Movable Tabs

At work, where I’m forced to use Windows Vista, I use Google Chrome exclusively. And a thing I’ve grown to love about Chrome, is how it handles moving tabs, which is slightly different—and better—from Safari 4b, which I use at home.

In Safari, you grab the small lined area at the top left of a tab to start dragging, something introduced with Safari 4, where before the entire tab was draggable. Once you start dragging, the semi-transparent tab follows your mouse arround until you let go of it, whereupon it either integrates itself into a row of tabs or into a new window. Most annoyingly, Exposé doesn’t work while dragging tabs.

In Chrome, you can initiate dragging anywhere on the tab, and if the tab is the last remaining member of a window, that window will disappear when you start dragging. This allows you to move a tab into a window behind the current, without first rearranging windows; quite nice in Windows’ maxmized windows regime.

Dear Apple: Please steal some of these interface tricks for Safari.

PS: I would switch to Chrome on OS X in an instant, if I could; extensions or no.

OnLive

If you don’t follow gaming news, this may have slipped by you, but trust me when I tell you that it’ll blow up everywhere in a day or two.

OnLive is basically a platform for playing a game that sits on a remote server, streaming the video to you over the internet. It sounds fantastic, awesome, revolutionary in a big way, and entirely implausible. At first I dismissed it, but the more I hear about it, the more I believe in it. Unless Sony and Microsoft manage to cock-block it, it’ll absolutely change the gaming industry.

If you’re even remotely interested in games, you owe it to yourself to check out the press conference video.

If this works—and that’s a big if, mind you—you’ll virtually never have to worry about upgrading your console again, because everything is run server-side. Games will be cheaper, faster delivered and you can’t lose or scratch the disc! As a developer, depending on how the OnLive business model will end up working, we also are no longer shackled by system specs. Piracy goes out the window. Noisy or defective components? Not a problem. And it works on your TV, your PC or your Mac! You can literally be playing on the TV, the wife comes in to watch Oprah, and you just flip up your MacBook and continue! The implications are absolutely mind boggling. And that’s just games; how about on-demand films and TV?

This is a game changer, pun and all.

The Woes of the Digital Album Booklet

It is remarkably rare to see your latest iTMS purchase accompanied by a digital booklet in the shape of a PDF file. Remarkable because whereas a physical booklet requires the use of large color-corrected printers, ink, distribution outlets, delivery vehicles (and men), loss in profits and much more, digital booklets require only ‘print to PDF’, and you’re done. Considering that, I do wonder why all my albums don’t come with booklets.

When they do however, it makes for a nice addition to the otherwise pretty non-tangible purchase that is digitally distributed music. In fact, in the degradation from LP to CD to digital audio, the only thing truly missed by the too-busy-with-life-or-too-sane-to-be-anal-audiophiles portion of the population is the art of proper packaging.

Yes, you can still go out and buy your Amon Tobin on LP with beautiful luxurious cover art the size of your head or order up the latest ultra-deluxe limited edition from Nine Inch Nails and get fantastically well-crafted paraphernalia you’ll look at maybe once a decade. In fact, when you take into account the work some b®ands put into creating their packaging, buying digitally is really a damn shame (never mind piracy).

Well played Lars. Well played.

Now for the bait ‘n’ switch in which we turn our the attention to how iTunes deals with those accompanying PDF files in a most annoying manner.

It lists them in the same file-listing as all the music tracks, which makes sense, after all where else would it list it? But what happens when you’re in coverflow view and you double-click an album-cover to play said album and PDF is listed at the top of the album’s files?

The album doesn’t actually play, as you might expect. It simply opens the PDF file! And adding insult to injury, the PDF file opens in your PDF-reader-of-choice—which in my unfortunate case, is Adobe Acrobat—taking you away from iTunes and probably launching you into the teeth-grindingly long process of telling Adobe Updater ‘please, with all due respect; fuck off’. This will probably take up to several minutes, depending on your system and the PDF being opened with what app, before you can return to iTunes and actually play the album you wanted to listen to in the first place.

Listen. No. Alright? Just no. Bad designer.

