This is always a good sign…
Category Archives: Apple Existence
My journey away from Windows, and into the light.
New iMacs
I have a certain sentimentality for the iMac. My first Mac was a 20″ G5 iMac, acquired just a bit over four years ago, and I thoroughly enjoyed cutting my teeth on it. I guess there’s always a certain nostalgia for your first love, eh?
This morning, the twitterverse is all agog about a potentially new iMac on the near horizon. The buzz is that it would be thinner, and include Blu-Ray.
Myself, I’d welcome that.
I have a great attraction for an all-in-one environment like the iMac, but I also see some pitfalls. The latest gen of iMacs allow for easy memory upgrades by the user, but a nearly impossible internal harddrive replacement. Last I saw, that operation involved removing the screen from the chassis, and that’s not a comfy spot for most, myself included. That leaves you with only USB or FW800 externals drives. Where’s eSATA? That would definitely solve the need for replacing the internal harddrive, as eSATA bays are available all over the place.
Another thing missing from the current line is a second Ethernet port. While I don’t have an immediate need for that extra port, it’s interesting to see companies like Drobo begin using that for faster-than-eSATA iSCSI drive connections across a second Ethernet port for their DroboPro high-end storage solution. For a data junkie like myself, that’s a real attractive path, despite the quite high entry pricepoint.
However, I think an iMac might be the only way to foist the last Windows machine in the house my spouse’s clutched fingers. She’s been on Windows for better than a decade, and I suspect that moving her to a Mac is unlikely. We’re running into some issues where she can’t browse my photo archive easily from her machine. Microsoft and RAW files still don’t get along with a piece of software to act as referee. She’s been going through an incredibly convoluted series of steps to view, select and print images from the datastore, and I’d no idea she was doing all that. An iMac would solve that in a snap, but I don’t know that she’s ready for that leap.
With new announcements coming though, anything is possible!
Video… Finally!
I was finally able to get video from my new iPod Nano to upload to YouTube. How’d I get there?
While researching the problem, I found that loads of folks are having problems like this, and for some of them, it appears to be related to Google Gears. I tried to install Gears, and the installer and Google Gears site indicate that OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard ain’t supported. 🙁
In one of those notes, however, someone mentioned that they had success using their YouTube credentials, rather than GMail-based credentials. Sure ’nuff, that seemed to work.
It’s a sample size of one, so YMMV, but below is our first video from the Nano to YouTube. Enjoy!
OnOne : An Update
Man, the folks from OnOne seem to be all over this Snow Leopard issue with their license activation.
Waiting for me this morning was an e-mail from customer support (sent about four hours after I reported the problem) indicating that my license had been reset. I jumped into Photoshop, and sure enough, I was able to get my license working again.
Thank you OnOne — that’s some mammoth customer service!
Snow Leopard! Genuine Fractals! Oh, the Humanity!
I was sitting around today, when my iPhone jingled, telling me that I’d received an e-mail. It was a monthly newsletter from OnOne about their products. I’m a Genuine Fractals 6 Professional user. I don’t use it real often, but when I do, I need it.
So what was the topmost bullet in the newsletter? A strong suggestion to deactivate OnOne products before upgrading OS X to Snow Leopard. Eh? Really?
And with my next breath, I realized that the newsletter was telling me that GF6 was not going to work until I contacted customer support. Period. Oh fudge. Only I didn’t say fudge.
Being in Missouri, there was a healthy dose of “show me”, and I tried GF6 in Photoshop CS4E and Lightroom 2.5… no dice. What I read was right — I was hosed.
So now I’m waiting for OnOne to respond with a hopefully painless way to salvage my investment in GF6.
Frankly, activation that is that deeply rooted in the OS seems a little overboard. The product’s great — nothing else can touch it — so I suppose it’s worth the pain, but I’m blown away that an OS upgrade can cause this kind of problem. Sure wish I’d had this info before I’d done the upgrade — and I’m betting that OnOne does too. It looks like they’re fielding quite a few questions on this one.
Stay tuned.
New Gear: iPod Nano 5G
At lunch on Wednesday, Jay and I had lunch with Becky, spending much of the time looking at our iPhones, watching the blow-by-blow of the Apple announcements on Twitter. We had a great time. I’m not so sure about Becky. 🙂
Jay had three predictions:
- Steve wouldn’t be there.
- There would be no camera on the iPod Nano.
- There would be no Beatles-related announcements.
Jay was one for three.
On Wednesday, Uncle Steve did appear on stage to a towering ovation, having beaten yet another life-threatening malady. He was still thin, and his voice sounded gravelly compared to a presentation he gave late last year, but he was still alive, much to the thrills of Apple’s shareholders, I’m sure. Frankly, I’m glad he made it. I think he’s a visionary, and maybe his shiny new liver will give him some shiny new ideas.
