Category Archives: Apple

Down with iTunes

iTunesOne more thing before we get started with today’s Macworld Expo craziness. Regarding whatever Apple’s going to announce at Steve Jobs’ much-anticipated keynote address in just a few hours: if it’s a new device of some kind, whether an Apple-branded mobile phone, a set-top box, a P.D.A. or a space age massage chair, then I hope it doesn’t sync with iTunes.

That is, I want it to sync with my Mac, of course, but I just don’t want that process to be handled through iTunes.

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Everything You Ever Wanted in an Apple Phone

For the past few months, I’ve carried around my Treo 650 smart phone with something very much like abandon. I’ve dropped it, tossed it, scratched it and let it tumble about inside of my briefcase, alongside my housekeys and assorted other sharp and unfriendly objects, without much care for its overall condition.

All of this, I can afford to do because since late last summer, there has been an almost irrefutable tide of rumor and allegation suggesting that Apple Computer will debut a brand new and potentially revolutionary mobile phone at next week’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Never mind that there’s been scant little evidence to corroborate these claims; this telephone’s impending announcement seems assured at least insofar as sheer desire and expectation are able to create technology products out of thin air.

This inevitability figures in prominently with my ongoing relationship with my Treo. I’ve long been dissatisfied with the 650’s bulky form factor and antiquated operating system, and I’ve been operating under the assumption that whatever Steve Jobs announces next week is going to replace my current phone, so why bother with preciousness? As soon as that new phone hits the market, goodbye Treo.

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Lookin’ for the Next Quicken

Quicken for MacintoshFor more than a decade, I’ve been using Intuit’s Quicken for Macintosh to manage my personal finances. Once upon a time, it was an elegant piece of software engineering — for anyone who’d ever balanced a checkbook, Quicken’s user interface, at least in the early days, was eminently intuitive. It worked exactly the way you’d expect it to.

Nowadays, it’s arguable whether the application has successfully retained that ease of use, or whether it’s driven off the cliff of bloat and accretion. But I know a few things for sure: for me, the Quicken franchise feels neglected, even while, as a user, I feel continually taken advantage of.

To begin with, I don’t think anyone would argue the fact that the Macintosh version consistently lags behind the Windows version in development and sophistication, and it only barely feels like a truly well-behaved software citizen on my Mac. In spite of this poor state of affairs, I feel regularly bamboozled by what I call ‘the Quicken tax,’ a combination of additional online fees that my bank charges me for accessing my account via Quicken, and the regular, forced software upgrades that Intuit demands I purchase from them every few years when they cut off support for older versions.

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Lookin’ for the Next Quicken

Quicken for MacintoshFor more than a decade, I’ve been using Intuit’s Quicken for Macintosh to manage my personal finances. Once upon a time, it was an elegant piece of software engineering — for anyone who’d ever balanced a checkbook, Quicken’s user interface, at least in the early days, was eminently intuitive. It worked exactly the way you’d expect it to.

Nowadays, it’s arguable whether the application has successfully retained that ease of use, or whether it’s driven off the cliff of bloat and accretion. But I know a few things for sure: for me, the Quicken franchise feels neglected, even while, as a user, I feel continually taken advantage of.

To begin with, I don’t think anyone would argue the fact that the Macintosh version consistently lags behind the Windows version in development and sophistication, and it only barely feels like a truly well-behaved software citizen on my Mac. In spite of this poor state of affairs, I feel regularly bamboozled by what I call ‘the Quicken tax,’ a combination of additional online fees that my bank charges me for accessing my account via Quicken, and the regular, forced software upgrades that Intuit demands I purchase from them every few years when they cut off support for older versions.

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A Postal Fix

MailJust an update on my 24-inch iMac troubles: as soon as I got serious about removing Rosetta-reliant applications from my system, things got better. My conclusion, though, is that the whole machine suffers from a woeful lack of system memory… there was some confusion with the order when I bought it, and I ended up with only one gigabyte of RAM. What I need to do, ultimately, is to max it out to its full three gigabyte potential. Cha-ching!

In the meantime, one of the things that’s really seemed to help is ditching Microsoft Entourage for Apple’s Mail program. I did this with something of a heavy heart, as I’ve been an Entourage user since day one, at least six years. In spite of how clunky and ineffective I think most of the Microsoft Office suite is (on any platform), Entourage has always struck me as a class act. It’s frequently showcased the very best of what Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit had to offer, and I’ve been very comfortable inside the program for a very long time.