This is a perfect example of the system performing an ‘expected action’, which in the user’s mind is most likely absolutely unexpected. After all, when would you expect double-clicking an album cover to open a PDF file? And even worse, this is the only action you can perform in iTunes which will actually transport you away from iTunes!

The iPhone Catch

iPhone Headset

Other than the recessed headphone jack (possibly the stupidest design decision in the history of ever), there’s only a single thing about the iPhone annoying me on a daily basis, and which, together with the non-glove-compatibility of the interface, has convinced me that yes, the iPhone was most definitely ‘Designed by Apple in (sub-tropic) California’.

The remote control ‘clicker’. It catches on to zippers like a Turkish vendor on a tourist. The shape along with the location along the wire, makes it perfect for incessantly snatching onto anything and everything semi-solid in the neck area, which in my case happens to be the zipper to my jacket.

Had the clicker been entirely smooth, from end to end, this wouldn’t be a problem. And no functionality need be sacrificed. Everyone gets what they want, we all become friends and world peace ensues.

Thank you Steve.

A Joyous Microcosm

Or how I learned to stop worrying, and love Apple’s Time Capsule. Which, with the purpose of having you empathize with the effort it took to finally find a solution to my Time Capsule woes—a device I bought to rid us of previous problems, not to cause us new ones—requires a break down of our rather intricate home network setup.

A Time Capsule

Coming into the house we have a 20mbit tube, the router of which acts as a DHCP server and then goes directly into the 500GB Time Capsule under the TV, which is the backbone for the tethered part of the network as well as network entry-point for a 250GB HDD where I mainly store my music, its internal switch hooks up to the 1TB NAS, the media center Mac Mini (Godiva) running Plex and a wire running into our bedroom—to my workstation setup—where it connects to a 1Gbit switch, which goes into an old 802.11g Airport Extreme—which is also the print-point—and my MacBook Pro (Valkyrie), when I need the speed o’ teh wire. Right next to the Time Capsule, there’s an Airport Express, tethered to the Xbox 360Which is fucked for two reasons. One, the Xbox doesn’t have bult-in wifi, and I’m not paying the price MS wants for their wifi module, so it has to be tethered. And two, the Airport Express is only there because the Time Capsule does everything except Airtunes. Gee, thanks Apple. (Xuul) and a PS3 (Glortho) on wifi. And finally there’s a second Airport Express in the kitchen, again, simply for streaming music to the speaker there. Finally, aside from the consoles and the Mac Mini, there’s a MacBook Pro, an old Powerbook (Freya) and an iPhone (Monolith), plus various other devices from time to time.

Now, here comes the interesting part. I had been having some serious problems getting my money’s worth out of the Time Capsule up until this week. Not only did it suffer bandwidth degradation over time, but Time Machine would often have problems mounting the backup sparse-image on the Time Capsule (even if it was already mounted!)Check out the support forums; they’re flooded with people suffering Time Capsule woes. And not a word from Apple. I’ve had quite a few friends ask me about it as a solution to their problems, and I haven’t been able to recommend it to them, not least because of Apple’s lack of support for this unit. Not at least I can tell them what worked for me, but that’s hardly good enough., which was concerning, as I’ve come to rely quite heavily on Time Machine keeping my stuff safe. Needless to say, I was mildly annoyed that the two things I bought the thing for, speed and backup, weren’t working as advertised.

And I had tried literally everything I could think of. At the end of the day, I had the Time Capsule set up as a WDS main unit, with the other three 802.11g airports running WDS remote. WDS being necessary for bridging the ethernet ports of the airport expresses, and it wasn’t working as intended.

I had a sneaking suspicion that the g-units were what was bringing the network down in speed, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that since I really needed the g-segment. So it took me a little while, not being a networks expert, to figure out how to go about it, but what finally saved me was this:

I dropped support for 802.11g on the Time Capsule and instead tethered the Airport Extreme to the ‘backbone’ and set it up as a WDS main on its own 802.11g wifi network, with the Express’s hooking into it as remotes. Then I ditched support for g on the Time Capsule, and created an 802.11n wireless network, and set it up as 5Ghz (wide channels), and not 2.4Ghz, which is not only where our own g network is, but also a rather crowded frequency in our neighborhood.

