So I finally caved in and bought an iPhone 3G the other day (I’m not exactly an early adopter you know). I have to say, it’s more impressive than I expected. A lot of what makes it so good is the attention to detail that’s gone into the design of the hardware, software and user interface. Here are some first impressions of its loveliness:

Proximity sensor

When you hold the phone to your ear while on a call, the phone temporarily shuts off the screen (saving power) and locks it (so you can’t accidentally “tap” on the screen).

Keyboard

I wasn’t convinced by the on-screen keyboard at first. But actually it’s possible to type quickly and accurately on it thanks to the predictive word input. You just have to trust it and let it do its thing! A nice touch: you can double-tap the spacebar to quickly add a full-stop (period for my American readers) followed by a space.

Conveniently, the keyboard layout changes depending on exactly what you’re doing. When entering a URL, you get extra “.”, “/”, and “.com” buttons instead of the redundant spacebar; for email address fields, you get “@” and “.” buttons, and so on. This really exploits the idea of a soft keyboard to its fullest.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like a bolt from the blue, OpenOffice.org version 3 burst onto the scene today. You can grab it now from OpenOffice.org. The poor server is groaning under the strain – there’s obviously a lot of demand for free office apps – but with a bit of patience you should be able to download it OK:

I’ve taken it for a quick spin, and so far I like what I see. There are quite a few notable improvements over OpenOffice.org 2.x, including:

• Speed. The new version has a much quicker startup time than 2.x, with the welcome screen appearing around 4 seconds after launching (on my 1st gen Intel iMac). The UI feels a fair bit snappier, and document opening and saving seem a little faster.
• Support for the latest MS Office formats. OpenOffice.org 3 can read the controversial Office Open XML (.docx/.xlsx/.pptx) formats – although it can’t yet save files in these formats.
• Easier app launching. The new UI features a nice welcome screen (see below) that you can use to quickly launch Writer, Calc, Impress, Base, Draw, or Math.
• Better Vista compatibility. Always good if you happen to use Vista!

However, one of the most noticeable changes to the Mac version is – you guessed it – native Aqua support. Finally, OpenOffice.org looks and behaves like a Mac app! No more having to boot up X11 and put up with an interface only a mother could love. (NeoOffice helps to get round some of the UI problems, but it does lag behind the main OpenOffice.org release by a few months.) Read the rest of this entry »

This is probably old news if you’re Stateside (or Europe-side, for that matter), but recently Apple launched iTunes Store movie rentals over here in Australia. I thought I’d give it a spin.

Now, generally I don’t touch DRM-encumbered content – if I buy something, I should be able to do what I like with it, right? – but I figured that movie rentals are a different ball game. Obviously, without some sort of DRM, the concept of renting a movie online wouldn’t work. So, fair enough I guess. And the movies on the iTunes Store are only AUD $3.99 to rent, which ain’t too bad.

However, the range of movies available is tiny, weighing in at around 700 movies last time I checked. There’s also a lot of crap on there; I can’t see myself renting Uptown Girls or Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine any time soon. (Are the movie choices as bad in other iTunes Store countries?)

We decided to rent Groundhog Day, which is one of the better movies available. The process of renting the movie was pretty much as straightforward as buying an album, though it did ask me to authorize my Mac twice. The download weighed in at 1.2GB, which took a couple of hours to download over my ADSL line. Read the rest of this entry »

If you use iTunes, you’ve probably spotted those little arrows in circles that appear next to certain columns in the currently selected track. When you click them, you’re taken to the album or artist on the iTunes Store:

If you remember, iTunes 7 and earlier gave you a Preferences option to turn them off. And rightly so – they clutter up the UI in my opinion.

However, for some bizarre (no doubt marketing-related) reason, Apple removed this option from the Preferences dialog in iTunes 8. Thanks guys. 😉

Fortunately, there’s still a way to turn the arrows off. Quit iTunes, open a Terminal window, and type:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool false

Now relaunch iTunes. The arrows will be gone. To turn them on again, type:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool true

Not so fast…

Before you turn the arrows off, though, you may be surprised to learn that they do, in fact, do more than just take you to the iTunes Store.

This post on macosxhints.com contains a couple of comments which taught me something new: You can actually Option-click an iTunes Store arrow to find stuff in your library. Option-click a track name column or album column arrow to get a list of all tracks in an album; Option-click an artist column arrow to view all tracks by an artist.

So those arrows are actually useful after all! In fact, by changing another hidden preference, you can swap the behaviour of clicking/Option-clicking:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool true

Now clicking the arrows takes you to the album or artist in your library, while Option-clicking jumps to the Store.

Obviously, you can revert back to the original behaviour by typing:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool false

And there you go! The hidden delights of those little arrows.

How many times have you tried to unmount a hard disk or memory card, or empty the Trash, only to be told that a file is in use by an application? It’s happened to me a few times. Unfortunately Mac OS doesn’t tell you exactly which application is using the file, which can make it tough to track down the problem.

One way out is to logout or reboot the Mac to clear the file lock, but there is a less drastic solution. What’s Keeping Me? is a handy little app that lets you search for an open file (you can also search for a disk name to find all open files on a mounted disk). It then tells you which app or process is using the file(s). For best results select the As Administrator option to find all files.

