Obviously, Apple has a long-standing love affair with the mouse. Fair enough, they’re damn useful things. However, some people prefer to use the keyboard wherever possible. For example:

• My wife prefers keyboard shortcuts, because she has a bad wrist and using a mouse for more than a couple of minutes is agony.
• I prefer keybaord shortcuts, because I find the mouse is slow and imprecise for performing repetitive actions, and my time is important to me. Also, if I perform those actions a lot, it hurts my wrist too.

Macs have always had a bit of a reputation for being poor when it comes to keyboard shortcuts, but one of the things that sold me on the Mac last year was that Apple are supposed to have improved shortcuts considerably in the last few years. Well if the iMac I have in front of me represents an improvement in keyboard support, I shudder to think what old Macs must have been like. 😉

(more…)

As Mac users (and friends of Mac users) will know, Mac OS loves splattering hidden metadata files and folders throughout your directory structure. For example, open up a terminal and do an ‘ls -a’ of one of your directories, and you’ll probably see a .DS_Store file in there.

This is all very well when browsing the folder on your Mac, because Mac OS X sensibly hides these from view in the Finder. However try tarring or zipping that folder, sending it across to a Windows machine, then unzipping/untarring the archive file in Windows. You’ll see the .DS_Store file sitting there in Windows Explorer, in plain view. Even worse, if you zip a folder using Mac OS X’s “Create Archive” option, it creates another Mac-specific __MACOSX folder in there too, further cluttering up the archive for non-Mac users.

Naturally, Windows and Linux have no use for such files and folders; all they do is confuse matters for the poor users. This can be a bit of a problem when distributing zip files to hundreds of people, like we do on PageKits.com. Of course, it’s easy enough to write a shell script to recursively scan a folder and remove all these Mac-specific files and folders prior to archiving, but it’s still a bit of a pain.

So I was pretty chuffed to discover CleanArchiver the other day. It’s a nifty little archiving utility that removes those pesky Mac-specific items as it archives. All you have to do is drag your folder to the CleanArchiver icon in the dock, and it does the rest. It can create gzip, bzip2, zip and dmg files, and you can tell it which Mac-specific things to remove and which to leave in. Perfect for zipping up folders to send to your non-Mac-using buddies.

Why is there no way to turn off the screen on an iMac? I mean, properly turn it off?

It’s not something I thought about when I was thinking about buying an iMac – I just assumed it would have such a basic feature. For something that’s generally well designed and usable, this omission sticks out like a sore thumb.

I’m sure lots of people have their own reasons for turning off their computer screens. Here’s mine.

I run 3 types of nightly backups on my Mac (I’m paranoid). One does a rotating backup to DVD. One does an rsync backup to my wife’s iMac. And one does an rsync backup of our server in the UK (in case it ever goes tits-up).

And in a few months’ time, my iMac will be in the bedroom (I’m being turfed out of the office so we can turn it into a nursery for our upcoming wee nipper). So you can see why having the screen off might be a good idea. IN THE BEDROOM.

Here are the solutions I’ve heard from various people:

• Just put the iMac to sleep. Er, then how are the backups supposed to work?
• Turn the brightness all the way down. You’d think that’d work, wouldn’t you? But oh no – unlike Mac laptops, where zero brightness really does turn off the backlight, an iMac’s idea of “zero brightness” is “ever-so-slightly darker than maximum brightness”. Useless.
• Set the display to sleep in 1 minute. There are even scripts available to do this for you (and reset the sleep time back to normal afterwards).

Setting the display to sleep is not a bad approach, apart from two fundamental problems. Firstly, I don’t want the screen to turn off in 1 minute – I want it to turn off now.

Secondly – and more seriously – it’s not reliable. What I mean is, the screen spontaneously and randomly turns itself on. This seems to happen when certain specific activities occur during the backup process – spinning up the DVD seems to do it, as does network activity. (I’m still trying to pin down exactly what triggers set it off.)

As you might imagine, having a gorgeously brilliant white screen is wonderful when you’re working on it during the day. It’s not so nice when it turns itself on at 3AM in your bedroom.

So that’s the current situation. Apart from cracking open the iMac and installing a manual switch for the backlight, the best I can hope for it probably to put a towel over the thing at night. Ridiculous for such an otherwise well-designed machine. If you’re thinking about buying an iMac, and you want it doing stuff with the screen off overnight, I suggest you heed this warning. Memo to Apple: Fix this. Now.

If anyone has a decent solution, please tell me. I would absolutely love to hear it.

UPDATE May 2: Found a way to sleep the display instantly. 🙂

Is it just me, or is a 20″ iMac 2GHz Intel Core Duo with 2GB RAM not as fast as you’d expect it to be?

