May Contain Nuts

So it’s been more than a day since Apple’s big announcement, and I thought I’d weigh in on it with my own thoughts, for whatever they may be worth.

First off, I’m not sure if this will be the game changer Apple thinks it will be. I can see potential in it, but I don’t think it will change the computing landscape outside of the portable realm… The desktop and even the pro laptop have too many things that they’re better at than what can be accomplished on a mobile device, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. I also don’t see this replacing PMPs and smartphones entirely, since it’s just too big to be practical in those terms.

That said, I can see what sort of market Apple is targeting with this device, and it’s not the computer whiz population. Those of us willing to put up with poor performance and shoddy build quality in exchange for a mini laptop that can run a browser and an email client at the same time, and theoretically run the same applications as a desktop machine, are probably going to be ill-served by the iPad, and that’s fine. I think there is still plenty of space in the market for things like the Eee PC and the MSI Wind for those who want a familiar desktop operating system and the capabilities that go along with it. However, the poor market performance of tablet devices thus far seems to indicate that for the average consumer, the existing products are not the sort of experience they’re looking for.

I think Apple’s take on the mobile space has been vert refreshing compared to the offerings from Redmond. Microsoft wants to put Windows on everything, even when its user interface and complexity get in the way of accomplishing everyday tasks. Apple on the other hand has built an entirely new interface for their mobile platform from the ground up, with the explicit goal of making it user-friendly, touch-oriented (rather than simply touch-capable), and intensely intuitive to use. The key factor to their success with this platform, I think, is how spatially-oriented it is. The interface behaves like a physical object and responds naturally and intuitively to user input. It also provides considerable visual feedback when changing screens, so users have an easy time understanding how they got where they are, and how to get back to where they were. Apple has also done a great job of building an entire interaction system on 3 basic gestures: tap, swipe, and pinch. Without expanding their gesture library, Apple has built much more advanced functionality into the iPad OS, which is both incredible and praise-worthy. It would be easier to create all manner of new gestures for more complex tasks, but Apple has resisted this impulse and built on a simple interface language that their users are already familiar with.

Apple seems poised to capitalize on the ultra-portable tablet computing market by taking what they learned from the iPhone and scaling it up, rather than trying to pare down Mac OS X to fit in the confines of a tablet space. Again, this is a clearly different strategy from that of the rest of the industry, which seems intent on trying to put the familiar Windows desktop on even the lowliest and least-capable portable devices possible. I think Apple has the right idea, though. Desktop operating systems are needlessly complicated for everyday one-off tasks like checking email or browsing the web. The iPhone OS, on the other hand, is built to be always-on, highly responsive, and easy to directly manipulate with your fingers. For a device intended to be used for quick, light computing, that sort of OS makes much more sense than Mac OS X or Windows.

I’ve seen a lot of people decry the iPad as a giant iPod Touch, and while this is true on it’s face, it ignores the depth and richness of the iPhone OS app space, and what additional capabilities a large-format display like the iPad’s can afford developers in the future. In this way, the iPad isn’t really aiming to solve any specific problem; instead, it’s a vessel into which people can put their own problems to be solved.

I’ve also seen a lot of complaints about the lack of multitasking on the iPad, and to a certain extent, I can agree with this as being something that Apple will eventually need to address as the platform matures, especially on the larger-screen devices. Being able to run apps in the background like Pandora or Skype would be a huge boon to the device’s capabilities, and I think it will get here eventually. For now, though, Apple is focusing on making the OS do one thing at a time very, very well, and maturing the OS before wildly expanding what can be done via background processes. In terms of productivity though, a singletasking OS like the iPhone’s isn’t that much farther behind an underpowered multitasking OS on smaller netbook devices. iPhone apps remember their state far better than desktop apps, and in general they launch much more quickly than their desktop brethren too, so little time is lost swapping between apps.

People have also, bizarrely, been lampooning Apple’s decision to develop a version of iWork for the iPad. I think it’s a wonderful idea, and I think charging $10 per app is beyond reasonable considering how much power there is in the apps, and that the desktop suite sells for $80. I can’t help but wonder what Microsoft would charge for an Office suite on this device… (incidentally, I’d love to see Office on the iPad; competition is good!). I think folks who wanted to see iWork on the iPhone are reaching; it’s just not something that translates down to a screen of that size without becoming practically useless. The iPad screen, however, is much larger and the interface far more capable than the iPhone’s, and I think a productivity suite makes sense on such a device for light work that can be transferred to and completed on a primary work machine.

