Category Archives: Apple

Back to Square One

Install Mac OS X Tiger
Between Friday night and this morning, and between trips to New Jersey and Brooklyn, I managed to find some time to get Mac OS X Tiger installed — all the while demonstrating quite admirable restraint and patience, I don’t mind saying, given how much of a lather I’ve been working up over the release of this latest version of my favorite operating system.

Part of that was the idea that dedicating a weekend to something so clearly geeky, while undeniably satisfying, might perhaps be a case of misplacing one’s personal priorities; I still endeavour to have some kind of balance in my life. Also, thinking in terms of ounces of prevention versus pounds of cure, I took great pains both to properly prepare for the upgrade and to perform the most extensive flavor of installation available.

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Catch a Tiger by the Tail

TigerJust prepare yourself for a veritable ‘perfect storm’ of bad puns on the word “tiger” when the latest version of Mac OS X ships tomorrow. Journalists have been saving them up for their headlines for months now and can’t wait to unleash them, just like users have been building up anticipation for months and can’t wait to install it. I know, because as the hour of its official release approaches, I get more and more worked up.

A co-worker at my office pre-ordered a copy a while ago (I did too, but from Amazon). When she checked on the shipment earlier in the week, they led her to believe it would arrive today, a day early. In excited anticipation, we made plans to install it this very afternoon… but the FedEx guy never showed up. Now I’m more anxious to get my hands on it than ever. Unfortunately, when the software is finally released for real tomorrow, I’ll be preoccupied with some personal obligations, and similarly through the rest of the weekend. It may not be until next week that I get it installed. That is, provided that a legal injunction doesn’t prevent Apple from shipping the software. Grrrrr… (Get it? Grrrrr?)

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Ooh, Ooh It’s Magic

MerlinIn the twenty-first century, software development has become incredibly easy: if you have a need for a program that you don’t think exists — like, say, a credible alternative to Microsoft Project that runs on Mac OS X— all you have to do is imagine it, then Google it or write about it on your weblog, and there it is; someone else has already thought of it. Somewhere, some enterprising and talented programmer has already coded it and tested it and even built a snazzy little Web site for it and it’s maybe even in its second or third major version. Just like magic.

It’s a cheeky sentiment, but I honestly feel that happens often enough to ring at least partly true. The most recent example being just yesterday, when I asked that very question about project planning software. As several very sharp readers pointed out to me in short order, there are at least a few excellent options out there that I had no idea existed. One of them is called Merlin. I downloaded it, gave it a spin and was immediately floored by how closely it matched what I had been looking for in vain: Gantt chart resource management and budgeting just like Microsoft Project — except Mac-like and elegant.

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Ooh, Ooh It’s Magic

MerlinIn the twenty-first century, software development has become incredibly easy: if you have a need for a program that you don’t think exists — like, say, a credible alternative to Microsoft Project that runs on Mac OS X— all you have to do is imagine it, then Google it or write about it on your weblog, and there it is; someone else has already thought of it. Somewhere, some enterprising and talented programmer has already coded it and tested it and even built a snazzy little Web site for it and it’s maybe even in its second or third major version. Just like magic.

It’s a cheeky sentiment, but I honestly feel that happens often enough to ring at least partly true. The most recent example being just yesterday, when I asked that very question about project planning software. As several very sharp readers pointed out to me in short order, there are at least a few excellent options out there that I had no idea existed. One of them is called Merlin. I downloaded it, gave it a spin and was immediately floored by how closely it matched what I had been looking for in vain: Gantt chart resource management and budgeting just like Microsoft Project — except Mac-like and elegant.

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We Need a (Project) Plan

It’s been surprising — very surprising — the number of people that I know who have made the switch to the Macintosh in the past year or so. It’s as if Apple’s “Switch” campaign, which stopped airing two years ago, is only now having a delayed effect. But really, what it’s about is that the smartest and most creative people are doing the smartest and most creative projects on the Mac. And yet there’s still a big hole in the platform’s offerings when it comes to pulling off great projects: project planning software.

The 800 pound gorilla in this niche, Microsoft Project, has its faults, to be sure. But really, that program is sufficiently fluid and pliable for serious work, and it has the added cachet of serving as a de facto standard for project plans nearly everywhere. At Behavior we use it extensively, and not just our project managers — I spend time in it frequently myself, and I reluctantly depend on it as a fine-grained, flexible tool for estimation, planning and tracking of fairly complex jobs.

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Podcasting Not All Hype After All

iPodderXThere are at least a few podcasting skeptics in my office, and until last week, you may as well have lumped me in among them. The technology seemed a bit too eagerly hyped to be really as cool as all that, plus I couldn’t justify finding the time to experiment with it. At some point, though, I downloaded the installer for iPodderX, probably the most well-known of the podcasting software aggregators (or whatever this particular sub-genre of software is termed), and installed it.

It was a week or two before I actually opened up the software and started to fiddle with it. In spite of its best efforts at imitating an Apple-style user interface, it’s not particularly elegant or intuitive, but I managed to get a few podcast feeds functioning and transferred to my iPod.

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Replacing iPod Earbuds

iPod EarbudsOkay, I’m getting a little concerned about iPod theft on New York City’s subways, which are up 24 percent over the same period last year, according to recent police reports. It’s been a long time since I really thought that anything I carried about my person was in danger of being stolen — or would make me a candidate for a mugging — in New York, but something about the ubiquity and attractiveness of iPods make that scenario seem not quite so far fetched now. I could just stop using my iPod on subways, but a less counter-intuitive and more agreeable solution would be to replace those telltale white earbuds with something a little more discreet. As a side benefit, it will prevent me from appearing, as a commenter suggested in a previous post I wrote about iPods in New York, to be a “tool of Apple.”

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Enhance Your Performance!

Enhance MeThe advice that some readers had for me in response to my complaining about Mac OS X’s tendency to develop troubles over time was: run a clean system and avoid third-party enhancements. It’s good advice and I’ve heard it lots of times over the years. At an old job, when the new Mac sysadmin first saw how many extensions and control panels I had running on Mac OS 9, he said, “Everywhere I go, there’s one guy that has like three rows of extension icons on the load screen. I guess you’re that guy here.” Guilty. I’m addicted to system utilities and enhancements, I must admit, but that doesn’t mean that I must resign myself entirely to the ill effects of them, does it?

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Just Like Starting Over

Mac OS X PantherMac OS X is great and all, but I’m feeling a little down on its susceptibility to the effects of accretion. My experiences with both Jaguar and Panther have been that life starts out all hunky dory when you have a new installation, but over time things gradually start to break down — utilities stop working, mysterious crashes occur, speed takes a hit. This is to be expected with complex operating systems, but it makes me pine a little bit for the old days of Mac OS 9, when you could clean out a system simply by moving files in and out of select folders and then reboot — now you need to run the Terminal and invoke all sorts of arcane UNIX-style commands and shit.

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Fine-Tuning iTunes

iTunes RatingsIt was about 11:00p the other night when I sat down in front of my computer, ostensibly to add a few new songs to my iTunes database so that I could load them onto my iPod photo. While I was at it, I decided to grab the attendant album cover artwork too, something that I’ve been doing more frequently since buying the iPod photo — these models displays covers nicely if diminutively on their color screens. There’s no rational motivation for wanting the artwork, except perhaps as a small way to compensate for the complete dissolution of visual design as a component of music in the digital age… but I’m not bitter about that.

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