Mac App store first impressions

I've perused the Mac App Store. There are some nice apps in there, but I have to say that just based on the value to me being offered, almost every single paid app I've seen so far has been a minimum of double the price I'd be willing to pay for that app. I'd be happy to pay $10 for Daisy Disk, but not $20. Maybe $15 (more like $10) for Earthdesk, but not $25. The one exception is the Contact Cleaner and Calendar Cleaner apps. I don't know if they're any good or not, because my calendar and contacts are clean enough for me at the moment, but if, for example, I had my Mother's calendar and contacts, it'd for sure be worth $5 to fix them.

We'll see if the market as a whole shares my view. Early indications are that at least some developers who got in on the ground floor are ecstatic about first day sales, but I do suspect that, as with the iPod/Pad/Phone app store that preceded it, prices will plummet as we see a race for the bottom.

New MacBook Air

I've decided to trade in my old MacBook Pro for an Air. I used to think that a big screen was what I wanted, but I've had a change of heart and now light weight is key, since I'm taking it with me on the train most mornings.

For a little while I had appropriated Scarlet's (original model) Air, and it was nice, though that machine only had 2 GB of RAM and was a little sluggish. It also was a little awkward only having a single USB port that was recessed inside that little door gizmo. Basically, it didn't work with anything except a cable, for the most part.

The new Air is a worthy successor. Not only can you get it with 4 GB of RAM, but they addressed just about all of the issues the original Air had (2 USB ports, and both them and the magsafe connector are mounted on a vertical, rather than a canted surface).

As we speak, I'm writing this post on CalTrain with the new Air. With the MiFi for connectivity, it's an excellent experience. Time will tell how the battery stacks up, but I may be able to leave the power adapter at home from now on if Apple's claims are justified. And leaving that behind makes my load about a third lighter, it turns out (the power adapter weighs almost as much as the Air. The rest is my tote).

Most remarkable is that the restore media for the Air is in the form of a USB ROM drive. It's slightly longer and narrower than a postage stamp, yet it contains all of the pre-loaded software and is bootable. The first announcements of third-party replacement flash drives for the Air have come out today, so this would be how you'd get your machine back up and running after swapping the drive out. Of course, that presumes you can find one of those pesky pentacle security Torx screwdrivers to get the bottom case off (really, Apple? What's the purpose of keeping me out of my own machine?).

I haven't tried the USB SuperDrive we bought for the old Air, though I assume it works just the same way with the new one. Of course, with USB ports on both sides of the machine, you no longer are forced to keep the drive on the right, if that's not what you like.

Once again, I was struck with how easy the transition to a new mac is with the migration tool. But at the same time, I was also struck with how bloody long the process takes. And I had to do it twice, since I was migrating two machines down into one. The second time, however, I used a USB Ethernet interface and connected the Air directly to the target machine, which improved the speed (instead of using WiFi) markedly.

Apple Wireless Keyboard and Magic Trackpad - Together At Last

Why Apple didn't design this in as an option I'll never understand.

As I explained in my last post, using a Mac Mini as an HTPC hasn't been quite ideal until now. The Magic Trackpad plus the Wireless Keyboard make ideal bedfellows for the mini in the living room... If only they were joined at the hip.....



Achieving this isn't too difficult. The most desirable factor for this is that the two should be as rigidly attached as possible, yet the bond can't be permanent, since you wind up with the power button of the keyboard jammed right against the battery door of the trackpad (or vice versa if you're left-handed). So some sort of Velcro attachment is the best mechanism I could think of. The only trouble is that velcro can shift laterally to some extent. So I went with a 3M product called Dual-Lock. It's like velcro, except that it's genderless and since both sides of it are made of stiff plastic, it tends to be much better at holding still.

I found the stuff at Orchard Supply (Home Depot didn't carry it), in a two-pack of 3"x1" pieces (it's actually a 4-pack - there are four pieces, which makes two complete fasteners). I also bought an 8x10 sheet of .Lexan. I used a hacksaw to make a 6"x3" sheet and attached one strip to each end and two about a half inch apart straddling the middle. I then stuck the mating pieces on, peeled back the adhesive and stuck the keyboard and trackpad on.



So, There! I fixed it!