After going through a ton of announcements, the event ended with “One more thing…” — a Jobs trademark, and frequently means that the best was saved for last. Conspicuous by its absence was any mention of the iPod Nano — Touch, Classic and Shuffle all got some love during the presentation, but nothing about the Nano. One more thing. Steve talked about video, and how handheld solid-state video devices were grabbing up a big chunk of the market. And he said Apple wanted a piece of the action.
And they’re gonna give it to us for free.
Enter the new iPod Nano, now outfitted with a camera that’ll shoot video at 480p at 30fps. The free part? It’s free because Apple built the camera into the Nano, and kept the price the same. And added an FM radio. And a speaker. And a pedometer. And voiceover. And voice recording. And a slightly bigger screen. Same physical size, same price. Crikey. And it was available immediately.
In reality, it was available for order immediately, and only showed up at the local Apple Store on Thursday. A quick dash from work to the Galleria during lunch has put a nice electric reflective green iPod Nano in my hands.
I love the new finish on the 5G Nanos -– very nice. However I’m inclined to think it’s a fragile finish. In fact, despite it being aluminum, the slick feel reminds me of a plastic case. And I don’t know if it’s that my hands are telling my brain that the thing is plastic, but the 5G Nano feels lighter than my 4G Nano. That’s gotta be some kinda subliminal thing from my fingertips to my brain’s weights and measures division. Speaking of fingertips, the slick feel of the case keeps making me feel like the little thing is gonna squirt out of my hands — it’s the same kind of feel my iPod Touch had.
The FM radio works well enough, although the big ol’ building I work in blocks a lot of signals. BTW, you have to have the headphones plugged in for the radio to function -– it uses them as the antenna, and is aware when they aren’t attached. I’m using non-standard-issue Bose earbuds, and they seem to work just fine as the radio antenna, so it appears there’s no Apple voodoo going on requiring the use of the Apple headphones in order to use the radio. That’s a pleasant surprise after some the headphone wackiness that’s gone on lately from Apple.
The video camera functionality is fun and actually seems to work pretty well. Uncle Steve said that there was one-button publishing to YouTube, with the implication that this would come through iPhoto. However, even in his presentation Wednesday, iPhoto didn’t have an icon for YouTube, and we never actually saw him upload a video anywhere, despite playing some YouTube hosted video shot with the 5G Nano.
I’d wanted to post a new video on YouTube from the Nano, but have yet to get it to work. First off, I found no place for one click publishing to YouTube from iPhoto. Instead, I copied my videos to my desktop, and tried to upload one through YouTube’s web interface. To quote Janie Porsche, “Eeeehhhhnnnntttt!” I didn’t save Christmas, nor did I get a successful video upload. While the video appeared to upload, the backend processing never completed, and finally errored out.
Not being satisified with that — and having a blockbuster video shot with my iPod Nano that I wanted to share — I tried uploading the video via Quicktime Pro. It does have a menu item for uploading to YouTube. Filled in the boxes, and once again, the upload finished, but there was no completion. In fact, I left it churning for about 10 minutes (for about 30 seconds of video) before mercifully ended the process’ life.
I’m not a YouTube video expert, but to me, it seems like YouTube doesn’t like converting the Nano video stream into whatever it prefers. I like the video shooting capability, but so far, the one-click publishing to YouTube seems to be falling on its face for me. YMMV.
Speaking of pulling video from the Nano, it appears that the only way you can access your video gems is to put the Nano in “disk mode”. I tend to slam my iPods in docks when I’m done with ’em, and pluck ’em out at a second’s notice as I’m headed out the door. In disk mode though, you can’t do that. You have to do an orderly eject from the Mac desktop or iTunes. While that’s not a real big deal, it does take longer, and it definitely doesn’t fit with how I’ve been using my iPods for years. A prediction: I will foul up that sequencing at some point, and toast the load on the new Nano, forcing me to go through a restore.
One thing of note. The camera will not shoot stills — it’s motion only. My understanding is that that’s not uncommon in fixed-focus, fixed-zoom solid state video cameras, but it still would’ve been a nice thing to have. (Pardon the pun.)
The built-in speaker was a surprise the first time I accidentally hit play on a music screen while showing the thing to co-workers. The sound is tinny, of course — on a movie of my Bernese Mountain Dog, playback made her sound like Chihuahua — but the fact that it’s there at all is cool and is great for quick and dirty video sharing.
The slightly bigger screen is nice. When playing tunes, the thing displays artist, album and title with no scrolling — a nice UI improvement. Not a big deal, but nice.
