Wireless Sync

Apple is the king of “no wires.”  They did everything wireless first.  But the iPhone still needs a wire to sync.  They have the perfect syncing technology already: Bluetooth.  Why not permit syncing over Bluetooth? I don’t any limitations on why you can’t sync over wifi, let alone Bluetooth.  This seems like a no-brainer.

New Springboard

How we’ve made it to 3.0 without a better way to manage our apps, without even folders, is a mystery. It’s imperative, especially as iPhone owners install more and more apps, that there is a better way to manage and access apps. It’s time for a re-thought Springboard.

File Management

Seems awfully odd that I carry 8GB of disk space on my hip but can’t carry a single document without emailing it to myself.  It’s time to permit some storage of files on the device.  Older iPods allowed “disk use,” why can’t the iPhone? And if not, at least a manner of loading the files through iTunes would be appreciated.

Background Apps

The chants have been loud and plentiful. We want to run apps in the background. It’s not fair to say it will chip into battery life: we understand that. Let us run down our own devices as we wish, okay?

Suffice it to say it was incredible.  Using just my external hard drive, it read my backup, asked me what I wanted to restore (it found 4 things: Users, Network Settings, Applications, and “Files and Folders”).  I checked them all.  After a few simple questions, it told me that it would take just shy of 4 hours to complete.   Surprisingly, it was done a scant 150 minutes later.  When I booted up, I was amazed. Not only did everything come over, it was almost as if it was my exact machine.  Barely a noticeable difference, save speed and size.  

A few things slipped by, for example, I had changed /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg to a custom image, which it did not preserve.  I had changed some system icons, and those new icons did not preseve, but, for example, my external time machine drive had a custom icon, and it did remain.  The new install also required many updates I had already applied to my old OS X installation. 

Time Machine Restore: Incroyable!

All in all, though, I’ve never seen a smoother or faster migration.  The power of UNIX – everything living in predictable directories and segregated into “Library” folders, means that both backing up and restoring have a power that the Windows Registry simply can’t match.  In fact, in wading through all of this, it has a severe handicap when it comes to system migration due to the fact that data is mashed into so many inconsistent places.  

Apple has pissed me off quite a bit recently.  But – oh boy! – did they re-energize me with this one!

Update: worth noting, here is a great article on restoring from a time machine backup.

I’ll break this down into the following parts: OS X, iPhone, App Store.

OS X

Apple’s operating system, OS X, is still the best OS on the market today. I’ve heard several claims that Apple is proprietary and closed and doesn’t contribute to the open source ecosystem, but here is OS X. It’s built on an open source core, which is good, if nothing else, for auditing code flaws.

OS X is still the most beautiful experience out there, and still gets in my way the least when I’m trying to do work. Webkit still sits as the default browser in the form of step-brother Safari, and Webkit is not only open source, it’s also the available on Windows, super compliant, super fast, and it’s the core of Google’s Chrome browser.

OS X also uses open formats for mail storage, standard XML for most configuration files (yes, some plists are not plain text, but they are trivial to open as well), their backup software produces a browsable volume. Their native office suite produces clean XML file formats. The server system uses Open Directory, RSS, Apache, Ruby on Rails, iCal, WebDAV, Wiki software, Tomcat, L2TP/IPSec, PPTP, and more. SnowLeopard will implement CardDAV and ZFS. In fact, Apple has been pretty decent about using open source technologies. While they haven’t always given back in this form, certainly basing your apps and system around open formats is better than basing it on closed, proprietary systems, no?

I always say: “If you don’t want your open source work used in commercial derivatives, then don’t use a permissive license.” There’s no clause that says you have to give back when using the BSD license.

iPhone

I’m tired of talking about the iPhone. My first gen iPhone was the love of my life. It made me so happy. My 3G makes me cry. It used to crash all the time. Then 2.1 came out and fixed all of that. Except now I’m worse off.

Firstly, I get “Call Failed” about 3 times every day. Middle of a call, the call will simply drop and say “Call Failed.”

Secondly, I cannot install or update apps. I get a mysterious error telling me that the app will be available when I next login to iTunes on my computer. When I do, I get an error that I can’t update the app. Only solution? Delete the app and all app data from the phone, reinstall from scratch. Tons of people have this problem, Apple has no solution.

