Yellow Swordfish

The Tame Leopard

Having waited for at least the first update from Apple to arrive, I finally bought Leopard (OS/X 10.5) and have now installed it onto my iMac. Now as anyone who may have passed this way over the last two and half years will know - I am a big fan of Macs and OS/X and would never be able to go back to Windows. But I am also a vocal critic of Apple and the things they get wrong. And the biggest thing they get wrong as far as I am concerned is the arrogant certainty with which they always tell you - ‘things just work’. They invariably don’t of course.

It’s the little things that would fluster the non-Mac literate and get them searching the Apple support website - except of course that they wouldn’t be able to because Leopard totally failed to find my Apple Airport WiFi Base Station and even when it finally did it failed to notice that there was actually a fast and juicy internet connection throbbing through it. To find that meant setting up the base station again except, of course, that the Airport Utility couldn’t find it for a long while. I lost count of the reboots.

The other problem is that when you finally do get connected up and can visit the Apple support pages for a little help with this and that, actually finding anything useful is a bit like finding a decent turkey in the local supermarkets late on Christmas Eve. Sure, you can find hints and a forum full of others going on and on about how things ‘just don’t work’ but when you do find what you need you’re back up against that wall. ‘Just do this, this and that and everything will be fine’. But it never bloody well is fine. The Apple attempt to make everything simple to setup and use and their zealous belief that they have done just that is the one thing that drives me to despair. If you need software help with anything Apple the last people to look to are Apple themselves.

Other than that - Leopard is….. pretty. But I really wanted to take advantage of Time Machine hence the upgrade.

Now here’s something else that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere - although unlike real Mac fan-boys I don’t actually read every word published so it probably has been. My first upgrade was from Jaguar to Panther. Jaguar, I recall, had a few games that weren’t that bad. Panther came bundled with a pre-licensed copy of the wonderful ‘Art Directors Toolkit’. Tiger came bundled with some more simple games and a pre-licensed copy of ‘Comic Life’. Leopard comes bundled with… er… nothing. Not even promotional 30 day tryouts of Pages! This is not a complaint as such, just an observation that surprised me.

Extremely Annoying

A few days ago I reported my frustration with trying to get the Apple Airport Extreme WiFi Base Station to work with a Windows XP box and I would like to thank the people who offered advice, none of which, sadly, helped any.

But thanks to Samuel Lai at Drive Deactivated the problem has been resolved and once again it is one of those frustrations that Apple heap on their users by their own annoying stupidity. And, for anyone else who may just venture here with the same problem, the resolution is painfully simple.

The Airport - at least the one sold in the UK - is preset to broadcast on channel 13. In the UK, channels 1 to 13 are all available for wifi use. In the USA however, regulations restrict users to channels 1 to 11. And PCI wifi card manufacturers almost invariably preset their card’s country setting to the US thereby excluding excluding channel 12 and thus excluding the Airport as configured out of the box. Change the channel on the Airport and as if by magic, up it pops in the Windows list of wifi networks. Instantly!

And all Apple had to do was use some common sense like all other manufacturers. But this is too much to ask. It just doesn’t seem to be the Apple way.

Apple Extreme

It’s no secret that over the last four years I have been a committed fan of the Apple Mac. Ask me what computer you should buy and the answer is easy. I still find it more of a joy to use from day to day and now get hopelessly stuck whenever ny wife asks for help with her Dell box running XP. But I am not blind to the many failings of Apple and those failings are legion. From poor or, in many cases, nonexistent documentation to software that does things the ‘Apple way’ or not at all. The documentation, or lack thereof, seems to stem from an extremely arrogant position that their stuff just works. Which would be fine if it did. But much of the time, it just doesn’t.

When my LinkSys wireless access point started to play up and it became obvious that I was going to have to replace it I decided that I would forgo the ugly little box with the plethora of flashing lights and sticky out antenna and invest in the Apple Airport Extreme base station. I mean just look at it. Simple elegance with one small green light on the front to let you know it hasn’t dozed off. But what I really liked was the ability to plug an external USB drive into it for backup and a USB printer - both of which can be shared by anyone on the network. The small little booklet basically said, plug in the cables, turn it on and like magic, it would just work. We are Apple, it said. Our stuff just works. You don’t need a troubleshooting section because nothing is going to go wrong. Just you wait and see…

And did it work? Of course it didn’t. Cabled it up without extra drive or printer, turned it on sitting net to my iMac and yes - my iMac found it. Ran the setup utility and all seemed well. Except after setting it up (correctly I might add - I know what I’m doing) the iMac lost it immediately. I wont bore you with the details of the next frustrating hour trying to work out why whatever I entered into the configuration of this damn thing it always ended up telling me it’s IP address was 10.0.0.1 which ain’t what my network uses. The answer was in an update to the software that had only been released the day before. Download that and then it all worked. So it was a god job I didn’t try and set this thing up four weeks ago when I actually bought it as it would have been flattened by now on the road outside after having thrown it through my window.