Both wifi networks are on the same backbone, meaning I can easily stream music from my MacBook Pro to the Airtunes ports, control the MBP from my iPhone and otherwise go back and forth exactly as I please. And it’s fast enough for me to backup, serve music and even, for hobbiest levels, manage photos wirelessly.

Awesome.

Denmark has (one of) the Worst iPhone Plan(s) in the World

Hey, everybody bitching and whining about your iPhone plans out there in the world (yeah Canadians, I’m looking at you, whiners); I think it’s official now. Denmark has one of the worst iPhone plan in the world (though it looks like Norway beats us).

Not to mention Telia, which doesn’t have the best reputation in the country either…

So, you know, the next time you’re a Canadian whining about Rogers and their iPhone plan, consider that ours is not only more expensive, but worse in every conceivable way. In fact, you can’t get a plan for your iPhone in Canada that’s as bad as the ones we have here in the Northern countries.

Think about that for a moment.

The MacBook Pro As Primary Workstation

Currently our household has 3 Macs. A 1.66Ghz Mac Mini (my workstation, called Valkyrie) w. 1GB RAM, a 1GHZ Powerbook w. 512MB RAM (Rikke’s machine, called Freya) and my 2.2Ghz MacBook Pro w. 2GB RAM (Godiva). They’re all running Leopard and share the wifi network (on which there are several other devices, as well as a 1TB network HDD). Connected to the Mac mini is a 250GB disk for photos and music and a 500GB disk for time machine backups.

Here’s the deal; I want to hook the Mac mini up to our 40” Bravia and use it as our media center, running OSXBMC on it as well as whatever other applications it would make sense to run on there. In turn, I would then have my 20” Cinema Display, wireless keyboard and mouse and the external HDD’s sitting without a workstation.

This is where the MBP comes into play, because I then want to use that as my primary machine from now on (where it’s been my secondary up until now). But I’m not sure if I can live with some of the issues that crop up in doing this. So I’m looking for some qualified help here:

  • The iTunes Library. This is the biggest issue. I’m approaching a 160GB library, which is currently hosted on an external HDD. My MBP’s disk is a mere 120GB, so there’s an obvious problem here. I play music through our Airports, and if the MBP doesn’t carry the music, I can’t do so unless I’m wired. So I can either keep my music on the external HDD so I only have access to it when I’m ‘wired’. This sucks, because if iTunes discovers that its ‘library disk’ is gone, it resets that location to the MBP itself, and so I have to manually change it back all the time. Or I can prune it down; though I’d rather not to be honest. Or I can keep a sub-set of it on the MBP. Or I can keep it on the Mac mini. If I keep it on the Mac mini, I can’t manage it though, except on the TV or through a VNC connection, and that feels a bit bleh. Man, do I ever wish Apple would allow me to manage shared libraries… Or I can find some other solution that eludes me.
  • iPhone. I need to have a loose wire for syncing the iPhone if I’m not wired up to the display. No biggie. But again, the iTunes issue.
  • Now You See It, Now You Don’t. I’m afraid of applications leaving their windows on a screen that is no longer there, when I unplug the cinema display. I generally think OS X deals with multi monitors well (opposite Windows, cuz DAMN!), but I’m unsure if this is a problem at all?

And of course, anything else that might be of interest.

Comment are open.

The iPhone (Sucks) as Portable Music Library

I love my iPhone, but there’s one thing I don’t understand. With my iPod, formatted with FAT32, I could connect it both at home and at work, and effortlessly stream music off of it or even copy music onto it in both places. Not so with the iPhone. It is bound to my workstation. Sure, I can connect it to my workstation (or my MacBook Pro or Rikke’s Powerbook or someone else’s computer), and they will detect it just fine. But the music on it is inaccessible…

If I try to turn on ‘manage manually’, which is what worked with my iPod, it tells me I have to erase the music library to bind it to the current computer!

Combined with the minijack port being compatible only with Apple headphones (what’s that about?!), this effectively makes it a pain in the ass to use at work. After all, I spent good money getting myself a pair of awesome headphones (Beyerdynamic DT 770); yet if I want to listen to something off of the iPhone, I have to use Apple’s headphones?

