So I’m browsing around the Apple iTunes App Store looking for a cool game for my iPhone, and I’m reading some reviews about a few games when I notice that the iTunes Store allows people to sort of review the review. At the end of each review is a simple question: “Was this review helpful?“ followed by clickable “Yes” and “No”. To the far right of the review title, it tells you how many people found the review helpful. The problem is that it thinks App Store users are “listeners”, when I’m pretty sure they’re “users”.
A song from the Music Store. 2247 “listeners” found the review helpful.
A movie from the Movie Store. 456 “viewers” found the review helpful.
An app from the App Store. 18 “listeners” found the review helpful.
I guess someone copied and pasted code from the Music Store and never made the change?
How come Interface Builder 3.1, the latest version as of the time of this post, shows rounded application menu corners when OS X Leopard did away with them?
You gotta love Apple sometimes. People have been asking begging for the ability to create their own custom ringtones out of songs they already own since before the iPhone was released. At first, Apple said, “No, you have to buy them for $0.99 after you buy the song for $0.99.“
People cried foul. “Why do I have to pay an additional fee when I already own the song?“ was the common refrain. “What if I want to make my kids singing as my ringtone?“ was another.
It looks like Apple finally relented. As you can see from this support article, there’s now a way for Mac users (sorry PC), using the latest version of iLife, to export 40-second clips to the iPhone as a ringtone. However, THIS IS THE ONLY MENTION OF THAT FACT ON APPLE’S WEB SITE. In fact, in the description of the update to GarageBand that enables this functionality, it just says, “This update improves overall stability and addresses issues with file export to iPhone.“
Sneaky Apple, very sneaky.
This evening I was copying a large video file from my desktop “server” to my Mac laptop over wireless. During the transfer, my wireless connection conked out, as it does once in a while. When it conks out in the particular fashion that it did this evening, it generally takes about 20 minutes for it to recover, and all wireless networking is useless during this time. Because this “conk out” session happened in the middle of a file transfer, Finder became hopelessly confused, even after the wireless connection was reestablished. As I tried to get Finder to behave correctly, it became clear to me that I was going to have to restart it.
In the past, when I need to quit a misbehaving application, I click on the little blue Apple logo in the menu bar, click on the Force Quit… menu item, and then the Force Quit Applications window would open. I could not do that this evening since Finder is the application responsible for making the menu bar function. Since I couldn’t use the mouse to accomplish what I wanted, I would have to use the keyboard. As I reached for the keys to bring up the Force Quit Applications window, it hit me that I have no clue what key combination to use.
In Windows, it’s the ubiquitous Ctrl-Alt-Del…a combination that has been drilled into my head since the days of PC-DOS 1.0. MS wisely continued to use it in Windows for the same general purpose, and everyone, even my mother, knows to try it when things start behaving badly. Because my Mac hardly ever crashes, I have really never used the combination of keys, and therefore hadn’t memorized them. It happens to be Option-Command-Esc, but it took me a few minutes using my iPhone browser to find them.
One of the good things about the Mac being so stable is that you don’t need the emergency key combinations often. The bad thing is that when you do, your probably don’t remember them. I think I’m going to print out this list of keyboard shortcuts and store it somewhere.
The new danger is that I won’t remember where I put it.
This being my birthday, I was able to sleep in and just sort of do nothing all day. This gave me a lot of time to read the Interwebs which is all ablaze about Apple’s $200 price drop of the iPhone.
Being both an Apple shareholder and in the “iPhone $600 club” myself, and having paid the “stupid tax”, I do have an opinion on what is now known as “the drop” (as opposed to “the catch“).
First of all, anyone who bought the iPhone at $600 either thought it was worth $600 or returned it.
Second, early adopters always pay more for the ability to use cutting-edge technology.
Third, the price of technology, especially cutting-edge technology, drop very rapidly as the costs of mass marketing come down, and companies, in general, owe nothing to the customers that bought the product before the price drop.
So why do I feel like Apple owes me at least an apology?
Because of the time frame.
Continue reading . . .
According to an analyst at Piper Jaffray, 500,000 iPhones were sold between 6pm Friday and 6pm Sunday. Furthermore, the report indicates that 95% of the iPhones sold were the 8GB ($600) model. With that info, let’s look at the numbers:
- Assuming the Piper Jaffray model ratio is correct, 475,000 8GB models were sold for a total of about $285 million, and 25,000 4GB models were sold for a total of about $12.5 million, bringing the combined total to $297.5 million.
- If we use the Piper Jaffray total of 500,000, but use the Josh Madison ratio of 60% 8GB to 40% 4GB, then 300,000 8GB models were sold for a total of $180 million, and 200,000 4GB models were sold for a total of $100 million, bringing the combined total to $280 million.