I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s generally faster than my 800MHz Pentium III running Linux was. But I’m still spending a lot of time hanging around waiting for it to do stuff. For example:

Safari sometimes sits there for 30-60 seconds with a spinning beach-ball when I try to switch tabs (often after the Mac’s recently woken from sleep, but sometimes for no apparent reason at all).

Spotlight is shockingly slow sometimes – it can sit there for over a minute. Quicker to just find the file manually!

Waking from sleep is a good exercise in patience. The display appears more or less straight away, but it’s a good 20 seconds before you can actually log in, and then another 20 seconds before you can click something in the Dock.

I know NeoOffice isn’t renowned as a speed demon, but the thing’s actually slower than OpenOffice was on my Linux box (if that’s possible)! The thing takes about a minute to start, and sometimes I’m waiting for at least a minute between clicking the close button and a document actually closing. WTF?

OfficeTime and IE5 (I know, I know – I’m a web developer…) are slow as molasses, but then they are running under Rosetta, so I’ll let them off. (C’mon OfficeTime, let’s have this Universal version you’ve been promising for the last 6 months!)

Where’s all this super-duper 2GHz processor power going?! I know I’m a bit of a “power user” and tend to have 10-15 apps open at once, and often run Parallels with a 256MB virtual XP machine, but I mean, 2GHz and 2GB RAM shouldn’t be this slow, should it?

Interestingly, there have been a couple of big stories in the news recently about some well-known Mac users switching the other way, from Mac to Linux. One of them is Mark Pilgrim, a chap I have a lot of respect for after reading his excellent Dive Into Python book.

I can see his point about file formats. I want to make sure that my data is going to be accessible in 20+ years’ time (particularly my photos, with their names, descriptions, tags and a record of which album they’re in). iPhoto, iTunes et al seem fairly flexible on the export front but at the end of the day they are proprietary file formats, which is a concern.

For now though I (perhaps foolishly) see ease of use and features as more important, so I’m sticking with the Mac at present!

By the way, the squeak remains. It comes and goes – sometimes there’s nothing for a whole day (or it’s too quiet to notice), then suddenly it’s back with a vengeance. My workaround when it happens is to sleep the Mac, wait 30 seconds, then wake it again. This usually stops the squeak for a good few hours (maybe because of the fans revving up momentarily when waking from sleep?). It’s still pretty pesky though. If it doesn’t get better after a few weeks then I expect I’ll be on the phone to Apple.

I’ve had the Mac for a month or so now, and on the whole I’m very happy with it. It’s certainly much easier to use than my Linux box was, and it’s much quicker to get work done on it. (Except for OpenOffice, which actually seems worse than the Linux version. Hope that improves soon!)

One thing I’ve noticed with Apple’s software though, is that on the whole it’s wonderful and does everything you need, but it often “falls at the last hurdle” by missing some killer feature, or doing it very badly. I suspect a lot of this is to “encourage” you to subscribe to .mac (which frankly after spending $3K on a new computer I’m loath to do) or buy some other add-on. Sometimes it’s downright annoying, and often means you have to fork out for some 3rd party shareware app to get the job done properly.

Exhibit A: iPhoto. Wonderful app. I love the ease of browsing and in-place editing, and can process and manage my photos so much faster than I could with just The GIMP and a file system. However, the “Export to Web Page” feature falls into the “why did they even bother?” category. It’s terrible. It produces a plain HTML page with a table of thumbnails in it. That’s it. No selectable colours or templates. It doesn’t even have CSS classes on the table elements, so you can’t even style it yourself.

(more…)

I’ve had my new Mac for just over 2 weeks now. Things I really like about it compared to my old Debian box:

• Drag & drop actually works, and works consistently. You can drag almost anything from anywhere to anywhere. Drag a file to a buddy in iChat to send it. Drag an album cover from Safari to iTunes to add it to the mp3. You can even select some text and drag it to the desktop if you want!
• The whole thing feels really consistent. Spell-check from practically anywhere (Mail, Safari, iChat) in the same way. Command + comma is always the keyboard shortcut for Preferences, in any app. The app menus are always laid out in the same way.
• Mail is so fast compared to Thunderbird on Debian. When you drag a mail to a folder, it actually goes to that folder immediately (not 10 seconds later after it’s finished re-downloading from the IMAP server). Searching my entire 400MB mailbox for any word or phrase takes seconds rather than minutes. The UI is really snappy and responsive -probably partly due to having a computer that’s 4 times faster! (There is one bug I’ve found in Mail where IMAP attachments take ages to download. Hope to see this one fixed soon, Apple!)
• iTunes is lovely. Really easy to organise your music, and it’s nice and responsive too. (If only it had gapless playback!!)
• It’s true that stuff generally “just works” without requiring loads of configuration and tweaking first. This is what I was hoping for. I’ve had to customise a few settings, but on the whole Mac OS just does what you expect it to, out of the box. The downside to this is that you can’t always tweak things as much as you like. I laughed when I found there are only 2 options for desktop colour schemes – “Blue” and “Graphite” (grey). This reminds me of the old “Both Types of Music! Country and Western” gag…
• Weird though it was at first, I’ve grown to love the use of the Command key rather than Control for stuff like cut and paste. (e.g. Command+x, Command+v.) It’s much easier on the hand and wrist, and quicker to use too.
• And I just love the way you install apps by dragging them to the Applications folder. So simple! Debian (and particularly Ubuntu) are a lot nicer in this regard these days, but still there’s something very satisfying about physically dragging an icon into your applications folder to install it (and of course dragging it out again and into the trash to uninstall).