Now the more observant/tech-savvy amongst you have probably spotted that this is remarkably similar to opening a Terminal window and typing:

sudo lsof | grep -i <filename>

And you’d be right. Still, What’s Keeping Me? is more user-friendly – especially for those who tend to approach the command line brandishing crosses and waving garlic – and it conveniently allows you to quit or kill the offending app at the click of a button. Plus it’s only 5 bucks (voluntary donation) so you can’t go too wrong. And it has a cute icon. 🙂

By the way, here’s a quick tip. If you ever need to do the opposite – that is, find out which files an app is using – fire up Activity Monitor, select the process in the list, then hit Command-I to inspect it. You can then click Open Files and Ports to view a list of files being used by that app.

Earlier this month the 9to5Mac blog dropped a hint of a future Apple product known as The Brick, alleged to be unveiled at an Apple event on 14th October. Since then, the Apple rumour mill has been in full effect, with all sorts of wild speculation on various Apple blogs as to what The Brick could be. We have the following gems on offer:

• iPhone Savior kicked off by speculating that it’s a sub-notebook of some sort. Let’s hope it’s lighter than a real brick. A few days later they hedged their bets by suggesting The Brick is actually the bastard son of the Mac Pro and Mac Mini – A Mac Mini Pro, in fact.
• Computerworld has a nice theory: The Brick is a kind of wireless docking station that features a USB hub, allowing you to wirelessly connect your MacBook to the peripherals on your desktop. I like this one.
• Meanwhile, over on the MacRumors forums there have been some interesting ideas from the punters, including a squarer, sharper MacBook; a MacBook without the accompanying “brick” power adapter; a tablet Mac; and a MacBook power brick that doubles up as SuperDrive, ethernet port etc.
• Finally, Macenstein claims to have solved the riddle: “The Brick” refers to a product that will beat Microsoft Windows to a pulp. You know – a brick through a window and all that? Sounds a bit tenuous to me personally. But we’ll see.

Sheesh – two small words are leaked and the bloggers start spreading the rumours like wildfire. Erm… including me. Ah well, never mind! 🙂

If you’re an OS X Leopard user then you’ve no doubt encountered a dialog similar to this one from time to time:

This means that the file is “quarantined”; it happens whenever you first try to open a file you downloaded via your Web browser.

Generally speaking, this is a good thing, as it makes you think twice about opening something that may potentially be malware. However, if you’re downloading a lot of files that you know to be kosher then it can get quite annoying.

Fortunately, there are ways to disable the quarantine dialog, so that downloaded files open without needing confirmation. I found a good solution over at The Pug Automatic blog – this is basically a short AppleScript that you attach to your Downloads folder as a folder action. Then, whenever a new file is added to the Downloads folder, it’s automatically un-quarantined. Neat.

Computers these days are wonderful; thanks to the joys of multi-tasking you can happily have ten apps open at once. There’s an argument, though, that humans work better when focusing on one task at a time, with minimal distractions.

The rather nice WriteRoom took this message to heart, giving you a full-screen word processor that’s just green text on a black screen. No frills, no distraction.

Recently a vaguely related app caught my eye: Isolator. Rather than being a simplified version of a word processor, Isolator is a free menu bar app that hides the windows of all applications except the one you’re using. You can even hide the Dock. (It would be nice if you could hide the menu bar too, and have it fade in when you move the mouse to the top of the screen. Maybe in the next version?) It’s easy to flip Isolator on and off when required with a key combo.

You can hide all other windows behind a completely black background:

…or you can customize the isolation effect in different ways. Here I’ve made the tint effect slightly transparent and added a blur filter:

Isolator is a nice way to block out distracting apps while you concentrate on the task at hand. I often find myself wandering off to check my mail in Mail, surf the web in Firefox or play with my iTunes playlists, and Isolator helps me avoid these apps and keep on track.

One slight problem is that many of the apps I use – Terminal, Firefox, TextEdit – tend to have multiple windows open at once, and Isolator can’t hide inactive windows within an app. So it’s quite hard to get it down to just one window along the lines of WriteRoom.

Having said that, Isolator is a handy little app, and it’s free to boot. If, like me, you’re easily distracted, then this might just help boost your productivity!

It’s not been a good couple of months for my work iMac. After the recent green pixels and dying hard drive issues, my iMac’s AirPort card has been looking distinctly dodgy over the last few weeks.

Basically it’s OK once it’s up and running, but the problems start when waking the iMac from sleep. 2 out of 3 times it’s fine, but at other times, the AirPort icon shows that the AirPort is off after the Mac wakes up:

Any attempts to turn the AirPort back on, either from the menu bar or in Network Preferences, fail. There’s no error dialog, but the AirPort stays off.

I think it also happened once even after power cycling the Mac. It fixed itself on the boot after that.

The AirPort card shows up fine in System Profiler.

These are some of the errors I see in /var/log/system.log when waking from sleep or manually trying to restart the AirPort: Read the rest of this entry »

Rumour has it that Magnetosphere, a really rather nice visualizer plugin for iTunes, will be incorporated into iTunes 8 (which could be out as early as this week). Magnetosphere is no longer available from Barbarian’s site (though you can still grab it via this blog post).

I’m not normally fussed about visualizers, but the original Magnetosphere produced some lovely organic effects, with swirling, pulsating stars and light streams. There are a few Magnetosphere videos out there that look even cooler (here’s one, here’s another, and here’s a third) – these all look like they were pre-rendered rather than real-time, but still, they might give a taste of things to come. Roll on iTunes 8 I say!