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Simpler and Simplerer

After using the Kinkless Getting Things Done system to manage all of my to do items for months, I ultimately had to set it aside. I’m just not up to the task of maintaining the system anymore; not that it was particularly difficult, but it did, on occasion, ‘hiccup’ on me, and to do items and projects would fall out of sync with one another. I just don’t think I have the energy in life right now to troubleshoot things like that that just shouldn’t need troubleshooting.

(This is really the fault of the whole damn concept of synchronization, which, at this stage in the maturity of software, is unbelievably anemic. But that’s another discussion entirely.)

Instead, I’m turning to Mori, a simple note-keeper application from Jesse Grossjean’s Hog Bay Software. Mori is a descendant of Hog Bay Notebook that adds some nifty new features like robust Spotlight support and, er, some others that I don’t really use. Mostly, I turn to Mori because it does what Hog Bay Notebook did so very well: conveniently bundle together what are essentially RTF-based TextEdit files into a hierarchical file system. Put more simply, it takes a bunch of not particularly fancy text documents and allows you to edit and manage them in a single window. There’s no context lists, no project hierarchies, no synchronization or database — none of the things that kGTD does. It’s dead simple.

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Housebreaking an iMac

iMacThere’s a witch hunt going on inside my new iMac; last night I made the resolution that I would excise from my hard drive as many applications as possible that rely on Apple’s Rosetta. That’s the supposedly invisible translation layer that Apple provides on its Intel-based Macintoshes in order that users may run programs originally written for the platform’s previous motherboard tenant, the PowerPC chip.

The reason is that, after several weeks of usage, I’m sufficiently fed up with the slow application switch times, the spinning beach balls and the unfortunately frequent crashes that I encounter using this Intel-based machine. I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate to blame Rosetta (I suppose it could be the relatively paltry 1 Gigabyte of RAM that I have installed, but if that’s a more accurate cause of my troubles, I’ll also say it’s an unreasonable one) but forgoing as much ‘dynamic translation’ as possible seems like as good a tactic as any for increasing the responsiveness of my machine.

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Listen Up, Adobe

AdobeSeveral weeks ago, at his personal Web site Design by Fire, former Adobe employee Andrei Herasimchuk published an open letter to John Warnock, co-founder and spiritual father of Adobe Inc. In it, Herasimchuk proposed the idea of making a selection of Adobe’s highly popular typefaces — Caslon, Franklin Gothic, Helvetica Neue, and others — available to the public under an open source license. The idea would be to reshape — and improve — the typographic climate for Web designers through a newfound ubiquity of these generally well-regarded typefaces.

It’s a terrific concept that I fully support, but it’s probably best described as ‘a long shot’ in the grand scheme of things. It’s true that Adobe would generate a tremendous amount of good will by open sourcing a slate of very useful typefaces, but I think I have an even better idea for Adobe to totally hit a home run in the near term, and without compromising any of their existing businesses. Ready for my crazy idea? Here goes; make the next version of the company’s Creative Suite software not totally suck. Crazy, right?

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Big and Fast and Slow

Things have been quiet here because my new iMac arrived at the end of last week. I’ve been diligently getting it set up so I can do some serious work with it; it’s kind of amazing how many little utilities, tweaks and additions to the operating system have become must-haves for me to get things done.

After owning laptops for so long — and after having spent nearly three years with a diminutive 12-in. PowerBook — working on a desktop takes some getting used to. Having such an emphatic statement of computing power displayed so prominently on my desktop is a new experience; this iMac is a beautiful thing of no particular shyness. It’s bright, bold and immense — I mean huge. Mousing up to the top right of my screen feels like an unnaturally long trip; it’s a little like reaching for a jar from the top shelf in my kitchen.

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A Browser Back from the Brink

OmniWeb 5.5The latest version of OmniWeb, which is perhaps best described as ‘the Macintosh browser you pay for,’ is out on the streets, just now emergent from its long beta gestation period. Version 5.5 finally brings us a third-party browser based on Apple’s now open source WebKit framework, which puts it nicely in line with Safari with regard to rendering fidelity and Macintosh fit and finish. On top of that, it faithfully re-creates virtually all of OmniWeb 5’s winning features: visual tabs, page source editing with instant previews, expandable text-entry boxes, etc.

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