Thirdly, I’m tired of the feature debate on the internet. I cannot understand why Apple refuses to introduce certain features. Why, oh why, will they not introduce MMS, copy/paste, and voice dial to shut everyone up? What reason could they possibly have to willfully frustrate people? My God, this would quiet so many people down, if they would only introduce these fairly basic features. I haven’t seen a phone in several years that can’t do picture messaging, every time I tell someone I can’t get the messages, they wince in disbelief and say “The iPhone can’t do picture messaging?” As if that’s not enough, the ONLY medium to retrieve your messages is Flash, a technology NOT available on the iPhone! Say whaaaaaa?

I’m tired of it. Honestly, the experience has gotten so bad for me, as compared to my expectations, that I can’t say it’s impossible I’ll be on Android in 2 years. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still the best phone on the market by a longshot, but I don’t think it will maintain its top spot if things keep going as they are, with this lack of interest in catering to customer needs.

The App Store

I’ve been quiet for way too long about the App Store. Engadget had a great piece on Apple’s policies regarding the App Store. Apple is simply wrong. Period. They simply must get their act together.

The way Apple is behaving is unforgivable, and if I had anything to do with the App Store, I’d be looking to bail. Apple has made it clear, several times now, that they are not looking out for their developers. First off, the refuse to clarify the rules to qualify for the App Store. It appears that approval is an entirely subjective process. Secondly, the review comes after the app is already written, and therefore, the developer has no course of action and no appeal. That person or company’s time is just flat out wasted. Of course, there is no consistency either. A coin flipper appears to be ok, but a fart machine is “of limited utility.”

I own multiple Macs, multiple iPods, multiple iPhones. I’ve purchase family packs of OS X, family packs of iLife updates, and I buy applications that I like or need. I have an Apple TV, an Airport Extreme, an Airport Express, and apple headphone, cables, etc. And I have been directly responsible for “switching” at least 10 people. I am a very loyal Apple customer. But I feel betrayed. Betrayed because it’s clear Apple takes people like me – a tech inclined enthusiast – for granted. The fact that Apple doesn’t feel a need to open up about iPhone mistakes or App Store policies means that they feel no need to keep me in the loop. They do not feel as though I should care if things work, or that I should be able to plan. And I will certainly not dabble in Cocoa to play with iPhone programming, as anything I may write will be subjectively reviewed by God-knows-who and no particular rule will be applied.

Apple got to the top by doing things right and making a good and solid system. But as Windows 7 becomes more and more transparent via the E7 blog, all of Apple’s products and plans become more secretive. How can anyone invest their data and livelihood into this ecosystem?

Wake up Apple! Listen to us!

In the meantime, I fired up a copy of Windows XP inside Parallels and it installed quickly, easily, and painlessly, actually, and kind of surprisingly, a lot easier than it ever was to install Windows FOR REAL. It took about 40 minutes, and I never had to interact with it even once – Paralles installed XP, configured and entered the CD Key, and even added Parallels native drivers. I am impressed.

I installed PN2 as well as AVG antivirus and AVG anti-spyware (new app? Never used it before!). Then I tried out coherence mode. Beautiful. Absolutely beautfiul. Did I mention that Parallels put XP on my Mac network and I easily opened files on my Mac from my new Windows installation? Gorgeous.

So, here is the finished product: XP running on my Mac. Note that PN2 is sandwiched *between* Mac windows. Cleartype is on and works. The apps feels great. The whole thing is just … awesome. This is an amazing feat.

When I jumped over to a Mac in 2005, I asked Simon again about porting PN. Turns out this is pretty much impossible. Yes, SciTE and Scintilla can be tricked into running on a Mac, but to build PN you need WTL (Windows Template Library), which is based on ATL (Active Template Library), neither of which exists for OS X, nor can I find an effort to build a drop-in replacement for them for OS X. So building PN natively is not something that can be accomplished, it’s not something that can be ported – it must be rewritten. From scratch. And that ain’t gonna happen.

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So recently, when I found out that Parallels has something called “[[http://digg.com/search?s=parallels+coherence|coherence mode]]” which allows you to “disjoin” your windows from a desktop and layer them with OS X apps (probably not – more likely it’s just a transparent desktop). I decided it was time to take another swing at getting PN on my Mac. Since then, I’ve been happily using [[http://codingmonkeys.de|SubEthaEdit]], which has served me just fine, but I miss PN. Yes, I realize PN will not integrate terribly well with the OS X desktop experience, but I don’t care that much. I’m very handy with it.

