratio of 26
• Analysts surveyed by Thompson First Call expect sales to jump 19% in fiscal 2007

 

MacSeven.com does not offer investment advise, if you decide to buy Apple stock, know that it may perform well but the stock price could just as easily go down. By no means is it a sure thing.

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

...is ".Mac" next?

Yesterday Google announced it's new Google Office aimed at small businesses. I'm sure this sort of thing gives Microsoft sweaty palms considering this is Google. I can't see where this is much of an impact for the Mac audience. However, it does make me wonder how much of a dent Google will make into the Dot Mac market. Google already offers many things that Apple charges for with .Mac. Of course there are integrated goodies with .Mac that you can't rival completely, because Apple supports .Mac and integrates features for it in it's programs.

There are people who are happy to pay the $99/year fee for .Mac for what it offers in return, and then there are more and more people opting for free offerings from Google or others. I'm in the latter group.

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

I had a Plate'o'Shrimp moment today when I saw an article pointing out that Apple is much better than Microsoft at maximizing revenue per user for operating systems. Article here. (Plate'o'Shrimp explanation)

Just a couple weeks ago I was pondering how Apple probably makes a lot more money running the iTunes Music Store on it's current pay per track setup rather than my preferred option which is a subscription based model. As I was running through the music scenario it occurred to me that with updates almost each year for Mac OS X, Apple probably is able to get much more money out of our wallets than Microsoft does with paid updates multiple years apart.

Microsoft has only had new OS's every few years, longer from XP to Vista. While Apple has had new revised versions of OS X almost every year. If a person were to pay for each update of OS X along the way, they would pay for more total dollars to be able to run the newest versions of OS X than a Window user would have paid for current versions of Windows.

I don't want to get into a philosophical (or mud slinging) discussion about Windows versions the Mac. But it was pretty interesting to me as I thought about this at how much more money Apple can potentially make by doing upgrades and charge for them annually as opposed to revamping the OS every few years.

How many people upgrade with each new release of OS X, how many people run the version that came with their computer, and "upgrade" when they buy a new computer? I've got no idea, but I'm pretty certain a high percentage of Mac users don't upgrade their OS as frequently as Apple releases new versions. If you are here on this site reading this article, I'm pretty sure that you update the moment the new version is available.

One thing for sure, I'll be running Leopard, whether I upgrade my current Intel iMac, or upgrade to a newer faster Intel Mac which would come with Leopard installed.

I don't hear people complaining about the cost of upgrading to the newest OS X, I think the people who pay to keep current find the upgrades worth the cost while others who don't find it worth the cost just wait.

Gene Munsters's analysis assumed that everybody upgrades at each opportunity, I don't think that is what happens for a large percentage of users. Regardless, it would seem to me that Apple has a more lucrative approach for generating OS revenue dollars. Without some hard facts it's almost impossible to know how much more money Apple is generating.

Please join in the forums and voice your thoughts on the topic.
You will only receive an activation email, unrequested emails are never sent out.

You can discuss this topic here.
........................................................................

Here we are, MacBook Pro's are rumored to be upgraded to Core 2 Duo cpu's this coming week. What does this mean? 20% increased cpu horsepower at the same energy requirements. Nice! Price is my question, will this nice upgrade cost more money, will it be an option, or will it just replace the older model?

iMac's would seem a likely candidate for the same upgrade to a Core 2 Duo. I'm very happy with my iMac and it's performance, sure I'd love to have it running faster, but not sure I'd go through the hassle involved in changing computers for a 20% upgrade. Though it would be great for those who haven't upgraded to the new Intel Mac's yet.

Join the community in the Forums, speak out about your thoughts on the topic. Your input is most welcome.

COMMENTS
........................................................................

I saw a post mentioning the new release of the Personal Finance software, Moneydance. Quite honestly I'd never heard of Moneydance before, but interestingly it is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I had looked briefly at iBank before, and while visually it looks very nice, it doesn't have the ability to directly download your bank and other information straight from the internet, you first have to logon to your account and download a file, then import that into iBank - I have over 15 various accounts and have zero interest in taking on this task manually.

I've been using Quicken for over 15 years now, and while I am overall pretty happy with the product, I have a love / hate relationship with Quicken. I love it because it handles all that I need it to do and it greatly automates and simplifies the tracking of my household personal financial management. I hate it because I think it should be more elegant and (pun intended) more intuitive. I also hate that since switching back to the Mac in February 2006 I've had to keep running Quicken for Windows because the Mac version of Quicken is a complete joke.

The marketing that you will find on Intuit's website for Quicken don't give you any indication at how inferior Quicken for Mac is compared to it's Windows counterpart. I imported my Windows data into the Mac version of Quicken and was seriously disappointed as I tried it out. I would estimate that the Mac version is more comparable to Quicken for Windows 1996, not 2006. To make sure I wasn't missing something, I checked user reviews at both Amazon and MacUpdate, and unfortunately confirmed my discovery that Quicken for Mac is pretty lame.

Side note: Oddly enough, while the Windows and Mac versions of Quicken bear no resemblance in features or interface, TurboTax on both platforms is virtually identical. Kudos to the TurboTax team for giving the Mac a decent product. I'm not sure, but maybe TurboTax is done in Java and easier to port across platforms?

When I saw the notice about Moneydance and read that it could import from banks etc. I decided to try it out but after a brief foray realized that it's not full featured enough for me to give it serious consideration. Great job in getting it to import data from the net, but for my relatively modest financial management needs Moneydance isn't the ticket for me.

I would love to see somebody come up with a serious program. I'm beginning to think that Apple may have to play hardball to make this happen. Either somehow get Intuit to bring Quicken for Mac up to speed, or develop their own product. Apple obviously has some great software engineering talents and a knack for fantastic user interfaces. Apple would have the clout to hook into the financial institutions for downloading data. Personally, I'd rather pay Apple $75 for a decent product than Intuit but either way I just want something that I can run on my Mac that will give me the same experience, or better, than Quicken for Windows currently provides.

Which product to you use?

Do you agree or disagree with my sentiments? Tell all on the forums, the link is below.

You can discuss this topic here.
........................................................................

One last item before I take off.

I saw that ArsTechnica has posted their review of the new MacPro. I think that ArsTechnica's reviews are tops, if you are considering a new MacPro or are just interested in it, give this review a read.

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

MineSweeper is a game many of us have played at one time or another.

When I ran across Mine Swept I had a nostalgic moment, give me a second to compose myself please...

No, this isn't as exciting as new Leopard features, or a MacPro, but hey it's free and fun.

Check it out at Malarkey Software.

What classic games have you recently rediscovered?

You can discuss this topic here.
........................................................................

Wow, there is a lot of great stuff that they go over for Leopard in the WWDC Keynote Speech. And there is more to come that was not previewed. I'm really excited to see some of this in action. Time Machine, Spaces, and the Mail enhancements with Notes and system wide ToDo's are three things that all by themselves will make upgrade to Leopard a must do for me. And that just scratches the surface. The Keynote also covers all the information about the new Mac Pro and XServe computers. If you don't have an hour and a half to spare to watch the video, then be sure to check out the Leopard Sneak Peek which can be viewed very quickly.

You can click on the images below to go to the WWDC Keynote Speech, and to see the Leopard Sneak Peek information.

You can discuss this topic here.
........................................................................