Here’s a habit I’ve gotten into every time I visit Best Buy or CompUSA: looking over the various keyboards they have to offer¹. I’ve been hunting for a good from-the-couch keyboard that can be used to control a home-theater computer (like my new Mac mini!), and I’ve never found it. I look for a small keyboard, and one that has a built-in trackpad or thumbpoint device or something capable of guiding a cursor. The other thing I look for is Bluetooth support since my Macs use it and it wouldn’t require some weird-o USB-antenna dongle to work (and I’ve seen some of these non-Bluetooth wireless devices that operate in the 2.4GHz range which has got to cause some kind of interference with a WiFi network).

Alas, nothing is right. The latest thing I’ve seen that looks interesting is Microsoft’s Windows Media Center keyboard. They have the right idea, but what’s with the restrictions? Why can’t it be used with any PC? And I’m not sure, but does this work via a infrared or what? It’s a little wide, but I guess it’s lap-friendly.

Anyway, what I wound up using was… my PowerBook of course! With the magic of Synergy, I can use my PowerBook’s keyboard and trackpad to control the mini. It’s configured so that once I move my mouse beyond the top edge of the PowerBook’s display, it pops up at the bottom of my TV. I’ve used Synergy before to do this kind of thing, but this is ideal. Communication is done over WiFi and it’s smooth— no jerkiness like I’ve experienced with Bluetooth keyboards/mice².

I tried a wireless keyboard for a while, but oddly enough, it would start to fail when I leaned back into the couch, but would work when I was sitting up right at the edge of the couch. It’s supposed to have a 30-foot range! Maybe it’s just trying to enforce good ergonomics/posture?

1. Can someone please explain to me why Microsoft and Logitech are competing with each other to see who can make the most variations of keyboards and mice for the market? The different editions vary so greatly— don’t they have any notion of what works and what doesn’t?
2. This won’t be a good solution for full-screen games like Quake 3; at least not yet.

Posted at 12:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I knew it was coming. Apple didn’t surprise me one bit by announcing the new Intel-powered Mac mini today.

It was not all champagne and roses though.

The baseline price went from $499 to $599. Well, understandable I suppose. They did make Bluetooth and AirPort Extreme standard after all. And the base RAM is still at 512 MB¹. That’s good too. Gigabit ethernet is standard as well. A couple of extra USB ports are welcome. And THANK YOU for ditching the internal modem.

But, I can’t help but wonder if the extra $100 is going to really kill the sales volume. $499 is an awesome price point. $599 may still be competitive, but it’s enough to give a consumer pause.

And, I’ve often wondered— where is Apple going with the mini? Are they just trying to make an inexpensive mac? Are they shooting for the holy grail of home theater integration? Something I can use to eventually use to jukebox my entire DVD collection? Perhaps even DVR abilities?

And how about gaming? At $499, the mini was near the price of a game console. OK, so it doesn’t have much of a game library— but what if it did? What if you had some Bluetooth wireless controllers to use with it? What if Apple released a GameKit SDK— something on par (or better) than DirectX?

But no— sadly, the mini is now at least $599 and— adding insult to injury, has a integrated graphics 3D chip from Intel— not a decent ATI or NVIDIA chipset. Apple went with Intel this time— either out of contractual obligation or at least as a cost saving measure. What a shame. Will the mini be capable of running Doom 3? Or Quake 4? I don’t know, but I’m not about to shell out $599 to find out.

I think Apple could really make some inroads with the mini, but they need to be aggressive about marketing it. They should be willing to lose money per unit. I’d love to see a $399 mini— one with a $50 option for a wireless keyboard and wireless Mighty Mouse. The “halo effect” of runaway mini sales would be worth it. And where are the commercials for this Mac? Are they planning on telling people about it?

As for the other “fun” products today? $99 for a iPod case? $349 for some iPod speakers? My, oh my.

1. Er, 512 MB less at least 80 MB that is reserved for the integrated graphics chipset. You’ll probably want to upgrade to 1 GB, so add another $100 to the total for that.

Posted at 7:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So I’m browsing around the source for Apple’s Mighty Mouse page because I want to know how they rig their “Local Reseller” search form to provide history and stuff like that. Well, the page doesn’t validate of course, because they’re using some Safari extensions to the <input> tag, namely a “search” type with attributes such as “placeholder” (which is text that is displayed in field until you give it focus) and “autosave” which stores the values you enter in a cache.

Anyhoo… I happened to note one other irregularity. Specifically, the little legal statement they have at the bottom of the page:

Mighty Mouse © Viacom International Inc. All Rights Reserved.