I want to close by presenting a theoretical use case for the iPad, since so many people seem utterly perplexed by who could possibly use it. I will be taking a few liberties by assuming the iPad-specific development of a few apps that already exist on the iPhone, and treating the iBookstore as a mature product, but I hope you’ll agree that none of the assumptions I make are out of the realm of possibility.

Assume, if you will, that I’m a college student with an iMac at home. I also have a 16GB iPad that I got for an educational discount at $479, and have been able to buy most of my textbooks on the iBookstore for a fair amount less than it would have cost at the college bookstore. I have a reasonably sizeable iTunes library, a handful of games, the iPad-optimized version of Notebooks from the App Store for taking notes in class, and the iPad and desktop versions of the iWork suite. While other students are lugging around 10 to 20 pounds of textbooks, an iPod, and a notebook full of paper (and possibly a laptop as well), I can grab my iPad and take off to class with nothing else. After class, I can go to the library to research a paper, taking notes and working on a preliminary outline in Pages while roaming the aisles. On my way home, I plug my iPad into my FM transmitter and listen to some tunes while I drive. Once I’m home, I sync my iPad and keep working on my paper on my iMac. The next morning, I sync it back to the iPad along with a Keynote presentation that’s due today and head back to class. To present, I just plug my iPad into the projector with the docking cable and get started immediately. Between classes, I can hop on the college wifi network to browse the web, or play a quick game of Star Defense while I wait for the teacher to arrive. For the sake of brevity, I will leave out the scene where I get mugged for my iPad in the parking garage.

I think this device will be most popular in the educational market, especially higher education, but its usefulness as a teaching and learning aid can be seen at almost every grade level. If Apple scores big anywhere, it will probably be there, especially with their aggressive pricing and educational discounts.

The iPad may essentially be a giant iPod Touch, but there is a ton of potential in such a device for people who want an appliance-like computer, not a car-like one. Apple is going after the 10,000-miles-without-an-oil-change “it should work like my microwave” crowd with this, not the gearhead crowd that replaces their car’s computer ROM or changes their own transmission fluid, and I know for a fact that there are more of the former than the latter in the consumer marketplace.

I have some more thoughts to expound upon, but it’s late and this post is already beyond long enough as it is.

So now that I finally have a replacement for my dead external media drive and things seem to be on their way toward stabilizing on the bug front, I’m looking at getting a copy of Snow Leopard to install on my iMac at home. I’m seriously considering doing for SL what I did for Leopard, which is to wipe the drive and do a fresh installation of the OS to get rid of any cruft that’s accumulated in the intervening 2 years (and there’s been quite a bit of that, to be sure).

I’m also going over all of the applications I use/have/installed-but-never-touch with an eye toward upgrading or replacing some of them as needed, keeping the ones I really like, and dumping the rest. Most of the “plugins” I use in Safari are already Snow Leopard-compatible, and I’ve found a possible replacement for the one that isn’t so that I can run the browser in 64-bit mode. I’m taking a long, hard look at Photoshop and contemplating whether I’m going to even bother re-installing it again once I upgrade. I have a couple of applications I’m eyeing as possible replacements, like DrawIt, which, in addition to Pixelmator, covers pretty much everything I ever seem to use Photoshop for in the first place, at 1/6th the price (plus hopefully a considerable boost to productivity that comes from not fighting with Adobe’s POS software).

The other application I’m eyeing for retirement is Fetch. It’s served me pretty well throughout my time on the Mac, and is one of the first apps I actually bought after CyberDuck started behaving poorly on my G5, but its interface seems dated, and if I’m going to have to shell out for a fully-Snow Leopard-compatible update anyway, I might as well play the field and see what I can find that might work a bit better. The alternative I’m currently looking at most favorably is Flow. I especially like the column view support it boasts (I live in column view now, and hate that Windows has nothing comparable), as well as the general look and feel of the application as a whole. Added bonus: Flow doesn’t seem to try and replace my cursor with a running dog which, since upgrading to Leopard, has been a spasm of flickering cursor icon fighting.

Sadly there doesn’t seem to be a downloadable version of DrawIt that doesn’t already require Snow Leopard, so I can’t really play with that app until after I take the plunge, but I do intend to fiddle with Flow tonight, and if nothing else I’ll suffer the indignity of Adobe’s absurdly bloated and unstable crapware until I can find something better if DrawIt and Pixelmator don’t measure up enough. I just have to get a couple of lingering things done in Photoshop first before upgrading to Snow Leopard so I can carry on without it and not lose anything in terms of time or effort.

I’m also hoping to pick up a copy of Versions, but it’s kinda pricey and I don’t have a lot of funding to lay out for stuff like that right now. Maybe in a while, and until then I can use something else for SVN, like svnX (don’t tell me to use the command line. I frankly hate doing things by command line; it’s just not how my brain works).