My wife’s Dell however refuses to admit to it’s existence. Apple claim all innocently that as long as the card in the Dell is 802.11g compatible then I will have no problem. They are, of course, wrong again. Oddly enough the Dell can see the disk and connect to it. It can print using the printer. It can run the Airport utility and configure it. But can it actually ’see’ it. Like buggery it can’t. And notably, the threads on the Apple support forum that all ask why this is happening, go unanswered.

It’s very pretty though.

iHate The iPhone Already

So - the USA is now just a few days away from the launch of the much discussed iPhone from Apple. At last. I already hate the bloody thing.

As an Apple Mac user I do tend to peruse the odd ‘Mac’ website and subscribe to a small handful of Apple related feeds. I like to know what software is being released and pick up the tips that abound at such places. But for the last couple of months it’s been all bloody iPhone this and iPhone that and “I can’t wait to get my iPhone” and I am sick to death of it.

So I figure it goes public on the 29th June. Let’s say another 5 or 6 days of people publishing gushing stories of what they did with their new toy. Then there will be two or three weeks of horror stories as the truth sets in.

And then perhaps things can get back to normal.

Apple In The Spotlight

The Apple Mac world was, as usual, pumped up with adrenaline yesterday awaiting the keynote from Steve Jobs at the Developers Conference and expecting great things. Of particular interest to me, as I have little interest in the much anticipated iPhone, were the as-yet unannounced and ’secret’ new features of the forthcoming Leopard - or OSX 10.5.

To put it mildly, general consensus from the techie press this morning, now that the keynote has been properly evaluated, seems to be one of immense disappointment - the first time I have seen a Jobs presentation so heavily criticised since I switched to Macs back in 2004. But there are two ‘missing’ features from the Leopard roll-call that seem to have not been mentioned by most - if any.

The first - Finder - gets a mention as at least it has undergone a face-lift but I don’t see anything actually that useful. Cosmetic yes - but useful? Apple has failed consistently (in my experience to date) to actually turn Finder into the tool it needs to be and all that Leopard seems to be adding is eye-candy. But it is the other omission that seems to have gone unnoticed and a look at the new Leopard Features web pages doesn’t seem to even give it a mention. And that is Spotlight.

Introduced with much fanfare and hype in Tiger, Spotlight, the indexing and search tool, is a total mess and disaster. OK it finds stuff, but the way the data is presented ought to receive awards for one of the worse UI’s ever developed. It really is unusable and I resent the space it even takes up on my menubar yet alone the background processing that is going on for which Apple have failed to give me a switch to turn off.

Yet Spotlight, given a usable interface, could be such an excellent and useful tool. Sad then that it appears to have been ignored. Unless, of course, it is still a secret!

So looks like when Leopard hits, I’ll be sticking with the excellent Path Finder for both jobs.

My Fourth Apple Mac Anniversary

I am in the middle of moving, collating and collecting together all the little bits of personal and important data that I keep on my computer - an early spring clean so as to speak - when I stumbled across the invoice for my first Apple Mac and realised that today is my fourth anniversary as a Mac user. And, as I have been from time to time, writing up my thoughts and experiences moving from a long time relationship with Microsoft to the glossy Apple, it seemed like a good time to take stock and look at the small handful of things that still annoy even after all this time. And the best reason for that, of course, is that in the past when I have voiced a gripe I have more often than not been helped out with some advice on how to curb the errant behaviour I dislike.

On the whole of course, I am fully integrated into the ‘Mac Way’. Nowadays, when occasionally faced with a Windows machine, I feel lost and find it hard to dredge up the memory of where things are but being fully immersed in the ‘Mac Way’ is not the same thing as being happy with the way that OSX struts its stuff. There are still some major annoyances.

Take, for example, the menu bar. I have got used to the single menu bar at the top of the screen but it’s ’stickiness’ often causes me to curse loudly. As I don’t like to have too many windows open at a time - I just don’t like clutter - I tend to close a window when done. So the one thing that happens at least once a day is I try and perform a shortcut keystroke against the application that is on ‘top’ only to find the menu belongs to an application I just closed the window of. Typical of this is Mail. I’m browsing using Firefox and I open Mail. When finished with Mail I close the window and Firefox is back on top. And I press the Apple/T combination to open a new Firefox tab and get the ‘Choose Font’ dialogue instead. Press Apple/Q on that and bloody Mail quits. The only way, as far as I am aware, of closing the font dialogue is to click on that extra small little button top left. Some serious finger accuracy on the trackpad. What I want, what I really, really want, is for the menu to reflect the application window that is open on top of all the others. When I close the Mail window I want the menu bar to change to Firefox. And yes, I know in this example the Mail application is still open - but the window that the font dialog is aimed at isn’t.

Next up - the save dialog. Most seem OK but every now and then in some app or other I get a save dialogue that has decided for me where I am going to save this file and it is going to damn well put it there if it’s the last thing it does! In all fairness it will let me save the file deeper into the folder structure but it ain’t going to let me navigate to a folder earlier in the path than where it opened. What the hell is that all about?