- Ratatouille, according to Box Office Mojo, brought in $47.2 million for the weekend.
Clearly, the iPhone won. Was there really any doubt?
Today is June 29th, and if you’ve been living under a rock for the last few days, today’s the day that Apple’s iPhone is unleashed upon the general public. It also happens to be the day that Disney/Pixar’s newest movie, “Ratatouille”, opens. Just to make sure that everyone understands the connection, Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, Inc., and he was the CEO of Pixar before Disney bought them not too long ago. Mr. Jobs is currently the largest shareholder of Disney stock.
This leads me to wonder…which of Mr. Jobs “babies” will have a bigger opening weekend in terms of dollars?
According to Box Office Mojo, the biggest opening weekend of all time is “Spider-Man 3” at just over $151 million. The biggest opening weekend for an animated movie is “Shrek the Third” at around $121.6 million. The biggest opening weekend for a Pixar animated movie is “The Incredibles” at $70.5 million.
Let’s assume that “Ratatouille” will beat “Spider-Man 3” as the largest opening weekend for a movie and will do so at $155 million (I don’t think it will, but we’re just going to use that as a round number). For the iPhone to beat $155 million, Apple/AT&T needs to sell 310,000 of the 4GB ($500) model, or 258,334 of the 8GB ($600) model. Since I suspect that the sales ratio of iPhone models will be 60% 8GB and 40% 4GB, Apple/AT&T needs to sell 155,000 of the 8GB model and 116,000 of the 4GB model, with a grand total of 271,000 combined.
Based on the line at the Apple Store on 5th Avenue, which I can now see from my office on Madison Avenue, I’d say that the iPhone will beat “Ratatouille” in the opening dollars game.
Update: Posted a wrap-up of the amount of money each made based on analysts reports.
I found something the other day that’s a little annoying about the Mac. Since I only reboot once in a great while, usually when a security update forces me to, which isn’t very often, upon each reboot I am usually confronted by a lot of my software notifying me that updates are available, which causes me to spend the next little while downloading and installing said updates.
I’ve gone weeks, even months between reboots and also between application launches, and am annoyed when some applications have gone through five or more updates, mostly bug related updates, that I was not aware of.
This is not a problem with the Mac, per se, but rather with some of the automatic software checking libraries that are used. In fact, I blame lazy developers. There is a free, open source, library out there called Sparkle that a developer can add to their application to accomplish update checking, and many do. From a quick scan of the documentation, I gleamed that, by default, Sparkle checks for updates on application launch. Upon further quick glances, I further gleamed that it seems to be relatively easy for a developer to implement periodic checks, and that said periodic checks could be user configurable. The fact that some developers do not do this is just lazy.
Apple has sold 100 Million iPods. If we do the math since it was first sold at retail on November 10, 2001, that would be 1,977 days, which breaks the sales down as follows (averages based on a 24 hour day):
- 50,582 sold per day
- 2,108 sold per hour
- 35 sold per minute
- A little more than one sold every two seconds.
That’s an unbelievable amount when you really think about it. In the time it took me to write this post, more than 100 iPods were sold.
Apple, at this moment, is announcing an upgrade to Aperture. According to TUAW, it will have the following:
Aperture 1.5 has a new library system with better support for external storage, DVD’s, as well as RAID. This should make a lot of Aperture users happy. iLife integration is also new, with support for a plugins framework. Plugins for Gettyimages, iStockPhoto, Flickr are included with more on the way. The magnifying function has been improved and one can now magnifiy images up to 1600%. The XMP format is now supported for exporting image data. You can get information about a photo without the RAW file being available to Aperture (i.e. it is on a disconnected external device).
The support for external storage is huge. What good is having a photo library app if you can’t have most of the library offline?
1600% magnification? Might just be a bit of overkill, but if you’re going to do something, do it big!
XMP format support is nice. Those sidecar’s are important for application interop. Apple isn’t the only kid on the block, you know.
This 0.35 bump is nice. Shows that Apple is still improving it, but makes me hungry for v2.
The full list of improvements can be found at Apple’s Aperture site.
This past Tuesday saw Apple unveil new iPod Nano’s, update the fifth generation iPod, add games to the iPod, introduce movie downloads from the iTunes Music Store, and renamed it the iTunes Store (since downloading movies from a Music Store would seem silly).
The announcements were, as I expected, stopgap. All of them were uninspiring, save for one.
Continue reading . . .
Well, I’ve spent one year using a Mac as my main home computer. It’s been a learning experience for me and I wrote about it here.
