It’s been a busy and tough few weeks and I haven’t been writing. I do have new things to write about, but free time and motivation have not met in a while. I did get an iPhone and love it. But the iPod part of it is disappointing. I’ll say more when I have time.
Check back soon!
There is a poplular address book / social site called Plaxo which attempts to sync your information on your
PC or Mac with your social network. It seems pretty cool as a social network, but I don’t want everyone I know on earth to reside in my address book and phone. I don’t want to filter through all those people I’m not likely to want to talk to on a regular basis. Nothing against them. They’re nice people. But I like getting to information quickly when I’m out in the world.
But the real kicker, and the motivation for this post is that if you use another address book syncing service like MobileMe, you’re likely to end up with whole duplicate calendars as things start syncing with each other. So my advice is to pick one and stick with it.
A little while back, I wrote an article about calibrating batteries for laptops. As most of us know, it’s a good idea to exercise our rechargeable batteries in all our devices. Well, I have a black iPod classic which has monster battery life, but it gets very little use. It’s usually connected to power since I mostly use it connected to the car stereo. So I’ve been puzzling on how to drain it and only now have a reached an obvious conclusion. All you need to do is put it in repeat mode and play something over and over until the battery dies.
One thing you need to consider if you’re a iPod listener like me is the play count of songs. I have smart playlists that fill up based on how often or how long it has been since a song has been played. So this repeat needs to be done on a song, or preferably a video that does not affect those playlists. A video will run the battery down faster, so I picked one that I don’t care about and just let it play all night.
To do this, go to your iPod settings, select Repeat and click the select button until “One” appears. Then go play the video and just let it run until it stops. The long battery life of the iPod Classic can be a curse, but this should alleviate it. We sure don’t want to replace the battery for a long time.
If you haven’t been following iPhone news this weekend, you don’t know that it’s been crazy. The first day it went on sale was an activation nightmare. AT&T’s insistence that the iPhone be activated in-store caused long delays and Apples activation systems were hit hard by the world-wide simultaneous (by that I mean 8 a.m. local time) rollout so their systems were down most of the day.
iPhone 3G Availability
So I didn’t even try to get on on Friday. Saturday? I figured it wouldn’t be too bad if last year’s initial roll out was any indication. I got to my Southlake, Texas (a 30 mile drive) store by 3:00 and found out that they had sold out the previous hour. What made me a little angry about this was the fact that Apple wasn’t saying anything about stock levels over the web besides, “Check back tonight after 9:00 p.m. for tomorrow’s availability at this store,” which is more than a little vague.
Checking back after 9:00 only tells you what they will have in stock the next day (iPhone 3G 8GB and black or white 16GB). Not how much or anything. So, when I checked, I saw it was green across the board for my “local” store for Sunday.
So I decided to go take a chance since they didn’t open until noon. Arriving at 12:18, the line was a block long which seemed workable to me. Over an hour later on one of the hottest days of the year, an Apple rep went through the line and gave people vouchers for what they had inside. The guy two people in front of me got the last ticket and it was for a black 16 GB, my preference.
I’m glad the folks at the Apple Store had the decency to pass out water for those of us waiting in line. They also went to a lot of trouble to inventory the phones and match them to the customers in line so that the rest of us didn’t have to suffer needlessly.
So after two trips out there, I’m officially waiting until the hub-bub dies down. My RAZR still works. But it’s just not cool anymore! What was interesting was that the people waiting in line were seemingly normal folks. These weren’t fan boys or anything like. We’ve become tied to our phones in a big way, but until now, no one has gotten it right. I guess it shows how starved we have become for something that really works the way we want it to.
If you’re running Firefox 3, there’s a cute little Easter egg. Type “about:robots” in the address field and see what you get.
Robots aren’t the ‘droids I was looking for.
I wrote earlier that I was working on getting my Vista BootCamp install to run virtually in Mac OS X under VMWare Fusion. Well, VMWare updated their software to version 1.1.3 which resolved the issue of having to re-authenticate Vista so I did and it works. Running under Fusion, you don’t get the cool Windows Aero effects that you get running in BootCamp (yes, even on a MacBook). The only added complication was installing VMWare Tools in Vista, but that was a piece of cake and all automatic.
However, the bad news is, if you plan to switch from running Vista under BootCamp to Fusion, you’ll need to reset the Windows Experience Index. This is found in the Control Panel under Performance Information and Tools. If you’re not running Control Panel in Classic Mode (as you should!) click on System and Maintenance to find Performance Information. As for me and my house, I’ll run XP under Fusion and boot into Vista when I have to.
One thing that I was hoping that Microsoft would finally fix after all these years was the way it shut down. On the Mac, I am used to the fact that when I shut down with all my applications still open, as each program closed, I would be presented the opportunity to save my work while the Finder waited patiently in the background. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve shut down a Windows machine expecting the same nice behavior. But no. When windows closes down, it starts quitting applications. When it runs into one that wants to save your work, you get the requisite “Do you want to save?” with the associated dialog. You go to click “OK” and before your finger hits the mouse button or the enter key, Windows pups up and says, “Do you want to close Excel” right over where the save dialog is still sitting. But it’s too late. Your finger is committed and you click OK and there goes your work. It all happens in about a second. But you can tell that the engineers who designed Vista paid attention to this process because it darkens the window in a cooler way than XP did. Big whoop! There is no change in behavior. STUPID! STUPID! STUPID!