Before taking the dive and going XP, I had a thought. What if instead of running XP, I ran [[http://reactos.org|ReactOS]]? ReactOS aims to be Windows binary compatible. If I could pull this off for free, I though, so much the better. I downloaded the latest release, ReactOS 0.3.1 and tried to boot it in my demo copy of the latest beta version of [[http://parallels.com|Parallels]]. Upon boot: “Unable to locate boot partition” D’oh.

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So I tried booting the ISO in “Q” which is a Cocoa-based front-end for Qemu. I was able to get it to boot and install. However, it was slow as molasses.

I found a newer build and was able to get it to install in Q. Again, it was so slow it was unusable, and it crashed every 30 seconds. iBrowser didn’t work at all, and Firefox would crash when I tried to download a file.

Several downloads later, after visiting the forums and getting lightning fast responses from “Ged,” one of the ReactOS forum admins, I located the nightly builds from the latest Subversion trunk. Interesting that the nightlies were VERY hit or miss. The latest nightly tagged -rel (for release, I’d imagine) would not install, it would give me an error. So I went back to Parallels and gave a Dec4 -dbg (for “debug”, natch) build a shot. And bingo – I got it installed.

ReactOS 0.4-svn ran about 200 times faster in Parallels than it did in Q. It was almost usable! So I jumped online and tried to download PN. Sadly though, double cliking the exe file would do one of two things: the first time, it would fail outright, sometimes displaying an errant “Next” button as though a phantom window might have surrounded it, but didn’t. The second time, it would simply bluescreen the entire OS and kick me back to the Parallels launch screen.

Click image for a larger view

Now, for the record, Parallels can bring your Mac to its knees, and I’m not even kidding a bit. When Parallels is unhappy, it will take down your entire system. Even though I never allocated over 256 MB and 4GB of my 2GB/250GB system to it, it would slow me down to NOTHING. Honestly – the dock would stop bouncing, the magnifcation would freeze, and if I could bring up Activity Monitor, it would show pmTool eating everything up (which is, itself, the Activity Monitor, which makes no sense). I can’t blame ReactOS for any of that. ReactOS looks cool, although it appears it has a long way to go before it’s much more than proof of concept. Very cool to see things like Notepad running like a champ, but I don’t think many EXEs will run out of the box. My next step is to run PN on ReactOS without an installer and see how that works.

So stay tuned for chapter 2 of this.

NeXTSTEP’s code is still seen today in OS X – if you poke around in the code or even some little hacks from the command like, you’ll still see objects referred to with their original “NS_” prefixes.

Anyway, check out the video. It’s long, but it’s really interesting.

Let me cut to the chase: it appears the vote has been hacked. Clearly, something fishy is going on here!

The winners are – get this – a cookbook, a sync manager, and a thing that makes your desktop look like the weather. I cannot believe it. I’m stunned. THIS is what Mac users wanted? THIS is the best we could come up with?

One guy dreamt big: you hum into your computer and it pitch corrects and allows you to create a song. Whoa! Cool!

One girl had an interesting idea: you take pictures of your clothes and then can keep a “virtual closet” where you can look at your clothes together and design outfits.” Holy crap – NOTHING I know of does this, even if I don’t have much of a need for it.

But you see, these are REAL apps that are the first of their kind. Who needs a new sync manager? And who but chefs will really use Cookbook? And I couldn’t care less about my desktop wallpaper matching the weather, being as though I can LOOK OUTSIDE if I want to know!

What a letdown.

Read More | Digg Story

received via the firsttube.com API

I got a new Core 2 Duo iMac recently, and I’ve been having problems with it for the last few days. Finder kept crashing, even after I removed ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Finder.plist and ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systemuiserver.plist, as I found might help onthe internet. It would crash during a slideshow, it would crash when I opened the “About this Mac” window and then just closed it, it would crash all the time.

Eventually, I traced it back not to Uno, which was the original suspect, but rather Stoplight, which is a SIMBL bundle, and that was the problem. That application crashed my system reliably. Thank God I don’t have to rebuild it again.

What I really want to talk about is rebuilding a Mac from zero. When I moved from the iBook to the MacBook Pro, I used the Migration Assistant, which is an amazing tool. Unmatched by anything in Windows, you literally plug it in and let it transfer everything – apps, settings, files, etc – to the new Mac. You log in, and – boom! – OS X feels like the same thing you just left behind, from your desktop wallpaper to your keychain to your browser bookmarks.