I really thought the form factor would be different with all the new toys, but Uncle Steve says it’s the same form factor. The photos I saw early on made me think that the new Nano was a little thicker, and more squared off on the sides. That doesn’t appear to be the case. Obviously, there are changes to the case in order to accommodate the bigger screen and the camera on the rear. And in a brilliant move, the headphone and dock connector have swapped positions on the bottom, meaning new accessories if you have a toy that is strict about that sort of thing.
Also, the capacity isn’t stamped on the case anywhere. That tells me Apple can stockpile cases, and put them on whatever capacity comes down the line. (C’mon Apple — 32GB would be sweet!!!) My guess is that the new case manufacturing process probably doesn’t lend itself to a quick turnaround. This way it doesn’t matter what comes next as long as the form factor is the same.
Two paws up on the Colinomometer. 🙂
More Snow Leopard Weirdness
As part of my day job’s schedule, I have Friday’s off. Typically, it’s my day to run around town, visit the bookstores and execute some coupon action. This morning’s no different.
However….
I went to print my coupons to my crusty trusty Okidata B4100 laserprinter from Doc Oc this morning only to find…. there’s no printers installed! Yep, it appears that when Snow Leopard installed, it scrogged both my Oki and my Epson R1800. Bummer.
The Oki’s got a really flakey driver install path — don’t use the drivers that Apple provides, use ours — so I always have to remember that little step, lest I have printing heartaches.
So, no biggie. The Oki’s printing, although I haven’t reinstalled/checked the R1800 yet to see if it’s printing is better than it was under Leopard. More on that, I’m sure, to come this long holiday weekend.
Another Leopard Wart
I have VMWare Fusion on my Mac for one reason, and one reason only: connectivity to my day job’s office. I don’t use it often, but when I do, it’s usually important.
Tonight, I’ve been trying to hit some of my lesser used applications after loading both my MacBook Pro and Doc Oc with Snow Leopard, and switching both of them to 64-bit mode. When I hit VMWare, it yelled at me:
We are not amused.
I went to VMWare’s site, and found them proudly touting experimental support of VMWare on the 32-bit kernel, and apologetically saying that VMWare running on the 64-bit Snow Leopard kernel is hard: “The transition to the 64-bit kernel of Snow Leopard is a major undertaking and something that we are taking seriously as we plan future products.” I’m sorry that it’s hard, but I expected more.
And I’m sure this is coming across as whiny, but I look at it this way. I have 64-bit ready hardware that I paid a gob of Benjy’s for. I have a 64-bit ready OS that’s been at the public dev forefront for many, many months. Yet, still I can’t get the kind of 64-bit love for my tools and toys as I could on the Windows platform. (Shudder.)
I get that not every app needs to be 64-bit. I mean, do I really need a 64-bit LOLcats screensaver? (OK, so maybe I do, but that’s a problem on my end!) But when big tools like VMWare and Photoshop are lagging on this front after so much lead time, well, I guess I expected a bit more than nebulosity at this stage of the game. I’m not knocking the tools — they are great — but I do have a bit of a struggle with the product planning. None of this 64-bit stuff should’ve been a surprise to anyone.
It’s simple. I drank the Kool-Aid, and want my gear to live up to the hype. I want it to just work.
Update on Snow Leopard
I’ve committed Snow Leopard to Doc Oc, but not without a few things to ponder.
Despite it’s 64-bit yellings and screamings, the OS is designed to boot in 32-bit mode out of the box. How big a deal is that? Well, I don’t really know. There’s loads of rantings out there talking about whether it matters or not. I look at it this way: if my OS is 64-bit capable and my hardware is 64-bit capable, why wouldn’t I run in 64-bit mode? From Apple, there’s no way to permanently change which way you boot. But, there’s unofficial ways. Here’s one. MIssion solved.
That leads me to my color calibration puck. I have an Eye-One Display2 from X-Rite (well, it was GretagMacbeth when I bought it), and it appears that the code that runs it only runs under Rosetta, which means it’s PowerPC code, not Intel. I never realized that, and wouldn’t have except that Rosetta isn’t installed by default with the OS. I’ve read about the puck not being detected, but I didn’t have that problem on the MacBook Pro, and now it’s all nice and calibrated.
All in all, things have gone pretty smoothly, although I won’t do the server for a couple of weeks — gotta bake the new goodies on the gear!
Forty-Five Minutes
Yep, 45 minutes to install Snow Leopard on the MacBook Pro. Not bad, in the big scheme of things. However, there are some warts.
The first is that the reminder application from X-Rite that prompts me to profile my screen every now and then requires Rosetta to run. Boo. The other is that iStat Menus is not yet Snow Leopard compatible (per their site).
Neither of these are show stoppers for me (although I’m curious if I can calibrate my monitor with the current X-Rite software; there does not seem to be any mention of any issues with a quick look on X-Rite’s site).
Stay tuned kids… Doc Oc is next!