But what caught my eye in the source was the class attribute applied to the <p> tag:

<p class="sosumi">Mighty Mouse &#169; Viacom
International Inc. All Rights Reserved.</p>

Classic. Well, it’s the same class they use for all their legalese, but considering the context here, it amuses me.

Oh, and the mouse? I dig it. I just wish it came sans tail. Will Apple ship this with their new machines? I hope so. I think I read that it still functions as a single button for the left and right sides until you reconfigure it. So developers— remember: keep your apps single-button friendly! Especially you, Apple.

I’ve wondered if the squeeze buttons can be programmed to act as the left-mouse button action (actually, it appears you can’t map them to the primary button— at least not using the bundled software). I wonder if it would feel more natural and/or logical to squeeze and drag rather than click and drag. If I’m moving a window around or a file from one folder to another. Squeeze and drag would be like physically clutching the item and moving it around. Then again, that may not be too ergonomic over the course of an 8 hour day.

Posted at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s been a few months since I began my Macintosh journey. Here’s a list of all the new files I’ve added to-date to my “Applications” folder along the way.

Continue reading "OS X software inventory" »

Posted at 1:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (52) | TrackBacks (39)

Gotta say, I’m really liking Adium. Release 0.50 came out this past week and it’s quite promising. I’ve been using Fire. Fire has been an excellent client, but for some odd reason, it doesn’t show some of my AIM buddies as online when they are. Adium doesn’t have this problem (as far as I can tell anyway). It just needs to handle multiple identities clustering (grouping multiple screen names for a single person together, so they appear online if any of those identities are online). Fire supported this feature and so did Trillian. Aside from that, I’m enjoying:

• Minimalist buddy list settings (my setup is a transparent buddy list with no frame — the groups and names just hover above my destkop background).
• Tabbed message window.
• Webkit-powered message window¹ (HTML/CSS rendered). More info on this here.
• Event bezel panel alerts you to connections/disconnections.
• Nice log viewer (chat history) with built-in search.
• So far, flawless support for all the major IM networks I use: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber (and some I haven’t heard of: Gadu-Gadu and Trepia).

The About page has some screenshots and some user-supplied desktop screen captures showing the thing in action.

Oh yeah, it’s free. One of those SourceForge projects.

Continue reading "In chat heaven with Adium 0.5" »

Posted at 9:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been using Mac OS X for several months now, and it just dawned on me. You know the red, yellow and green colors used for the close, minimize and zoom buttons? They look like this:

Sure, those colors may be commonly associated with “stop”, “slow” and “go”. But I think they were picked because they’re the colors for the common apples— red, yellow and green.

Okay, maybe not. But you never know.

Posted at 3:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s amazing what you can do with a wee bit of AppleScript. I’ve been searching for a droplet solution to easily copy images from my Powerbook to my web site. And it occurred to me that instead of spending $20+ for some shareware product, I could just script a solution instead. Here’s what I came up with (my first AppleScript, so don’t judge too harshly):

property scp_target : "user@host:path/to/images"

on open fileList
  repeat with thisFile in fileList
    set the item_path to the quoted form of the POSIX path of thisFile
    do shell script ("scp " & item_path & " " & scp_target)
  end repeat
end open

This expects that you have a SSH key pair in place already. Edit the ‘scp_target’ property and use the Script Editor to save this as an application, then put it in your dock. Drag and drop the files you want to copy to invoke it. There’s no feedback, but that’s how I prefer it. You can add some if you like. Click here to load this into your Script Editor.

A great companion to this is SnapNDrag, a free screen capture, drag-n-drop utility from Yellow Mug Software. Drag and drop from iPhoto works too.

If one were so inclined, they could even create a new weblog entry in a photoblog, referencing the newly uploaded image automatically. Drag and drop publishing!

And of course, this technique will work for any file, not just images.

Posted at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So a few days ago, for the first time in two weeks I fired up my former laptop, running Windows XP Pro. I had to clean it up, prepping it for sale since I don’t have much need for two laptops at the moment.

Within two minutes of logging in, I was greeted with something that I have been missing since switching to Mac OS X. Here it is:

Yep. Windows Update dutifully reported to me that there were no less than four critical updates all of which were to circumvent some attacker from gaining complete control over my computer. I guess it’s a good thing it’s been sitting very idle and off.

Don’t get me wrong — Mac OS X has a software update feature too. But by and large, it brings me new features and goodies. How refreshing. Every once and a while it includes a service update to some portion of the underlying system (like sendmail, which fortunately was replaced with postfix in Panther).

Posted at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I was pretty surprised to find that although Apple was not publicly offering a free OS X 10.3 upgrade to new PowerBook owners, they in fact were (and perhaps still are). I qualified for a free upgrade (well, free plus $19.95 for shipping and handling) according to their Mac OS X Up-To-Date web service. I even put in my purchase date as September 26th.