So I sort of twatted about this earlier, but I wanted to go a bit more in-depth, so I’m blogging about it as well. Thank god I’m at work or I might be compelled to do a video commentary and record a song in GarageBand… I’m a bit loopy today.

Anyway, ever since NewsGator announced that they were going to be getting out of the RSS sync business, I’ve been trying to come up with some form of reliable system that doesn’t utilize NewsGator’s products. Their track record for handling major conversions is pretty much 0 for 2 now, with an earlier botching of their now-extinct browser-based interface and the most recent epic FAIL on deactivating their sync service and migrating their users to Google Reader, which is taking place almost a month late and with seriously rushed products. Given that, I’m not exactly confident in them to be able to continue to provide quality products or services in the future, and so I’ve been trying to find a different way of handling RSS feeds since the announcement came out on Mysterium weekend.

For the interim period, I’ve just been using the existing MobileMe sync support in NewNewsWire (or as NNW 3.1.7 still calls it, .Mac) to sync feeds between home and work. It’s worked acceptably, but by no means perfectly (in comparison with the practically flawless NewsGator sync), with feed items regularly showing up on other machines despite being marked as read and freshly synced, and requiring either a manual sync command or quitting/relaunching the app to force a MobileMe sync operation. It’s also left me completely without a mobile sync solution, as NNW 1.0 for the iPhone doesn’t provide any means of syncing beyond NewsGator’s service. While not vital, it is nice to be able to check news when I’m either out and about (and have wifi access) or when I’m chilling out at home and don’t want to sit at my computer to read, and I’ve been missing it more and more of late.

I’d previously tried to find a Mac-based RSS client that syncs with Google Reader, since it seems to now be the only remaining cloud-based sync service in existence, but was unable to really find anything that worked as well for actually reading content as NNW does. Apps like EventBox provide sync capability, but their presentation seems to be geared more towards casual use, and the showmanship of the UI gets in the way of their functionality, while Mail and Safari’s built-in RSS support is also geared toward limited usage and still provides no viable mobile solution.

I finally got tired today of not having a mobile or forward-compatible desktop alternative to RSS feed syncing (NNW 3.1.7 seems to work with Snow Leopard, but future releases are always a gamble) and went looking for solutions again. This time, I stumbled across Gruml, which is still in beta but which seems to be under active and rapid development, and which has a presentation very similar to NetNewsWire. It’s still a little rough around the edges to be sure, but I’m liking it so far in my trial usage today.

I’m also considering picking up a copy of Byline for my iPod Touch for mobile Google Reader access. I’ve thus far been quite unimpressed with NNW for iPhone’s functionality in 1.x, and the complaints leveled against the 2.0 release are not encouraging (up to and including the purported obnoxious behavior of ads in the free version… I’m fine with ads: I use several ad-supported free apps, but they need to be unobtrusive).

I think NewsGator has shot themselves in the foot a bit with how horrendously they’ve botched this move to Google Reader for sync services. They’ve basically thrown the barn door open and told users they can sync with Google Reader or get stuffed, and then provided utterly un-compelling in-house solutions for consuming the content that is now being synced through an open service. I suspect their user base is going to shrink considerably as a result, because I can’t be the only person who’s been put off by their handling of this transition.

Those who dislike listening to people gripe about the ever-advancing march of change might want to skip this post, because it’s largely a “get off my lawn” complaint aimed at NewsGator…

So for whatever reason, NewsGator, a seemingly popular online service to sync one’s RSS feeds between multiple platforms, is discontinuing its RSS sync services to focus on… whatever nebulously vague “enterprise” solution it is that they offer (I’ve read over their website a few times in the past, and aside from being big on the buzzwords, I have no idea what else it is NewsGator actually does). As a result, they’re transitioning everyone to Google Reader.

This is all well and good for most folks who are okay with the Big G knowing everything about their lives, but the way NewsGator has gone about this migration is asinine to say the least (and I swear to the gods, “asinine” should be spelled “assinine”, because it only makes sense). They essentially provided 30 days notice that they would be permanently shutting down their service, and don’t seem to have given the various developers that they employ – who create the applications relying on NewsGator’s services for their sync functionality – any more of a heads-up than their users, as the developer of NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire iPhone has apparently been scrambling to get two new stable apps out before the deadline. This is especially crucial for the iPhone app since it’s useless without a NewsGator account to sync with.