It's not absolute perfection. With the whole thing in your lap, you notice that there's really nowhere to rest your palms, like there would be on a real laptop. And you have to watch out that your left pinky doesn't accidentally contact the trackpad and skitter your mouse pointer off on a tangent. Also, because of the thickness of the whole thing and its proximity to the bottom of the trackpad, the rubber feet won't ever touch the desk if you set it down. This makes the mechanical buttons in the trackpad useless, unfortunately. But if you don't provide a stiff support for the bottom half of the connection, it won't be as stable as this solution allows.

Magic Trackpad - the missing feature

The Magic Trackpad is the product I've been waiting for Apple to release since the first Mac Mini came out lo those many moons ago.

I bought a mini almost immediately after they came out to use as an HTPC, and it's served that role very well indeed. The only drawback is that we've had to use a wireless mouse to use the thing. That's less than a couch-friendly solution. We have a table between our two chairs in the living room, but that means that if you're in the right seat, you have to mouse with your left hand. Not very convenient.

The Magic Trackpad solves all of that, since it doesn't need to sit on an actual surface in order to work (unless you want to actually make the internal button click - then you must push the pad downwards on its feet. But the trackpad can work just fine without ever having to be clicked physically).

But now the only problem is that the trackpad is a separate unit from the keyboard.

If you set the trackpad next to the Apple Bluetooth Keyboard, it's obvious that they were designed to sit next to each other. It's only natural that you'd want to actually attach them together so that you could pass them back and forth on the couch as a single unit.

So why didn't Apple include some sort of mechanism to do exactly that?

There are some objections that need to be overcome. First, when the two are side by side, the battery door of one of them will sit right on the power button of the other one. So the two would need to be able to be routinely separated in case you needed to push the power button and to change the batteries.

So duct tape and rulers aren't going to be a 100% solution.

No, this is going to require some sort of rail and groove setup to allow the trackpad to slide into place, yet still be able to be slid off to change the batteries.

I look forward to multiple postings on There, I Fixed It covering this topic.

MiFi status dashboard widget

I've created my first Dashboard Widget. It's a MiFi signal strength / battery state widget. Whenever the mac is connected to the MiFi, this widget will display the signal strength and battery state. It's marginally easier than opening up a web browser.

I'm not a graphics wizard. All of the graphics in here I stole off the net using Google. Mea culpa.

You can download the widget here. Just unzip it and double click to install.

Enjoy!

Magic Mouse review

I've been saying for a while now that Apple needed to do something to bring multi-touch to its desktop lineup. Well, now they have. I bought a couple of Magic Mice - one for the mac mini in the living room and one for Scarlet's desktop machine. It works more or less exactly like it's depicted on its website. The scrolling with momentum is particularly welcome. It's a great way to scroll through big web pages and documents quickly. I actually hope that they add that feature to the multitouch laptops as well.

The two finger swipe gesture works with Safari as a "back" and "forward" nav action. I didn't think that would be useful at first, but I've actually found myself using it a few times.

The one gesture that's missing is a pinch gesture to zoom in and out (the pinch in Safari makes the text size larger or smaller). A close second best is the control-scroll gesture to magnify the screen. That works really well for the mac mini in the living room as a nice compromise - 720p is too low in resolution, but 1080p makes the fonts generally too small.

If I have one complaint, it's the packaging. They used tape to secure the mouse inside its box, but that tape doesn't come cleanly off - it leaves a nasty, sticky residue behind, and that residue was keeping the mouse from moving smoothly on a mouse pad. I had to break out the Goo Gone to get rid of it.

I hate it when this happens

I hate it when you have something fairly simple to do, that can be done a hundred different ways, but every goddamn one fails for some simple reason. Case in point: I have set up my laptop to act as an alarm clock. It opens up the XM Radio online streaming from a cron job.

I have an html file that does the right thing. It has some javascript that performs the "login" step, and then opens the player gizmo inside of an iframe. It works perfectly.

Well, it did. Snow Leopard seems to have broken XM streaming in Safari.

Ok. How about Firefox? XM streaming works fine there, and if I open up a firefox window and type in the file: URL, it works.

But the problem is that Firefox isn't scriptable! There appears to be no way at all, from a shell script, to open up a firefox window onto a URL of your choosing.

What about Camino? It's scriptable, and uses Gecko.... But alas, XM streaming doesn't work there, either - but for a different reason than Safari (looks to me like a cookie issue, but I can't be sure).

So I'm fucked. And by my count, it took the failure of 5 different vendors to get us here. Outstanding.

