Category Archives: Apple

All Together Now!

RendezvousToday at Behavior, we finally got a majority of the office running iTunes, thanks to the Windows version of this excellent music management, shopping and playing software that was released recently by Apple. This means both the Windows machines and the Macintoshes were all working together without a hitch, and much more seamlessly than just about any other cross-platform technology I’ve ever used.

This is all thanks to Apple’s superb implementation of the Zeroconf technology standard — Apple calls it Rendezvous — which makes networking and sharing ridiculously easy. We had already been using this between the Macs, but being able to see my colleagues’s Windows-bound iTunes music with absolutely no effort left me duly impressed.

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Big Black Cat

PantherApple promised to deliver Panther — the next major upgrade to Mac OS X — by the end of the year, which to my mind meant that we’d be lucky to see it by early December. Imagine my surprise when they announced that it would ship as soon as 24 Oct — just a little over two weeks from today — and that it’s available for pre-order immediately. When I heard this, I started getting excited in the way that one might get excited for a long-awaited movie release, or a new album from a favorite band; the anticipation suddenly took on a tangible quality, and I started imagining myself actually sitting in front of a computer — maybe even a new computer — and actually using, rather than reading about, this software.

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Lacking in Confidence

Web ConfidentialAll of my passwords and user data have been stored in a home-brewed FileMaker Pro database for years, but recently worries about poor security finally started getting to me. So I downloaded and registered Alco Bloom’s Web Confidential, which bills itself as “the most powerful password manager on the Macintosh.” Normally when I write a post like this, it’s with the intent of praising the entrepreneurial spirit of the lone shareware author, and I had assumed that I would become a Web Confidential fan more or less immediately. The software has been highly praised in Mac circles for years as an indispensable, highly secure tool for managing the bewildering array of security permissions with which Web surfers must contend.

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Fun with File Management

Path FinderCocoatech’s Path Finder is a replacement for the Mac OS X Finder that provides a multitude of geeky file management tools. It has a counterpart in the Windows world in the form PowerDesk, itself a geeky replacement for the Windows Explorer. Both of these programs subvert the ‘keep it simple stupid’ conventional wisdom of file management by adding lots of bells and whistles aimed at power users, but they’re also a lot of fun, at least for nerds.

I’ve been using the recently released version 3.0 of Path Finder for a few days, and it’s almost a home run. Its combination of management innovations, shortcuts and user-centric rearrangement of standard Finder interface elements is really excellent, a superb example of how third party developers can improve on basic operating system functionality. The only caveat is that it’s occasionally slow to refresh directory listings — not a huge shortcoming except for the fact that it completely disqualifies the program from truly replacing the Finder. Which is a shame, because I like it a lot.

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Different Thinking

Finding favorable writing about the Mac on the Web is easier than finding the names of your senators and representatives in Congress. Though the platform has a relatively minor share of the computing marketplace, there’s no shortage of highly enthusiastic voices — old and young, articulate and visceral — generating an endless litany of pro-Macintosh rhetoric.

Yet the nature of this writing, while invigorating, often fails on the point of making truly persuasive arguments for buying a new Macintosh instead of a new Windows machine, and certainly on the point of providing objective or sound reasoning. Which is to say, most of what you’ll read on the so-called Mac Web amounts to a kind of benign dogma. In the last few weeks, however, I’ve noticed a small number of articles of notably impressive quality, all of which are worth reading for Mac diehards, interested computing agnostics and maybe even for inveterate Windows users.

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Look Ma, No Wires

Belkin F5D7010After bringing home a DVR on Saturday, I made a second significant technological upgrade to our household on Sunday in the form of wireless 802.11b networking — finally. Our cable modem connection, which sits in the bedroom, now broadcasts a clean 802.11b signal throughout the apartment, thanks to a new Netgear MR814v2 wireless router which I managed to buy for a remarkable US$40, after rebates.

It astounds me that the price point for wireless networking has dropped so quickly, but it makes sense now that the slower 802.11b standard is rapidly being superseded by the faster 802.11g standard. At forty bucks, an 802.11b router is an incredible bargain, as most home networking needs will almost never exceed its 11Mbps limit. Even if, through some dramatic and unforseen alteration in my computing habits, my home network traffic demands 802.11g within a few months, then I’ll be able to comfortably discard this Netgear router knowing that it provided me a very economical entryway into the wireless world.

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The Hog Ate My Homework

Hog Bay NotebookI had more or less given up on the idea that I was ever going to find a replacement for Stickies when I read a very interesting article by Matt Neuberg in this week’s issue of TidBITS. Neuberg, in this latest in a series of articles on a sub-genre of software that might be called ‘snippet keepers,’ describes a supremely simple application that “…you can learn to use in about a minute — and [that] has an elegance and visual clarity that is simply stunning.” The software he was writing about is called Hog Bay Notebook.

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Adding Value by Removing Wires

Linksys WAP54GThe premium prices that Apple Computer charges for its hardware are hard enough to justify when it comes time to lay down the big cash for a new desktop or laptop, but it gets doubly hard to swallow when shopping around for commodity peripherals. Granted, wireless networking — Wi-Fi, if you prefer — can’t yet be said to be so ubiquitous that it can be classified as a commodity, but while shopping around for 802.11g wireless base stations, it seems hardly very far off. For literally days, I’ve been trying to decide between buying one of the more sensibly priced offerings, like the Linksys WAP54G, or spending nearly twice as much for the luxurious Apple AirPort.

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Remote Control

TimbuktuMy cold’s worse today than it was yesterday, so I am laid up in bed over at my girlfriend’s where the level of care and babying is at least several notches higher than back at my lonely little pad. Aside from napping and consuming lots of fluids, I’m spending a lot of time on my PowerBook using remote access software. First, Microsoft’s very clever Remote Desktop Client for Macintosh allows me to access my Windows PC at Behavior, as if I were sitting right there at the office — a very handy way to work from home.

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New Speed for an Old Mac

Power Mac G4 (AGP Graphics)My girlfriend’s Power Macintosh G4, formerly an ailing relic of the Mac OS 9.x era, is now a spiffy new Jaguar machine. A few days ago, I rolled up my sleeves, popped the tower’s side door open and installed the upgrades I bought at Macworld Expo: First, an additional 512MB RAM chip, which brings her grand total to 640MB. (To think, I once bought a pair of 16MB RAM modules for something around US$900!)

Second, I added a new IBM-Hitachi Deskstar 120GB internal hard drive. This saved me the hassle of having to pull off all the old data from the incumbent 20GB disk, and it gives her the added bonus of having two bootable internal drives. The Deskstar spins at 7200 rpm, which makes a much bigger difference than I had anticipated; the machine now seems to run much faster than its pokey old 450 MHz processor formerly allowed.

In fact, I had originally been skeptical about whether this Power Mac, which is already almost four years old, would perform acceptably under Mac OS X. Happily, I can report that with these additions its performance can be characterized as very responsive, and certainly more than sufficient for her not-unusual computing demands: email, Web browsing, MP3 playback, CD burning, instant messaging etc. Best of all, these upgrades cost a remarkably reasonable total of about US$210.

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