In addition to shutting down their online sync, NewsGator is plowing rather large and obtrusive-looking ad panels into their desktop applications (with, of course, a way to turn the ads off if you pay for the privilege). Now, I don’t mind ads as long as they stay out of my way. In fact, I’m using the ad-supported versions of several iPhone applications, as well as the ad-supported version of Tweetie for the Mac. However, given NewsGator’s previous decision to axe its pay-only policy for NetNewsWire and FeedDemon only to reverse course and start saddling users with ads after that plan apparently didn’t work out as well as they expected, I don’t know if I can really trust them to keep providing me something I’m interested in using. The botched manner in which they’ve handled this forced migration to Google Reader is not helping their standing in my eyes either.

Now, I have a few options. First, I could suck it up and deal with the ads, wait until the end of the month, and continue on happy as you please once the iPhone app comes out and I migrate to Google Reader. This requires perhaps the least amount of effort, but NewsGator has gotten under my skin with this move, and I’m not really inclined to put up with it.

Second, I could pay to get rid of the ads, but that still has me giving money to NewsGator. Again, given their shoddy handling of this and past large-scale changes to their service (the move to the “improved” NewsGator Online feed reader last year was equally terrible), I’m not inclined to put a lot of faith in them not to screw me over at some point in the future. I love the way NNW works, but the company paying for the development presently drives me up a wall.

Third, I could stick with the current release of NNW – 3.1.7 – and sync it using MobileMe between home and work. It would, however, mean I’d completely lose access to my updated feeds on my iPod, and via the web in a pinch. I’m rarely in a situation where I need to pull up my RSS feeds without having access to one or the other machines these days though, and NNW iPhone’s inability to cache anything but the text of a feed item for offline viewing is annoying at best (please tell me somebody’s iPhone RSS reader caches images).

Fourth, I could move to Google Reader, which is pretty much my only other option for RSS syncing after August anyway, and replace NNW and NNW iPhone with different apps. Unfortunately, I’ve had little success so far today trying to track down a Mac app that syncs with Google Reader that isn’t NNW 3.2. I saw EventBox mentioned, and gave it a spin, but its handling of RSS feeds is for casual users at best; the UI is lovely, but the keyboard shortcuts are bizarre, there’s no way to sort the list from oldest to newest (I’ll admit, I’m opposite man. I like having new items at the bottom so I can arrow down from least to most relevant content quickly), and the “article preview” view is enormous. Running the app at a non-fullscreen resolution, the best I could do without making the articles themselves cramped in the in-app viewer was get two previews to display at a time. It makes plowing through a backlog of Engadget posts more difficult than it needs to be.

Besides EventBox, I can’t really find anything else that syncs with Google Reader that isn’t either Google Reader in Safari, Google Reader in Firefox, Google Reader in a Site-Specific Browser (i.e. Fluid or Prism), or Google Reader in a Firefox add-on. Considering that I really dislike the way that Google Reader displays its content (it’s perfectly acceptable, I just don’t like it personally… it doesn’t work for me), that pretty much nixes all of those options right there. No amount of Stylish CSS or Greasemonkey scripts are going to give me a list-plus-viewer two-up option in Google Reader. It’s either Article View, or List View, where clicking on a list item blows away the list view and displays the whole article inline with the list. Grr!

I guess if worst came to worst I could go back to reading RSS in Safari, and hope that MobileMe would sync the read status of the feeds between home and work, but that still leaves me without a mobile option, because I don’t think Mobile Safari supports RSS feeds.

For now, I think I’m going to try doing the MobileMe sync on NNW 3.1.7, disable auto-updates, and see how it goes for the next week or so of desktop-only sync fun. If anyone has any suggestions on where to get a NNW-like Google Reader app for the Mac in the meantime though, I’d appreciate it.

My work machine, which is probably the most powerful box in the entire office outside of the server room, is a 2.13 GHz Core 2 Duo machine with 2 GB of RAM running XP SP3. It runs okay, but slows down if I have Photoshop, Visual Studio 2008, Dreamweaver, Firefox, Safari, and FeedDemon running at the same time. Unfortunately, this is a typical work load for me at my job, which requires me to bounce between two different versions of online banking code, occasionally re-compile the desktop financial software the rest of the programming department develops, do graphic design work for web sites, clients, and the sales department, and test designs in a variety of browsers. If I’m really busy, a couple more instances of VS08, as well as one or two virtual machines (for running older browsers) can sneak into the mix. And again, while it’s usable, the system does suffer from frustrating pauses upwards of several seconds at a time when doing simple things like opening a file to edit in VS08.

By contrast, my Mac at home (which admittedly has a marginally faster processor and twice the RAM [something my work machine can't handle because of XP's 32-bit limitations]) has been running Safari (with upwards of 30 tabs across several windows), NetNewsWire, iTunes, Unity (a game development IDE), Unitron (Unity’s script editor), TheHitList (task management), Skype, Adium, iPhoto, and a virtual machine for 3DS MAX work for about 2 weeks solid now, with occasional bouts of Photoshop use along the way, and has remained completely responsive throughout, despite the completely absurd work load I’ve put on it.