Well, here’s my answer to that:
Get a Mac!
It’s been a while since I’ve written. Frankly, the news of the new iPhone 3G is drowning out news of everything else. Don’t get me wrong, I’m going to stand in line to get mine as soon as I can. But there’s not much to say that isn’t already common knowledge and that ain’t much either. Anything else is speculation. So, I’m holding my tongue for a while.
Good news, fellow surfers! Firefox 3.0 has been released and I have to say that this is the best browser I’ve ever used. It’s fast and the developers have figured out how we use browsers and have made the most user friendly one yet.
First off, it doesn’t clash with the rest of your applications. You Windows users don’t care how things look, but we Mac folks tend to like our user interfaces to be consistent and elegant. Even so, the folks at Mozilla thought of Windows too. While the interface is pretty much the same, it looks like your operating system expects it to. See the illustration to the left with Windows XP (The Fisher Price Interface 
, Vista Aero and Mac OS X Leopard shown respectively. The user doesn’t have to configure a thing. It is automatic. I did not check to see if Windows 2000 or 98 were supported or treated with the same decency. I also like the prominance of the “Back” button compared to the “Forward” button. We use it more and it’s a nice big target. Note that even though there is no down triangle on it, “Back” still supports holding down your mouse button for a second to go back further in your browsing history.
Second off is the address bar. It has always bothered me to watch a non-techie user type in a web address when they feel like that have to type the ‘http://’ part of it. All web browsers simply assume this, dear reader. But just in case you don’t know, when you start typing ‘www’, the address bar rolls down a list of possible sites from your history as well as the ‘http://’ in underline so that you know what Firefox knows you know.
But wait, there’s more! Just type a letter or two from what you would normally put between the ‘www.’ and ‘.com’ and you’ll be presented with a list of possibilities from your history no matter where they show up in the actual address. As you type more characters, the list will focus more on what you want. It’s ver’ ni-ice. It’s like, you know, English, in the way you deal with it rather than arcane URL-ese.
Another one of my favorite things is the way Firefox 3 handles passwords. We’ve all experienced going to sites where we do business or social networking. You type in your user name and password and immediately you are confronted with a dialog box asking if you want the browser to remember your name and password. But half the time, I don’t know if I typed my password correctly or if I’m using the right user name or email address. But I click Remember just in case. Then a whole lot of red lettering pops up saying, invalid user or something. Firefox 3, on the other hand, doesn’t ask you — this is so cool — until you actually — wait for it — get in successfully! What took these guys so long?
And finally, there is the speed. It draws pages very, very fast. It’s simply the best browser I’ve ever seen. I only wish that it would support some of the Mac OS features like incorporating our dictionary into its text services. In every other application I have, I can right click on a word and poof, a “Look up in Dictionary” command presents itself and once selected, a mini window shows up with an Oxford American Dictionary definition. But I guess it’s a small nit in the grand scheme of things. I’m sure there’s more to love, but these are the big things that popped out at me. Download it and enjoy!
This past Saturday was spent installing Windows Server 2003 on my stand alone PC this weekend in hopes of making it a domain server primarily. I ran out of time before I could finish, but the thing that was holding me up was actually joining the domain that I had created. I set it up as a WINS server, DNS server and a domain controller. My AirPort Extreme Gigabit is my DHCP server (where your computer gets its IP or Internet address), but I may have to give that duty to the Windows server also. This may entail actually putting my server “out there” on the net rather than behind my router where it’s safe. If that’s the case, I may set it up a mail server as well.
This is all a learning experience and is way too much overkill for a home network set up. Apple announced MobileMe (Not a great name. I was glad to see Microsoft step away from the terms “My Documents” and “My Computer with Windows Vista. Now we have one more reason to be narcissistic.) to replace .mac last week at the World Wide Developer’s conference last week. MobileMe will give anybody push technologies much like Microsoft Exchange does in corporations. Push technologies give you instant updates to email, calendar and contact changes without the need to sync your devices. This is very, very cool, folks. This is mainly for the iPhone, and MobileMe web applications (so PC folks can get in on the action too. The demo looked awesome) but I wonder if it will come to their regular Mail, iCal and Address book software on our Macs without syncing as well. I’m guessing that we’ll need a new version of Mac OS X for that. Snow Leopard maybe? I’m excited about the possibilities.
Another thing that was touched on at Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference yesterday was teh official announcement of Mac OS X 10.6, officially dubbed Snow Leopard. With this major release, there will be no new features, but it will be an optimization of the OS. No one knows what they are going to charge or exactly what the release date is. But it is reliably rumored, and it only makes sense, that they will be dropping Macs with PowerPC processors from the list of supported computers. Maintaining an OS across two processors for for the last two years has been admirable, but it’ll be time for them to concentrate on Intel x86 if they are going to stay nimble and offer significant improvements going forward. The OS X 10.7 probably won’t be offered for another two or three years so 5 years of support for a legacy system is not bad. I have a Mac that old that’s running Leopard. Try finding a PC that old that will run Vista.