And why is it that some applications - or more likely most applications - will not let me - the God of this machine - decide where I want the data stored? I just installed a copy of Barebones Yojimbo (for the aforesaid spring clean) and nowhere do I get this choice. I want to make a copy of this so I am forced to hunt it down. This seems to me a strange paradox. I am constantly being told that the Apple Mac and OSX offer a more sophisticated experience for the more sophisticated user, yet when it comes time to choose where I want things stored I am not allowed to make those decisions.

Which leads nicely into the total lack of good uninstall routines for applications. Sure, just send the app to the trash and it’s gone - poof! The ‘package’ structure makes it so much easier to get rid of something no longer wanted. But if I want to eradicate Yojimbo - for example - removing the app is only half the problem. The data is still there lurking in the bowels. So are the preference settings and Steve Jobs knows what else? Sometimes large quantities of little files get left orphaned with absolutely no way of getting rid of them except by trawling the file system and making educated guesses.

And finally how could I not mention the Finder. What a total and unmitigated heap of crap that is!

Hasta La Vista

OK, so it’s an awful title and has almost certainly been overused - but, as usual, I couldn’t resist it.

Being now an almost veteran Mac user (well since OSX in any case, not a die-hard 84 man), I thank my son who himself is starting to lean Macwards, for my best laugh of the day which you too can enjoy at The Joy Of Tech.

The Apple Of Bill’s Eye

I got a little laugh from this one, gleaned from MacWorld today.

Microsoft convened a meeting with a small group of bloggers (still hate that word!) to discuss the upcoming Mix Conference in Las Vegas. Highlight of the meeting was intended to be a talk and in-depth chat with Bill Gates on the future of DRM.

But as Michael Arrington, who was at the meeting, let known:

The real highlight of the day was seeing the look on Gates’ face when he walked into the room and every single one of us had a Mac open on the desk in front of us – Niall Kennedy had also set up a makeshift wifi network using an AirPort.

You’ve got to chuckle haven’t you?

Glossy Apples

I recently decided to retire my Apple PowerBook and invest in a new MacBook Pro - despite the awful name. But I fancied the go-faster Intel Duo CPU and had already set my heart on 17 wonderful inches of screen real estate. The problem, as I saw it, was whether to go with the normal or ‘glossy’ screen. So I set out to try and find the advantages and disadvantages of both. Which proved somewhat difficult.

The Apple website was most uninstructive - seemingly taking no side in the debate on which was best. Not even recommendations determined by usage. My local Apple dealer (a reseller not Apple store) is staffed by a couple of friendly guys who seem to know an awful lot about iPods but very little else. One tried to spin me a yarn about the colour accuracy being less true on glossy screens but couldn’t back it up with any hard evidence - who knows he might be right but I rather think he was babbling and trying to sound clever. The other looked blank and was obviously wondering why I wasn’t in the shop to buy an iPod.

Which left the internet. There are literally hundreds of websites out there that pay homage to the Mac so I figured there must be some serious debate on this issue. Well - there might be but I couldn’t find it. What I did find, was a lot of discussion on why Apple had gone down this route - the most popular suggestion being that glossy displays are easier and cheaper to manufacture. And again - they might be right. Oh yes - there was also the odd comment that glossy screens are more reflective but that, it seems to me, is just stating the obvious.

To cut a long story short and acting on a hunch, I bought the glossy display and as far as I am concerned it is fantastic. And the main reason I say this is that for the first time I can take my laptop out into the garden, sit in the bright sun, and am still able to both see and read the content on the screen. I know the new MacBook line (both) state that the displays are brighter but I’m not convinced I could do this so easily with the traditional display. OK - I wouldn’t tackle a Photoshop session in the bright sun but I can easily do what I am doing now - and that, to me, is well worth it.

Alt-3

Whilst perusing my site statistics earlier, I couldn’t help noticing that, as usual, one item that I actually wrote back in June 2005, still attracts a lot of traffic. For over a year it has been on the front page of Google - depending on the search term of course - and is almost certainly my most heavily read item. And the title of this piece is basically the answer to the old piece - Who Hid The Hash Key?. I am, of course, talking about the Apple Mac keyboard.

It’s actually quite nice to know that I was not alone in being totally mystified about the missing hash key which, if nothing else, I need to use regularly for constructing CSS. And it just goes to show that Mac Switchers everywhere are still mystified by its absence.

Actually, I am still mystified by its absence.

Thanks Go To Trevor At OSXFAQ

I hate to go on about Apple support again but having finally got my problems resolved it is so not because of any help from Apple, I just need to say it!

Having spent hours trawling through Apple technical documents on their website and having waited some 7 days to get a response to what was, actually, a very simple question, I gave up and posted the same question on the rather excellent OSXFAQ where I got a response for a very helpful chap called Trevor within a couple of hours - who knew exactly what he was talking about and what I needed to know. No wait. No fuss. Problem resolved.

So I can’t recommend OSXFAQ enough and I can’t recommend Apply support at all.