I’d like to see your laptop do that, Lauren .

Well, the event’s come and gone, and I figured I’d summarize my thoughts on what was actually announced (versus what was rumored and what I personally wanted to see).

I wanted to see new Springboard organizational features like folders or stacks. No such luck there. Damn.

We did get copy and paste though, which is nice and much appreciated. I would have liked a more granular copy/paste capability in Safari, but whatevs. The shake to undo thing is pretty slick.

Mail got updated, but not in the way I asked for. The landscape keyboard additions system-wide are nice to see, but I still want a unified inbox.

It also looks like most of my requested Safari features didn’t make the cut, but they didn’t exactly spend a lot of time in there, so there may be more to Safari in this update than was mentioned on-stage. The auto-fill did get in there, though, and that’s really nice to see.

No Flash either, but that wasn’t exactly likely.

Notes sync! Woot!

No iDisk support, which is kind of blar considering how much else from MobileMe is integrated into the device. Maybe we’ll see that make its way in after the on-device storage increases, or once the mystical magical 10″ tablet device is released.

Calendar picked up both the CalDAV and .ics subscription support I wanted, so yay all day!

No wireless iTunes sync, unless there’s something tucked away in their Bluetooth or Bonjour protocols that will let the iPod app sync itself remotely in the background (something Apple, at least, could do since the iPod app is sort of an always-on affair)

No background processes, but we’re finally getting push notifications, which is good enough for me, honestly. Hopefully it’s something that the iPod Touch can tie in with just as easily as the iPhone, given that the iPod doesn’t always have an internet or data connection the way the iPhone does.

So, out of the stuff I wanted to see, I got a 5 out of 12, which is less than 50%, but not bad considering I called (or at least, was crazy enough to wish for) somewhat off-the-wall “never gonna happen” stuff like CalDAV and .ics support, and Notes sync.

The stuff like global and in-app search, in-app purchasing for paid apps, the improvements to the Messages app (which don’t really apply to me but are still nice to see), the YouTube account integration, and the huge number of new APIs including the in-app email sheet, iPod library access, hardware accessory support, voice chat, peer-to-peer connectivity over Bluetooth, and maps API (including turn-by-turn capability) are all really REALLY nice to see. I’m glad the new OS is being released for all existing hardware, even if all the features aren’t compatible with the older devices.

What I’m most excited about, honestly, is the potential for third-party accessories like game pads, where a hardware manufacturer could license a library that would enable game developers to interface with their game pad for added capabilities (like physical buttons). Apple opening up the Dock connector like this is something I’ve hoped they’d do pretty much from day 1, and I’m glad they finally have.

All in all, it’s not exactly a revolution, but it’s also not just Apple playing catch-up, either. Yes, a lot of this stuff has been possible on other devices for some time now, but that’s always been true of Apple’s smartphone competition. They’re definitely throwing themselves into a very active and mature market with the iPhone, and I think the 3.0 release is where they finally hit the sweet spot by pairing almost every feature advertised by the competition with the unique features and enormous potential of the App Store and their hardware accessory ecosystem. There are still some missing features – like the ability to take videos, and support for some form of Flash (which as far as features go isn’t exactly the most pressing) – and there are some platform-specific differences in philosophy between Apple and other smartphone OSes (most notably in support for background apps and/or multitasking), but the days of the iPhone being behind other manufacturers in a seriously appreciable way seem to be coming to a close, and Apple’s brisk pace of one major OS update every year is going to be hard to keep up with.

So, Apple’s having another party next week to show off the plans for iPhoneOS 3.0. As the owner of a 1st gen iPod Touch, I have at least a marginal level of interest in the software updates, because while I won’t get all of the goodies, and will probably have to pay for the rest, I do hope to get something out of this update whenever it eventually hits the interwebs. What follows is a little bit of commentary and a wishlist more than anything else.

First, there are rumors of new organizational features on the SpringBoard application. Whether this is true folders or something more Stack-like, I’m all over it. I’m fairly anal when it comes to how my apps are currently organized, and buying new ones is always something of a pain because inevitably it breaks my awesome layout by putting one extra “social network” app in a row than there’s room for.

Second, Copy/Paste. While I have rare occasion to use it, I do hope it makes its long-overdue debut, because it is kind of annoying that such a powerful OS lacks such an obvious feature.

Third, Mail updates. For the love of Zeus, please give me a unified Inbox!