The bottom line? I’m still using it, and will continue to do so.
I got my iBook back from Apple service on 1/12/06. Upon opening the box, I could see that there were now a few more scratches on the top of the laptop that weren’t there before, but nothing too bad.
I looked at the bottom and saw that there was a new battery. Upon opening it up and turning it on, I was greeted with the OS X 10.4 welcome movie and music. Wha?
I went through the initial setup, and sure enough, it was a new install. I looked at the work order and it shows what work was done on it…replaced the optical drive (good), replaced battery (good), replaced hard disk (bad). No clue why they had to replace the hard disk, but it’s a good thing I made a full backup prior to dropping it off.
Brought the iBook to the SoHo Apple store today. Craig at the Genius Bar looked a bit confused when I told him that I had half a DVD stuck in the DVD drive, but I showed him the other half and he sort of said, “Never seen that before.“
He took it into the back to see if one of the guys could jimmy it out, but no such luck.
It has to be sent out to be repaired. Will take about seven days.
I’ve been very happy using Safari most of the time. When designing web pages, it does a very good job of rendering the layout (after all, it is Acid 2 compliant, but only in a every specific sort of way). I have only one complaint.
The built-it pop-up blocker is actually quite good. It does a good job of blocking unwanted pop-ups and allowing the wanted ones (the one’s you click on something to launch them). The thing that kills me about it is that it doesn’t give any feedback when it blocks a pop-up.
Both IE and Firefox put a bar at the top of the page that alerts you that a pop-up was blocked. This is a nice feature so that you know when you click something and nothing happens, you can see that a pop-up was supposed to open, but the browser blocked it. Safari does not offer this.
This has only really been seen when a site uses Flash and launches a pop-up through a Flash link. Some sort of visual evidence that a pop-up was blocked would be most welcome.
Why does this sort of thing always happen to me?
So I have a DVD of Empire of the Sun, and it’s one of the older style, non-dual layer DVD’s where there are two physical sides, one side is the wide screen version of the movie, flip it over, and you can watch the extras.
The other day I noticed that the side of the extras had a crack in it. No clue how it got there, but the crack could not be seen on the movie side of the disc. In an effort to save the movie, I put it into my Windows DVD drive and tried to copy the VOB files to the hard drive. After attempting to copy it for several hours, Windows gave up and said it couldn’t be done.
So, I had the brilliant idea of throwing it in my iBook, you know, for the hell of it.
The iBook got a little further than Windows, but alas, it gave up on the copy too.
I then hit the eject button on the iBook, heard the little eject noise and saw the DVD spit out of the slot. It did not eject as far as it normally does, but I grabbed it and pulled. It didn’t feel any differently as I was taking it out, but once clear of the iBook, I noticed that the disc felt a little weird. It felt a little…flimsy. I looked at the disc, and lo and behold, IT WAS HALF THE DISC!
The top half of the disc (the extras side with the crack in it) was in my hand. Where did the other half go? I looked at the screen, and the DVD player came up and went to the menu for Empire of the Sun. Huh?
Oh, the movie portion of the disc was back in the iBook. No problem, I’ll just hit the little eject button again and…hmmm…it made the eject noise again, but no disc? Why is the movie playing again?
Yup, the movie half of the disc is stuck in the iBook. The extras half is in my hand. I guess a trip to the Apple store needs to be scheduled.
I use a program called TreeSize Pro at work to show me how a directory is being used. It’s really useful when I ask a user to clean up their home drive and they come back and say, “I need everything that’s in there and it’s all work related!“. After using the program and showing them that 90% of the space is taken up by MP3 and MPEG files, they generally change their tune (no pun intended).
I found a program for my Mac that’s even better. Disk Inventory X inventories your hard drive and shows you a map that shows you relative file sizes and sort of groups them based on the type and location of the files. Using it’s map, I was able to clean up about 15GB of unneeded data in about 5 minutes (damn GarageBand loops!).
While watching the Giants lose (and little Manning screw me in my fantasy league) I tried out the hack to get Safe Sleep working on my iBook G4 (mid-2005). I can tell you that it seems to work fine. Everything went to sleep and came back as expected. I did lose an RDP connection, but that’s to be expected since the network connection is gone during sleep (duh).
I’m not sure I’m going to keep it active all the time, but it’s nice to know it’s there.
The fine folks at TUAW have alerted me to the fact that someone figured out a hack that allows older iBook and PowerBooks to use the new Safe Sleep feature found on the latest PowerBooks.