In turn, this has me switching back and forth between headphones, as I have to listen to something from my workstation and then back on the iPhone for a podcast, or whatever.

I love that it can be disconnected at any time, so I can take a call if necessary, and as such I accept that it doesn’t work as a HDD. But how can this be intentional? At least let me stream my own music off of the damn thing; that’s the least you can do.

Leopard Up-To-Date

If you bought an Apple product—say a MacBook Pro—during October, before the launch of Leopard, you’re entitled to the $10-upgrade to Leopard (nick-named ‘up-to-date’), you could be fooled into thinking that with the $2000 purchase receipt in hand, you could walk into an Apple Store, say in New York, pay them the $10 and walk away with Leopard. Right?

It certainly sounds fair to me. The stores are official Apple stores, there should be nothing stopping them from extending the offer to walk-in customers. And you might’ve put down two grand just a couple of days prior to the launch of Leopard, so really, they owe you…

That however, is not the case. For what I can only deem to be entirely artificial reasons, the up-to-date program is an online offer only! And that’s despite the fact that the $10 upgrade package is exactly the same as the retail package.

I’m guessing the reasoning lies in the $120 difference between the upgrade and the retail price. That is, there are people, like me, who are so eager to get Leopard, that they might actually pay full price for a product they otherwise are entitled to for a measly $10.

I don’t want to think that about Apple, but I’m just really really disappointed right now, that I didn’t get to take Leopard home with me.

Update: Received my ‘upgrade’ DVD of Leopard today. Yup. ‘Upgrade’. So I can’t reinstall the machine with Leopard without going through Tiger. That’s cheap Apple. Cheap. And it wasn’t boxed either, in that cool psychedelic scifi Leopard box. Oh, and it’s a double layer DVD too.

Guess what I’m torrentin’ right now…

It's Beta, People. Beta.

Slap me around and call me an opinionated buffoon, but media from on high and way down the long tail need to snap out of their Safari-hatin’ and at least pretend that they understand that the product they are faulting for security issues, instability and various other bugs is in fact, a beta.

I don’t know how many basement-analysts I’ve read since monday, that are ignorantly treating it as a finalized product, despite the fact that it’s a beta. And the first beta at that. Hell, it is the first time this thing has set foot on Windows!

Oblivious to the fact that beta’s are released, because they need testing, these keyboard-breathers haphazardly throw together misinformed opinions and lackluster ‘tests’ (for shame Wired, for shame).

Now if Apple had the reputation of Microsoft when it came to neglecting their browsers, that’d be one thing, but despite the fact that I don’t even use Safari as my primary browser, I will fight Apple’s fight any day of the week on this, as they have managed to craft a damn good browser, which I wouldn’t think twice about letting my mother use.

And not only that, they don’t set it adrift down the river, they actually update it continually and Dave Hyatt has been open and welcoming Safari users on the Surfin’ Safari blog for years!

If you’re not responsible enough to add the ‘it’s still a beta, so there’s still a long way to go’ caveat to your ‘analysis’, you’re not old enough to publish on the internet.

Now go to your room and think about what you’ve done.

WWDC '07 Fallout

So I’m watching the keynote from yesterday, and I thought I’d throw some quick not-too-analytical thoughts into the fray now that I’m stuck here for another 40 minutes anyway.

First off, the new desktop looks nice. I have a folder named ‘clutter’ where I drag all the ‘wow, I’d love to keep that, but I have no use for it’-stuff. Basically the same as the new download folder, except that it’s a nicer implementation. Other than that, transparency and reflection is all great and all, but since I always have my dock hidden anyway, it will be incidental.

Stacks look great, and for people who don’t use Quicksilver (you know, your mom…), I’m sure it’ll be a nice way to launch apps as well. I hope you can use the scroll-wheel to flip through the stacks…

The new Finder. Was it everything you hoped for? For as long as I’ve been a Mac user, people have been whining about the Finder, and I really don’t understand why; it’s always been working great for me. The changes look nice, though it will be interesting to see just how useful Coverflow really is in a file-management environment.

Surely though, stuff like the built-in quickview is one of those things that gets the least ‘press’, but which will see the most usage.