That’s a brief list for now. I’m sure I’ll find lots more to love (and not love) about my new Mac in the next few weeks. If you own a Mac, please let me know what you love or hate about it! 🙂

One of the first things I tried to do on my new iMac was, of course, play a DVD with Front Row and that nifty little Apple Remote. It’s a wonderful idea, being able to use the Mac as a media centre, and indeed was one of the main reasons I bought the iMac.

So I clicked the remote’s Menu button and the desktop was whisked away into the background while the Front Row interface whirled into view. It’s quite a cool effect.

You get options for Music, Photos, DVD and Videos. I selected the DVD option and it asked me to put in a DVD. I fed it a Lord of the Rings DVD and eventually the DVD menu appeared. This is where the trouble started. The arrow buttons on the remote couldn’t control the menu, although the up and down buttons did change the volume. It was as if Front Row didn’t recognise that it was in the DVD menu.

I tried it a few times, but no joy. So I backed out of Front Row and fired up the regular Apple DVD player software instead. That worked fine. I tried installing the couple of hundred MB of requested software updates (including a Front Row update), but the menu problem in Front Row remained. After hunting around on Google I managed to track down the Front Row 1.2.2 update. Downloaded – installed – problem fixed. 🙂 Not sure why this wasn’t in the main software updates list though.

Other issues I’ve had with Front Row include:

• trying to use it while ripping a CD in iTunes (forget it unless you like watching the display freeze for minutes on end!), and
• an intermittent problem where it just won’t start, no matter how much I try to coax it into life with the Apple Remote. I think this might happen if you put a DVD in first so that the regular DVD player starts up, which then prevents Front Row from starting. Generally a reboot sorts it out.

Overall though, Front Row is a great addition to the Mac in my opinion, and the Apple Remote makes watching DVDs in bed that much easier! You can even send the Mac to sleep by holding down the play button on the remote, which is a nice touch. They just need to iron out a few bugs (and maybe make the music playback options a bit more flexible), and it’ll be perfect. Hell, it’s already better than having to muck about with hard drive and video card settings just to play DVDs on my Linux box!

This is what happened in my first few hours of Mac ownership…

Unpacking it was of course very exciting, and I was impressed with the way the whole thing is packaged. It feels like you’ve bought a high quality piece of gear the moment you open the box.

I was surprised at how small the Apple Remote is. Good job it attaches magnetically to the side of the iMac or I might lose it! They could have made the keyboard cable a bit longer though. I have one of those desks with a keyboard tray which means the cable has to go over the top of the desk to the Mac, rather than behind the desk and back round. It’s not too bad in practice though.

Problem #1 was pretty funny – I couldn’t work out how to turn it on! So much for the Mac being a paragon of ease-of-use. After 5 minutes of looking round the side and back, and pressing random keys on the keyboard (I’d heard you could power on Macs this way), I eventually had to give in and read the manual. I don’t know how I missed that power button at the back!

(more…)

Macworld UK have posted this (IMO rather sensationalist) article saying that Apple has closed down OS X, ie the source code is no longer available. In fact what they’ve done (and I believe they announced this months ago, so it’s hardly news) is closed the x86 kernel and drivers. All the other parts of Darwin that were open source, still are. I think Macworld’s just trying to stir things up and grab some extra page views here. 😉

The main reason for closing the source is, allegedly, that Apple want to make it harder for people to hack the OS to run well on PCs. (I’m sure they’ll find a way though, whether the kernel is closed or open.)

Frankly it doesn’t bother me much that the kernel isn’t open source, as long as it works and I can get my work done! It’s not like Mac OS is a Free Software operating system in the first place. And personally I’ve never had to hack the Linux kernel to suit my needs, so I doubt I’d be wanting to hack the Mac OS one either. I’m a bit concerned that the lack of peer review might lead to a less stable and less secure kernel, but we’ll see.

As for the article’s argument that research scientists won’t be able to compile a custom kernel – well there’s always Linux or FreeBSD isn’t there! 🙂