Safari 4 beta breaks Back-To-My-Mac

The Safari 4 beta is very, very nice, except for one thing: if you install it on a machine that you intend to use remotely via Back-to-my-mac, it won't work. While the beta is installed, the BTTM service tab in the preferences will have a yellow dot and caution triangle that simply says that there is a problem with your connection to MobileMe.

UPDATE: It looks like they fixed this sometime yesterday without a software update. It's possible that this was unrelated to the Safari 4 beta, but I did test it simultaneously with two machines - one with, one without - before announcing it.

iLife '09: Garage band artist music lessons are awesome

Scarlet expressed an interest last year in learning to read sheet music again. To that end, we asked for an M-Audio KeyRig 49 for Christmas.

Since I was a teenager, I've had a sort of background interest in music. I used to sing in choirs, and have been in operas and operettas on and off. I can read music well enough to plunk out vocal parts on the piano and can hack out chords and the like, so I thought I'd be able to teach Scarlet a little bit about how to play the piano as a way to help her read music better.

I still have my old synthesizer keyboard from 1984. It doesn't have velocity support, but it can act as a MIDI source, and I have a MIDI to USB adapter that has been demonstrated to work correctly with GarageBand in the past, but the newer USB music keyboards are lighter and more portable, so they make a lot more sense for our office space. Besides, GarageBand running on a mac is far and away a better synthesizer than that old Seiko keyboard could have ever hoped to be.

So that was the plan, and that's fine. But when the MacWorld keynote in January demonstrated the Learn To Play features of iLife '09, I was intrigued. Well, we finally got our hands on a copy of iLife '09, and I was so impressed with the free lessons (they really got Scarlet started on the right foot), that I bought an artist lesson for myself: Sara Bareilles' Love Song.

It's not really my genre of choice - I'm more of an alternative rock fan than a pop fan - but in the limited selection available, it was the lowest difficulty piano choice available.

Sara is an excellent teacher, and the song is certainly both playable, interesting, and reasonably approachable. I don't play it exactly the way the sheet music says I should. I play the chords and I simplify the rhythm a little bit to suit me (I'm not sure she would really approve, but I don't have enough left-hand / right-hand disconnect to do it her way).

There are a few improvements I would make, and they're minor:

1. While you can choose to replace the sheet music with the chords, it would be really nice to display the chord names above the staff the way you often see in real print music. I'd be able to see the chords more easily, while still pulling rhythmical cues and the vocal lead off the page. As it is now, the only prayer I have of keeping up with the full speed track is just with the chord track and winging it.

2. They really, really need to not let the time pointer get so far to the right before they scroll the music. I need to read ahead a little bit, and I pretty often get to the end of the screen and wind up getting surprised by what comes next when the next measure finally scrolls in.

3. The selection in the artist store is obviously too limited to be realistic. Not only is it obvious that this will change as more artists get on board, I'd be stunned if artists don't start tripping over themselves to get into the store.

But apart from those minor complaints, I have to say, the whole concept is really a blast. It's the best $5 I've spent on computer software of any kind in at least a year.

Has Apple lost their tiny little minds?

Go click on this link.

It's a 404 page now, but it used to be the home of Apple's retail stores. Why they'd move that page is a giant mystery to me, but whatever.

Go to the bottom of that page. There's a link to click on to visit an Apple retail store. That link takes you to -- wait for it -- that same page.

I have no words.

EDIT: At some point later that week, they fixed it. It was, at the time however, yet another thing that was annoying me that particular day (the iPhone 3G launch day).

Amateur PSK31 and Mac

I've been a dormant ham for a while now, but with some encouragement from my wife, I've recently got back on the air. Back in the day, I managed to work all the states on 20 meter AMTOR. Since then, the new AMTOR is a mode called PSK31. It's a digital mode optimized for keyboard-to-keyboard QSOs.

You have to use computer software to work PSK31. It converts your typing into audio, then converts the tones it hears from your transceiver back into text. It does the latter by listening for signals throughout the audio passband of your rig, showing them all in a waterfall display that you click on to choose either a blank spot to call CQ or on a signal to decode it and set up your transmitter to reply to.

So to make it work, you need to do three things:

1. Get the receiver's audio into the computer
2. Get the program's transmit audio into your transceiver
3. Allow the program to control your radio's PTT button

The grand plan was to buy a TigerTronics SignalLink USB. It looks to me to be the best possible solution. It connects to your computer only via a USB cable. It has an internal USB audio device and the signal isolation transformers necessary to keep the two apart. It uses VOX to key the radio (that is, when audio comes out of the audio device, it keys the radio automatically). All in all, it seems ideal. Unfortunately, however, they're 4-6 weeks backordered, since it appears that I'm not the only one who thinks it's an ideal solution.