Windows laptops have had this feature for a long time now. Basically, when you hibernate a laptop, it takes a few moments and saves the state of the memory to a special file on the hard disk. The laptop can then power down completely. When you turn it back on, it reloads the memory state from that special file and the laptop returns exactly how you left it. The main advantage is that while the laptop is hibernating, it is not using any battery power at all.
The latest PowerBooks added the “Safe Sleep” feature, but apparently there are just a few settings in NVRAM and OS X 10.4.3 that allow it to happen regardless of the hardware. You can find the hack here. I haven’t tried it, but I’ve got nothing better to do while watching the Giants, so I may give it a try. If I do, I’ll let you know how it goes.
Over the past few days there have been two updates to OS X 10.4. 10.4.3 came out on Monday and included a whole bunch of updates. I normally do not update any software with patches until a few days/weeks have passed because usually something breaks as a result of the update, and I don’t like being a guinea pig. That philosophy only works when I’m not waiting for the patch to fix something that isn’t working for me, as is the case with my AirPort problem.
I checked the Apple discussion to see what other people’s experiences were and if the update fixed their problem. There were reports of it fixing the problem for some people and not fixing the problem for others, so I decided to give it a go.
Continue reading . . .
About three weeks ago I upgraded the RAM in my iBook to the maximum 1.5GB. I had 768MB but I noticed that when I ran Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Safari, Firefox, Mail, iCal, Adium and another app or two, there was a five second “pinwheel” when switching apps, and i figured that upgrading the RAM was a pretty cheap way to increase performance. Every since then, every few days, I encountered a weird problem.
The problem happens without any clear event to trigger it, and happens every few days for me. The symptoms are as follows:
- The mouse response to the trackpad starts to jump around. It is as if the mouse on the screen freezes for a moment, then jumps across the screen in an attempt to catch up with the trackpad. This makes using the mouse very difficult.
- The kernal_task process starts taking up about 65% of the processor.
- The AirPort indicator in the menu bar loses at least one level of reception.
The only way to completely solve the problem, for the moment, is with a reboot. Stopping the AirPort does fix the kernal_task issue and mouse movement issue, but they both come right back as soon as you turn it back on. Also, when you turn the AirPort off and turn it back on, it may not reconnect to the wireless network.
I did a whole bunch of research and found quite a few threads in various forums that others were having a similar problem.
Continue reading . . .
Yesterday Apple finally announced what has long been rumored…a pro photo management application called Aperture. After looking through their web site on it I can say that it looks very good. I will never be able to run it well on my lowly little iBook, nor would I want to at $500 a copy, but it does make the amateur photographer inside of me drool.
Key features that I like are the fact that RAW seems to be treated like any other format, full EXIF/IPTC integration, hierarchical keywords/categorization, and non-destructive edits. It’s not a replacement for Photoshop, but I think it is a good organizational/management app, with some good basic quick editing built in. The light-table lupe is cool!
The main reason I’m happy to see this application is two-fold. First, following other Apple professional software, there will hopefully be an “Aperture Express” version available under $150 in the not too distant future, as well as a possible bulking up of iPhoto in the next version of iLife. The second will force other app manufacturers to improve their offerings since now there is a new 800 pound gorilla in the photo management space.
If someone would like to donate a Power Mac G5 with 30” Cinema display, and would throw in a copy of Aperture, I’m sure I wouldn’t mind.
One thing that I find so annoying on the Mac is how it chooses which application opens which file. It looks like by default it opens a file with the application that created it. On paper that makes sense, but not in the real world.
Example:
Let’s say that I have a JPG from my digital camera that I have in a directory. If I double-click on it, it will open in Preview.app. Good. Now let’s say that I edit that JPG in Photoshop and save the edited file with a different name. If I double-click on that new file, it will open in Photoshop because that was the app that created it. I don’t want that!!! I want all JPGs to open with Preview.app. If I want to edit it in Photoshop, I’ll open Photoshop manually. I can’t tell you how annoying it is to double-click on a JPG to quickly view it and then watch as Photoshop takes a minute to open and load all plug-ins, etc., when I’m just going to close it in a moment anyway.
I understand that to keep the size of the 12” iBook as small as possible, Apple had to make some hard decisions about which keys to leave off the keyboard to save space. Unfortunately, some of the keys are the very keys I use all the time. Page Up, Page Down, Delete (not Backspace), Home and End are all keys that did not make the cut. I really think that if they cut down the size of the mouse button, they could have gotten an extra row of keys on the keyboard at the top the size of the function keys. The addition of those five keys would make my life a lot easier. Yes, I am aware that I can accomplish all those functions by using a combination of keys, but that requires two hands in most cases.
I really hope that when Apple introduces their Intel based laptops they will find a way to include those keys on the keyboard.
One more thing…how about a right mouse button?