But this time, I sold the MBP weeks before the new iMac arrived, so I had no migration assistant to work with. What I did have was

1) an external Firewire drive, but the data was two weeks old.
2) an external USB2 drive with a current exact copy of the drive (via CarbonCopyCloner).
3) A copy of my home directory on a USB2 drive.

So, I booted up and set myself up as a user. Nice to know that a Mac wil detect Bluetooth mouse and keyboard as part of the setup process. Windows never did that before!

First things first: I copied all of the apps I wanted over from the external USB2 imaged drive. Step 2, I copied over the contents of the “Application Support” folder in ~/Library. Then a few more library folders, such as ~/Library/Mail and ~/Library/Application Enhancers.

The next step was restoring my keychain. This was done via a simple replace. I simply overwrote ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain with the copy from my external and it was restored.

iTunes was a bit more complex – but only a bit. First I copied over my music library, which I do NOT keep in the default location of ~/Music/iTunes Library. I changed the preference in iTunes to point to my prefered location and then quit iTunes. Then I copied over two critical files: ~/Music/iTunes Library/iTunes Library.xml and ~/Music/iTunes Library/iTunes Library. Relaunching iTunes had everything there in one shot: playlists and all of my music. Now, since I had backed up on iTunes 6 and this Mac came with iTunes 7, it had to update my library data AND determine gapless playback for over 5000 songs, which took some time. The nI fetch cover art, which took some time too. After that, I got a very odd error: “Cannot launch iTunes. There is not enough free memory.” Hmm… that’s odd. I have 2GB of memory, of which I’m using less than 300MB, but iTunes can’t open.

Long story short – after some internet searches, I had to download and reinstall iTunes, which is more complex than you’d think, because if you don’t remove iTunes.app AND the iTunes components from /System/Library/Reciepts/, it won’t install at all. That fixed the problem, which was odd. One site suggested it was because of a haxie I use called UNO.

Anyway, after that, I launched iPhoto and guess what – it worked perfectly on the first shot. How satisfying.

All in all, it took about 2 hours of actual work time to get myself back up and running and that was with fooling around in the middle. I’m extremely happy with how quickly one can rebuild a Mac without using the included tools.

In truth, at its core, if you just back up your home directly and your /Applications folder, you will have everything you need for the most part. Having done a rebuild of Windows machines more times than I’d care to remember, this is just cake. Absolute cake.

So, what should I show him? I’ve decided to highlight application installation/removal, moving/managing open files, iLife integration, keyboard shortcuts, incredible apps such as iPhoto, the file system structure (backup your home dir, all your crucial data is there), and of course, Spotlight.

Am I forgetting anything important?

Coolest Monk Ever
This dude can balance himself on ONE FINGER. This is incredible.

Leia’s Metal Bikini
Leia’s Jedi-era metal bikini as worn by fans. Yummy!

A note on OS X’s kernel_task
This one is a little nerdy, but it’s an excellent article on WTF kernel_task is and why it’s always present

Bullet Bill
Play Super Mario Brothers as…. the bullet?!

Girl caught stripping by mom
A girl with a webcam and a boyfriend gets caught by her mom. Hilarious!

CRAZY Russian Experiments
This video, thus far thought to be real, is from a 1940′s Soviet lab. Amongst the things on the film: keeping a dog’s HEAD alive without the body (about 5:32 in) and killing a dog and bringing it back to life. Yes. Seriously.

Family Guy Behind the Scenes
Did you know that Cleveland is a skinny white guy? Watch the cast recording some lines.

Shadow copies, at least in the current Volume Shadow Copy implementation, are most definitely NOT “exactly” the same thing as Time Machine. While VSC is very similar, it’s designed to do snapshots at certain times. This is fine for most restores, but in general, if you modify a document several times, you only have the version at the time of the snapshot. As I understand Time Machine, it does a snapshot at modification time, so you have each modification.

This might seem like a marginal difference, but in reality, it’s anything but trivial. This is a world of difference and nothing like this currently exists in a usable form in the base install of ANY consumer OS today. So while it may not be a new idea, it certainly IS innovation.

Children’s drawings of Winnie the Pooh, redrawn by talented artists
This reminds me of The Monster Engine. Very cool.

http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?306
Kinda old, but an interesting look at the development of OS X and Vista.

A funny picture

A fantastic optical illusion