Accessing your computers via .Mac sounds like a great feature, too bad .Mac has largely fallen behind the curve. I let my subscription expire last year, and I haven’t missed it one day.

Spaces… I’m still absolutely non-plussed. Maybe Apple’s implementation will be more intuitive to the way I work, but I’m very much an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ kinda guy, and I’ll soon forget that I have more desktops than the one I’m working on. And when a new mail rolls in, I’ll just open a browser and go to Gmail, even if I have a Gmail window open somewhere in the background already.

Safari for Windows? Well done. Am I going to use it? Probably not. I’m way too stuck in Firefox and the many extensions that make my life a hell of a lot easier. In fact, I can’t imagine the web without Google Sync, Adblock, GreaseMonkey (for my beloved Gmail scripts!) and of course the unconquerable Firebug (without which I couldn’t write Javascript).

Plus, even though the new Safari is great in many ways with stuff like resizable textareas, inline searching and reorderable tabs, plus form widgets are now skinnable… Not sure that’s a good thing… Mr. Hicks has some more observations.

But what’s it for? Well, I think Mr. Gruber probably gets it right.

But again, without the extensibility of Firefox, even though I like the rendering on Safari better, it just isn’t as interesting as it could be.

Finally, while not everyone is enthused and content about being able to do ‘web applications’ for the iPhone, I’m actually looking forward to it, as it’s something I might be able to do myself… But touting it as a proper alternative to actual app development? Not so much.

Either way, the keynote is coming to and end, and I need to get to work.

Most impressive demonstration of the keynote was probably the Core Animation video-wall, which I hope will make its way onto the net (and support misc codecs to boot).

Now, ask me: “Michael, do you want an Airport with a drive on it for Time Machine? Would that be nice?”

So yeah, no big splashes, I’m just still looking forward to the iPhone and Leopard.

iPod Tries to Kill Me

I love how, when you want to take your iPod with you, and it’s docked, and you check to see if the icon is on the desktop, and it’s not, but the iPod is still ‘Do not disconnect’, but you can’t eject it, so you take it anyway, and then there is no music on it… At all… Like the files are still there, but the index is gone, and so you just realized that you have to fill it up with 30GB of music again, which takes hours to do… But you’re off to work, and you only have time to write a short incoherent rant?

Thanks iPod. Thanks.

Update: Well, I reconnected my iPod, ejected it and ehm… Now it works again. So ahhh… I’ll be over here, shutting up.

Apple Retail Stores Apparently Kick Ass

“Sorry Steve, Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work,” BusinessWeek wrote with great certainty in 2001. “It’s desperation time in Cupertino, Calif.,” opined TheStreet.com. “I give [Apple] two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake,” predicted retail consultant David Goldstein.

Fascinating story about the Apple retail stores, from the ‘Apple is doomed!’ (the way it always starts), through the development cycle of designing the stores, through to how the Apple stores are now America’s best retailer. (via)

“Our stores were conceived and built for this moment in time – to roll out iPhone,” says Jobs, summoning one to the table with a tantalizing I’ve-got-the-future-in-my-pocket twinkle.

I’ve only been to a small store in Santa Monica, and it was quite pleasant. Good thing we don’t have any around Copenhagen, or I’d probably go broke…

Mac Mini Region-Free DVD?

DVD regions must die! It is ridiculous! I’m currently stuck, unable to change my Mac mini from region 1 to region 2, despite the fact that I have one of my five tries left. The fact that I even have this problem is idiotic, considering that I bought my DVD’s and I bought my Mac mini.

Neither are stolen or pirated, so why am I being bothered with this crap?

Anyway, does anyone know how I can break the law and put and end to this mockery?

High-Pitched Whine From Power Supply?

Recently I have noticed that the power supply for my Cinema Display has started emitting a high-pitched whine at night when it’s sleeping. It’s almost inaudible. Almost…

I have no idea what to do about this. I would shut it down on the switch, but that means turning off all the power in the bedroom (It’s an old building, one power outlet per room), and I hate not being able to simply sleep my computer.

I remember my old CRT monitor having the same problem, and it drove me nuts!

What the hell do I do!?