Fourth: Improvements to MobileSafari. It’s a great app as-is, but it’s a performance dog on the 1G iPod Touch. Granted this could probably be somewhat mitigated by buying a new 2G iPod Touch, effectively going from the lowest-specced device to the highest-specced one, but I don’t have $300 to throw at a new 16GB model. I’d also like to see the ability to open items in a new “tab” by pressing and holding to reveal a menu (like the one currently used for saving images). To go the Safari 4 route, adding the Top Sites feature in a CoverFlow format would be neat, but also largely unnecessary compared to some of the other “basic” requirements.

Please also give me the ability to sync remembered passwords, and have MobileSafari offer some form of auto-fill! Just because I have a full qwerty keyboard doesn’t mean I enjoy typing my username over and over again to log into sites like deviantART that are kind enough to log you out everywhere else when you log in using a different machine (and, frankly, this practice is asinine on anything but financially-oriented websites with sensitive personal information on them).

Next, I want Flash on the iPhone, if for no other reason than it would give me the ability to watch Homestar Runner while sitting in a waiting room or standing in line someplace. Set it up so you have to touch a Flash control to activate it (so Flash ads don’t utterly destroy MobileSafari) and I’ll be thrilled. However, I know this will never happen, so please move along.

Please give me the ability to sync notes to my Mac. This is stupid and obvious and it annoys me that it’s still not possible. Te $4.99 Notebooks app has mitigated this to a degree by giving me the ability to sync it with my Mac via Bonjour, but it’s something that should be built-in, for crying out loud.

iDisk support. Again, Apple would be horning in on the 3rd party market here, but that’s never stopped them on the Mac.  I’d love the ability to upload files from my camera roll to my iDisk (rather than going through the MobileMe Gallery), or save files there from Notes (or 3rd party apps), and open them for further editing later. This would be even more useful if I actually had an iPhone with always-on unlimited data, rather than a WiFi-dependent iPod Touch, but there are places in Spokane that I’ve nailed down as useful WiFi oases for this sort of thing.

On a related note, the Calendar app needs to be able to subscribe to web-based calendars (and on a related related note, MobileMe should keep my iPod and Mac calendar subscriptions in sync and display subscribed calendars in the MobileMe web app).

I say this with my tail between my legs given how absurd I found it when it was touted as a major selling point for the Zune, but wireless sync with iTunes would be really nice. Now that the computer room is separate from the bedroom (for the first time in my adult life), the fact that I use the iPod as an alarm (because it’s quieter and less stomach-twistingly annoying than our alarm clock) in the morning means I can’t have it auto-sync before I wake up like I used to back when I posted my counter-point to Zune’s wireless sync. The AppleTV is already 100% capable of this, which means that iTunes is 100% capable of it as well. It’d be nice to have it happen, since I leave my iPod plugged in beside the bed overnight, rather than plugged into the computer, and sometimes the sync process is slow enough (because there’s occasionally a big video file to copy over) that if I don’t get it started early enough, I have to leave it behind when I go to work. Reviving my auto-sync setup with a wireless connection at about 5:00 AM would be quite helpful.

Finally, the ability to run multiple apps at the same time. Again, this is something that may require migrating to new hardware (for two possible reasons: the need for a new hardware app-switching button, and the fact that, again, the 1G iPod Touch is the poorest performer in Apple’s lineup)

From AT&T, I’d love to see a rate plan that didn’t feel like a monthly sexual assault, because then I’d be totally willing to throw down for an iPhone 3G. As it stands, though, the monthly AT&T phone bill for my wife and I is almost $90, and that’s on a minute plan that no longer exists (450 minutes/month… of which we probably use maybe 100 on a busy month, plus text and a tiny bit of data in case of emergency), using RAZRs that we got for free when we signed up (and which I utterly despise using). Since the phone bill is due in the same pay period as rent, it’s not really an option to push it any higher.

From third parties, I want to see better consistency with Apple’s existing behaviors. For example, in 1Password for the iPhone, pressing and holding on an image doesn’t allow you to save it to the camera roll the way MobileSafari does (and, for that matter, NetNewsWire has the same problem). There’s nothing (that I know of) that says they have to wait for iPhoneOS 3.0 to make that happen, though.

The content of this post doesn’t really have much to do with the title, but I do think that those who see the computer as an “appliance” are a tad off the mark in terms of where they’re setting their expectations.