Well, it arrived today. And it’s installed. And it’s just spiffy. Unfortunately, it breaks some things. Specifically, several third-party things. Fortunately, those things are getting patched right now to work with Panther. Fugu has been patched already. So has SubEthaEdit. I’m still waiting for GPGMail, WindowShade X and PithHelmet. Things that still work: LaunchBar, Clutter, Synergy, BBEdit, Fire, osx2x, TinkerTool.

CSSEdit appears to be my CSS editor of choice at the moment. The latest release supports live previews. Unfortunately it doesn’t provide any feedback with regard to compatibility with the various browsers at the moment. But I think it has a good future.

Oh, and something else I am waiting on— the Panther-compatible cvsfinder. Someone who reads my site is a developer on this project and was good enough to give me a heads-up on it. It strives to be the Mac version of TortoiseCVS and it looks like it’s off to a good start. Version 0.1 was released just the other day and during the brief moment that I was able to run it, it worked pretty well (read: didn’t cause a kernel panic).

I don’t have time to write a full review of it — especially considering I’ve just been using it for a little bit, but Mark has the jump on all of us, so go read his.

Posted at 2:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (2)

Mark Morford’s Lick Me, I’m a Macintosh is a great account of the Apple out-of-box experience. It saves me the trouble of having to describe the experience, since mine matches his, word-for-word.

For those of you that look confused right now, I realize that I have been talking about switching to Linux and here I go and buy into the Mac? Well, perhaps I should have been more clear— I’m leaving Windows-land for Un*x territory. For PC hardware, that means running Linux. But I decided to buy a Mac because it’s the best packaging of Unix out there. FreeBSD at that. Looks, brains and brawn. That’s what I love about my PowerBook.

Hardware

Powerwise, I’m very pleased. CineBench 2003 shows it’s 1.25 GHz processor outpaces my former 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 laptop (non-mobile processor at that). It also runs cooler and unbelieveably quieter than any Intel laptop I’ve ever seen. And it’s 3 pounds lighter (at 5.6 pounds) and has a smaller footprint.

I’m still learning all the keyboard shortcuts. One thing that puzzles me about Apple is that they adore the simplicity of a single-button mouse (and trackpad which I’m stuck with), but in order to use the context popup menus, you have to hold down the Ctrl key and press the mouse button. Wouldn’t it be simpler to press a second mouse button instead? Seems more accessible and less confusing to me. I have a notebook mouse that I use and the 2nd mouse button works just fine, I’m just arguing that Apple should rethink just how user-friendly it is to make single-button mice these days.

I’m also a little annoyed that the keyboard on the 15” PowerBook is identical to the 12” one. It would have been nice to have a “Del” key that deletes the letter at the cursor instead of having to do Fn+Delete to do that. And can someone explain the extra “enter” key down by the arrow keys? That would been a good place for the “Del” key. Is anyone ever going to use that to press “enter”? Are there any good utilities out there for doing key-remapping?

Software

I’ve started gathering software, and so far I’ve registered NetNewsWire — that was a no-brainer. I’ve also downloaded Clutter but for some reason it’s not wanting to run (Updated StuffIt to 8.0.1 and re-extracted Clutter, all better now). Fire is a great multi-service IM client. I wish GPG-keyed messaging were more common place in other clients though. John Gruber pointed at LaunchBar the other day and I’ll be registering that too. My OS X media for Photoshop should be here soon (Adobe has a process for switching from Windows to Mac or vice-versa. You just pay the shipping on the replacement media). BBEdit looks like the best native editor, but it’s pricey (jEdit is a good editor, but it just doesn’t have that native Aqua look and feel). And hopefully OpenOffice 1.1 will be released soon for OS X. Firebird is installed, but I find myself using Safari more because it’s just so fast. Suggestions for other must-have Mac software are welcome!

iTMS

I still haven’t found a good replacement for Listen Rhapsody. I wish they would port their client to the Mac — given the success of the iTunes Music Store, maybe they are. While I’m at it, let me say that the iTunes Music Store is very nice and a good way to buy music, but I’m really annoyed by the fact that you can’t buy MP3s or convert purchased AAC files to MP3. Come on, Apple. You might as well make it an option. I can do it anyway by burning the AACs to CD and then re-importing back into iTunes anyhow. Given that, what is the point of the DRM stuff at all? Am I missing something? Oh yeah, the RIAA would flip if Apple sold uncontrollable MP3s.

Anyway, I’m having fun with both my new Linux and OS X systems. They play very nice together too. If you’re afraid to switch, don’t be. The water is fine.

Posted at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (20) | TrackBacks (1)