The next best thing is a RigBlaster Plug-n-Play. It makes 3 connections to your computer - audio in, audio out and a USB connection. The USB connection is for a USB-to-serial adapter that is used for PTT and for an (optional) radio control serial port interface. The port's RTS line is connected directly to the radio's PTT actuator. There is a software download on West Mountain Radio's site that contains an unsupported MacOS X driver. From what I can tell, it works just fine.

On the software end, there is a program called MultiMode, but the interface seems awfully primitive to me. Plus it costs almost $90. Instead, I went with cocoaModem. It has an auxiliary helper program called cocoaPTT that will do the serial port RTS for PTT thing on behalf of cocoaModem. You just have to make sure that the rigBlaster is plugged in, then start cocoaPTT, then start cocoaModem.

Hooray for Time Machine!

We were beset by thieves at the office this weekend. I had my company MacBook Pro on a Kensington lock, but the thieves rummaged through my drawers until he found the key. D'oh! They did, however, leave behind the Time Machine drive. Well, the IT staff replaced the laptop this morning, and with fingers and toes crossed, I booted up the Leopard install DVD and went into the Time Machine restore menu item. The entire process was completely painless. About two hours later, the machine rebooted just as if nothing had ever happened. I did lose the Windows XP virtual machine, but that was because I told time machine to ignore it. It's a 20 GB opaque file that changes every time I run Windows, and I figured that would take up all my time machine space. I don't regret the decision, though, because all I used Windows for at work was to run Outlook and TOAD, both of which simply need to be reinstalled on top of a fresh Windows installation.

Is Leopard Apple's Vista?

It's a harsh thing to say, I know, but Leopard has been more troublesome than any other release of MacOS X to date. Let's run down my list of problems:

1. Mom doesn't like the way iCal's detail panel works. I can't say I blame her. What was wrong with the drawers, Steve?

2. On Scarlet's machine, the dock periodically disappears. The workaround is to kill Dock.app, but why is this necessary?

3. Suddenly screen and disk sharing from one of the mac minis to my laptop doesn't work. It says the password is wrong when you try and screen share (bullshit. It's the same password that works for ssh and screen/disk sharing from any other machine), and disk sharing just says that an unknown error occurred. In general, this is the one problem with macs. When shit doesn't work, it can sometimes be completely impossible to figure out why.

4. Back to my mac randomly works or doesn't work, depending on how lucky you are.

5. Time machine over airdisk. We were all but promised this functionality. We're on the eve of 10.5.2 [edit: 10.5.2 is out now] and still nothing.

Time machine and AirDisk

How was this not broadcast over the entire Mac-loving portion of the tubes?!

If you want to use Time machine over AirDisk (a USB hard disk connected to an Airport Extreme), type this into a terminal window on your mac:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Mischief managed!

thanks to this guy. Credit where it's due, and all that.

Macworld '08 Keynote - more questions than answers

So, as usual, the keynote was fun to watch, even if you have to watch it tape delayed. His Steveness is, as ever, the eternal showman.

My wife and I have iPhones, and we love them. It's nice to see the new features, which indeed were downloadable before the sun set on the day they were announced. Left un-announced, however, were a few things I'd still like to see support for:

1. GPS over bluetooth connectivity, for up-to-the-second positioning and turn-by-turn navigation. No, I don't want or need GPS built-in to the phone. The current functionality demonstrates sufficiently that it is not really necessary. Perhaps we'll see this in a TBD 3rd party native app when the SDK arrives.

2. Since day 1 I have been unable to make the phone's wifi work with internet connection sharing on a mac. This is a pretty glaring one, Steve. I'm not the only one either. The mac support forums light up with this one pretty frequently.

3. Dinging the iPod touch folks $20 for buying them sooner rather than later seems like deja-vu for us who bought the iPhone on the first day. At least the magnitude of the sting is less.

4. No A2DC profile for the iPod touch or iPhone? We still have to use wires and adapters? Humph.

I have a little bit more ire for the announcement of the Time Capsule. This is nothing more than the existing Airport Extreme with a hard-disk built into it. Steve billed this as a fix for those who found that at the last minute the ability to use Time Machine on a laptop with a USB disk shared from the airport was removed.