Anyway, yesterday I took my iMac to the only Apple authorized repair company in a 200 mile radius (Spokane does have its disadvantages… I really miss the Kenwood Apple Store in Cincinnati!) to get its SuperDrive repaired/replaced, because it’s not reading media anymore. After spending an entire summer Mac-less (or effectively Mac-less, as going from a PowerMac G5 with Leopard to an eMac G4 with Tiger was such a usability downgrade that I essentially never used the loaner machine I’d been given by the shop I consigned the G5 through), I was very hesitant to do what I did, but it needed to be done, and waiting would have simply increased the separation time.

So, I am now once again relying on the Dell attached to our TV for my primary computing needs. Despite ironically being the Vista apologist in our household (Oscy hates it with an undying passion), I have sort of had my fill of the OS, and decided after messing with the beta over the weekend to install Window 7 on the TV Dell as the sole OS. While I did get a fairly decent impression of what the OS is like through fiddling with it in VirtualBox on the iMac, I was even more impressed with the OS’s behavior on bare metal hardware. The fact that it’s behaviorally similar to OS X in how it handles applications now probably helps my impression of the system, though it’s still different enough to be distinct from OS X in frustratingly subtle ways… it’s like running Firefox 3 on a Mac; it looks the same, and for the most part acts the same, but the niggling differences trip you up now and again.

Amusingly, despite a couple of graphical tears that only occurred while I was running the Windows Experience Index tests and the fact that in the default Explorer view, the user folder a) doesn’t appear until I’ve directly accessed a location like Downloads from elsewhere in the shell, and b) when it does appear, duplicate entries for each folder I enter show up in the sidebar, the OS seems remarkably stable. I’ve only had one real issue so far, and that’s Google Chrome not installing properly the first time because Windows Firewall blocked it from downloading itself, but even Logitech’s janky mouse configuration utility for Vista installed and ran after a reboot (and a couple of “this software isn’t designed for your OS” warnings from the installer itself).

(On a related note, I ask you, who designs a mouse with a middle button that by default toggle the scroll wheel’s smooth/clicky scroll behavior rather than doing something useful like, I dunno, middle-clicking? Or perhaps, since the answer to that question is obviously, “Logitech”, who at Logitech could possibly have thought that this would be a good and/or useful design feature?)

Anyway, I actually think I’d like to upgrade the TV box to Windows 7 when it comes out, and I seem to be well on my way to convincing my Vista-hating wife to do the same on her box. This amuses me to a certain degree, but also speaks to the quality and finish that Microsoft seems dedicated to delivering in this release of their OS. Hardware and software compatibility aside, Vista has been and continues to be a real performance dog on the Vista-compatible hardware that we have, especially for my wife, whose idea of a normal browser session consists of at least 100 tabs in a single window (so arguably, she’s putting the hardware to considerable use). I’d be interested to see what a week’s worth of Oscy-level usage would do to the Windows 7 installation, especially with all the GUI bells and whistles left on.

On a further note, I’m planning an apartment-wide re-architecturing of the networking setup we’ve got going, in an effort to actually make the folders we set up for sharing visible (and more importantly, accessible) by every machine in the house. Networking is supposed to be drop-dead simple for PC-to-PC and Mac-to-Mac operations, but unfortunately we live in a bi-curious household, OS-wise, and Leopard-to-Vista / Vista-to-Leopard sharing is just downright atrocious (don’t even get me started on printer sharing…).

Ultimately, the best solution I can come up with that will most likely guarantee universal access to shared files across all machines is to create accounts for each of us on every machine, and ensure that each share we create can be accessed by both accounts. If I had the money, I’d probably standardize around some sort of server with a 3-computer domain setup so I didn’t have to go through so much manual effort, but I don’t, so janky workgroup file sharing it is.

Also on the subject of networking, I’m hoping/expecting to upgrade the two Dell boxes to have wireless networking capabilities, since we’re planning on moving into a considerably larger apartment and I don’t want to have LAN cable strewn all over the floors to hook everything together. Unfortunately, that’s not exactly a cheap prospect, and I expect it to run at least $150 to $200 for the cards and router before all is said and done. Grr… stupid money.

So yesterday the most wonderful thing happened… I finally got a new Mac.  Y’know, to replace the one that I had sold on consignment at the end of May?

Last night was spent getting applications and personal effects moved onto the machine from the extenal life boat drive and setting up not one but two installations of Windows XP (one for Boot Camp gaming, the other for running 3DS MAX in a VM so I don’t have to restart the computer all the time).  This in and of itself took almost an hour to set up for, because I needed to create a slipstream disc with XP SP2 on it (I was unsure of the slipstreamable status of SP3, and didn’t want to risk it), and the process for doing so, while not necessarily complicated, was hampered by a lack of certain pieces of software that ultimately became unnecessary once I found nLite, which did all the hard work for me.  Trying to do it on Vista was also not entirely conducive to the process, as said missing pieces of software were incompatible with the new OS, but in the end I managed to get it done.