So help me figure this out, people. Somehow it's the 480 Mb/s USB interface that's the problem that's going to make it impossible to fix this without buying a new box with the drive built-in instead?

Now, in Steve's defense, he didn't say that this functionality wasn't going to be addressed for existing airport owners, and the new price points are competitive with what the prices of an old gigabit airport, external USB enclosure and drive would be.

Since I work at Netflix, I won't blog about the movie rental or Apple TV stuff. Sorry.

Lastly, though, was something I can't really complain about. The MacBook Air looks like a really fantastic machine. I know exactly to whom I'm going to recommend it. My mom! The 4 or 5 of you reading this who know me well are probably stunned by that, expecting me to name my wife or even myself. Nope. The time is right for mom's old, aging iBook to go. She's needed the optical drive on about 10 occasions, and she could use Dad's in a pinch. But for her, small and light trumps it all. I really think she'll love it. She'll particularly love jumping from a 1.mumble GHz G4 with 640M of RAM to a 1.6 GHz core 2 duo with 2 GB of RAM.

And no, it's not a surprise - I won't be buying it. :)

PokerStars native Mac client!

It's finally here! PokerStars now has a native Mac client. If you're familiar with P* on Windows, you won't find anything out of place here.

Of course, my first two tournaments with it were met with unbelievable cold deck losses, but it's been a bad night all 'round. I'm just happy to be able to get back on P* without the hassle of firing up Windows.

Just go to PokerStars (no, I don't get a kickback for the link) and click download. If you're using a Mac, you'll get sent to the mac download page. Like most Mac software, you just open the disk image and drag the application to wherever you want.

Oh, the irony

So one of the latest Get a Mac TV ad has the the PC saying, "If your printer doesn't work with Vista, buy a new printer!" As if Vista is guiltier than most OS upgrades at breaking older hardware.



Uh huh.

When we upgraded to Leopard, one of the things that didn't survive the upgrade was our HP PSC-1610 printer/scanner. So what did we do? We bought a new printer. Because our printer didn't work with Leopard. Pot, kettle, black.

IPv6 and Leopard

After a while of not having it working, I've managed to get IPv6 connectivity back to my house from the office. Huzzah! Now I can work around the broken Juniper VPN that we normally use.

Having got this working again (it's a combination of OpenVPN and the MacOS X port of the tun driver), I've rediscovered that AFP file sharing works over IPv6, like it used to in Tiger. Not only that, but Screen Sharing works over IPv6 too! The only hiccup there is that so far as I can tell, Screen Sharing can't figure out how to connect to IPv6 only DNS names. I've tried flushing the DS cache (with dscacheutil -flushcache), but that doesn't seem to help (nor was it necessary to get AFP by DNS name to work). Connecting to literal IPv6 addresses (wrapped with square brackets), however, does work.

So Big Ups to Apple for their commitment to IPv6! Now they just have to fix that one thing.

Apple has a sense of humor

This is kind of funny. In MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard), convenient file-sharing functionality has been added to the Finder. It will show all the machines on the local network, and if it's an Apple device, it will use a picture of the machine as the icon. However, if it's a Windows machine (or anything else using SMB), you get a picture of a monitor with the BSOD. Ha ha.



It may be a little hard to see in the preview. Click on the picture to see it full size.

Idea for Apple

We have a mac Mini hooked up to our HDTV in the living room. Originally, the thought was we'd use it as a media player (DVD, Netflix Watch Now via VMware, games, etc), but over time it's become the machine I spend a large fraction of my time using. It's just very comfy to sit in the recliner and... well, whatever.

So when we upgraded from the old full sized plastic bluetooth keyboard to the new aluminum one, I was quite pleased.

But there is still one thing that isn't quite nirvana.

The mighty mouse is nice, but it needs to sit on a flat surface to be conveniently used. We have a mouse pad sitting on a fold-down faux table built-in to our sofa, but that's not very convenient for right handed users sitting on the right side. It's ok, since I usually set on the left, but I've got a better idea: A bluetooth trackpad. Such a device could be designed to attach to either side of the new aluminum BT keyboard, or Apple could come out with a new BT keyboard and trackpad combo. In fact, the trackpad could be designed to work with both the USB and BT keyboard. It could use some sort of mechanical attachment system combined with a (proprietary or USB) electrical connection that could be provided by both versions of the keyboard.

So let's get cracking, Steve!