So now I have three different computers running on one machine, each with their own name (the new iMac’s name is Apollo, courtesy of Oscy, the Boot Camp partition is named Hephaestus, ’cause I thought the fact that he forged lightning bolts was somehow appropriate and amusing, and the VM machine is just called “MaxBox” because I was feeling incredibly uncreative by the time I got to that install).  There’s still a little bit of work to do to get everything back exactly as it was on my PowerMac, and I need to max out my machine’s RAM as soon as financially possible, but beyond that, I’m back in the saddle again.

So now comes the apology part…

Over the past three and a half months, my only computers have been the one at work (which I’m typically supposed to, y’know, be doing work on), the Dell hooked up to our television for the original purpose of watching downloaded movies and TV shows, and a G4 eMac running Tiger that probably wouldn’t have even been able to serve as a boat anchor thanks to its lack of a handle on the top (language warning on that link, btw).  Needless to say, this was not supposed to be a long-term solution to the problem of me consigning my G5, and with regular platitudes promising payment “early next week” for the better part of two months, I was never really motivated to come up with a seriously functioning secondary setup for my needs.  As a result, my access to (and general tolerance for reading) forums, chats, IMs, and even emails was rather substantially degraded, as I had no interest in setting up a whole ‘nother machine with my accounts and preferences and whatnot when a new iMac was perpetually just around the corner, and using a TV for a computer monitor (even an LCD TV) is something I regularly refuse to wish upon my worst enemies.

Anyway, the thrust of the above paragraph’s worth of justifications is that I have been rather remarkably unreliable this summer, for which I sincerely and humbly apologize.  I’m doing my best to get back up and running at full capacity as quickly as I can, and hopefully by the end of next week I’ll be moving full steam ahead on several things that were supposed to be done mid-last-month, and following up on some emails and other communications that have sat far too long unanswered.  As far as inconveniences go, I realize that being stuck with a computer attached to a TV is far less problematic than having one’s house flooded by a hurricane, but this has been a pretty crappy summer for me, performance-wise, and the computer issues only compounded my general apathy towards the world.  God help me if I’m ever stuck in a hurricane, you may never see me again .

Also, Mister Cloak, I want to apologize directly to you for not only not answering your IM last night, but dropping offline almost immediately after you sent it… my connection to Steam last night was not exactly reliable… I think I was on and off about 10 times in the space of 5 minutes at one point.  Finally I just gave up and signed out completely.

This made me chuckle… it’s a bit dated, but then I haven’t had much time to do much reading lately.  Work deadlines suck (the life out of me).  Anyway, on with the funny.

They tell us it’s the iWay or the highway. We think that’s a sad message. Software out there is made to be compatible with your whole life.

- Brad Brooks, VP of Vista Marketing (on Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads)

The most amusing part of this is that the current screensaver du-jour on all of the retail Mac boxes I’ve seen (at least at the Mac shop in the local Best Buy, because Spokane isn’t important enough to have its own Apple store) – as well as the marketing lingo on the Get a Mac page on Apple’s website – touts the Mac as being the most compatible machine you can buy.  The fact that Microsoft, which can’t even build a completely-compatible version of Office for the Mac, is the company saying it is just icing on the cake, really.  With the exception of a .NET IDE, a version of Windows Media Player for the Mac capable of supporting WMP9 DRM (both Microsoft products, surprise surprise) and 3ds MAX, there isn’t a single application or file format that I need to use that the Mac can’t handle, and the only time I’ve run into a software incompatibility running the other direction is using Pages to build The Archiver, because obviously Pages doesn’t run in Windows (much to Narym’s regular chagrin).  Of course, Microsoft Publisher doesn’t run on the Mac either, so there’s a little bit of anti-cross-platform love from both sides in the document design/layout field (and don’t even begin to tell me I could do The Archiver in Word… I’ll kill you ).

Really, the only category that the Mac is currently lacking in is games, which is pretty much the last bastion of the “there’s no software for the Mac” mythmongers.  Fortunately, with the exception of Sam & Max (and the Mac versions of Manhole, Myst, Riven, and Exile, all of which are all basically unplayable on modern Macs, and I personally think it’s deplorable that UbiSoft is still selling the 10th Anniversary collection for the platform without doing any sort of work to make it compatible with Leopard or systems with Intel-based processors), every game I want to play is either available on a console or has a Mac version, so that doesn’t really bother me (plus, I’ve got a Dell attached to the TV for this purpose… and watching Hulu).  Heck, I can actually play realMYST on my Mac, which is something Vista has made virtually impossible without GameTap.