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Here’s a quick tip that will allow you to see a a mounted USB drive or CD/DVD from the terminal in Mac OS X Snow Leopard (though this probably works in all versions of OS X)… cd /Volumes This is the location of all mounted drives, including CDs, DVDs, USB Hard Disks, Flash Drives and even Mobile Me’s iDisk – they should all be available as folders below “/Volumes”.
My first sight of the thing was of Steve Jobs holding it up and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was about the size of his head, 10″ screen and bezel included. I appreciate that this is an odd feature to look for but many of the rumours I’d read were touting a 7″ screen which to me (more later) would have been utterly pointless but 10″ is a good approximation of a page from a book or a small magazine. Sadly, along with this first sight came the bitter realisation that the thing was to be called the iPad, something I’m really going to struggle getting used to since it’s a crap name – please excuse my use of ‘the thing’ when referring to the new device. The design is very similar to that of the iPhone, except with a proportionally much larger bezel, making it look a lot more like a digital photo frame and though I’d bet money that this proportional imbalance will be reduced in future versions I also acknowledge that it may be intentional since you’re going to have to rest your thumbs somewhere whilst you’re not pawing at the capacitive screen. The weight is hard to gauge from presentations and so on but 1.5lbs seems weighty but maybe appropriately so, since you’ll want it to feel solid in your hands, I look forward to getting my hands on one to see what it really feels like to hold.
The price is an open verdict still since I’m in the UK but the dollar prices look pretty reasonable in my opinion, $499 for the 16GB WiFi version seems like a steal, though I’m sure I’ll end up getting the $829 64GB WiFi + 3G model since I’m highly likely to stick a tonne of video on it. If the UK pricing ends up being towards the harsher end of the scale (the British always get screwed but it’s usually by our own government so we’ve no-one to blame but ourselves) I may be tempted by the $699 WiFi-only version since I’m pretty sure I’ll be using it primarily at home.
The iPad is for people who want to grab their tablet off of the coffee table, quickly check their emails, see what’s in their calendar for the weekend and maybe pop open IMDB find out whether the guy in the film they’re watching is the same guy that was in Black Hawk Down and Enemy of the State*. A lot of people still have a PC situated at a desk which may be upstairs in a barely used room and unless you’ve taken the step yourself it’s almost impossible to express how your life can change when you go portable. It may sound overly dramatic but my life literally changed when I bought bought my Macbook, having my laptop constantly on standby down the side of the sofa means that any time I’m at home if I have an idea I can execute on it it, I can answer a question, book some tickets, contact my friends, etc. Through having the Internet by my side I’ve ended up in all sorts of adventures including Storm Chasing in the Midwest, discovering new music, attending festivals, going to gigs, exploring abandoned buildings and even meeting my girlfriend. Most people, especially families, warrant having a desktop – there are times when you need to sit at a desk and write essays, edit photos, etc. and because they’ve already got a desktop many people are put off buying a laptop as well and this is where the iPad comes in. Sure, you could have a laptop but this will be better at its core functions without any need for the complicated side of using a PC such as installing software, worrying about viruses and spyware, etc.
* Tom Sizemore BTW.
Have you ever wanted to keep a particular window on top of the others? I often want to watch video whilst I’m doing other things, either in Quicktime or more often a web video from YouTube or Vimeo – and thanks to Afloat I can (in fact I’m watching a Bruce Schneier talk right now). I first discovered Afloat quite a while back but when Snow Leopard was released it caused issues with PlugSuit, I just checked back (because I wanted to watch the Schneier video whilst surfing) and now there’s a Snow Leopard version as well as the old version for anyone still on Leopard. As far as I know it will work with any application and it’s totally free – get it now and check it out.
I’m not sure quite why people that make operating systems think that we’re all too stupid to understand what a file extension is, we need to know these things and sometimes we need to change the file extension but both Windows and Mac users have file extensions hidden by default. Here’s how to change this in Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard… 1. Select Finder > Preferences…
2. Then tick the ”Show all filename extensions” on the Advanced tab.
3. Quit the Preferences pane any you’re done.
The install ran well enough, I was a bit confused at first about whether the default mode was an “upgrade in place” or an “erase and reinstall” because the installer no longer offers a choice – the default is an upgrade in place so you don’t have to worry too much about losing all of your date (though it’s always worth backing up first). On my old Black MacBook I chose to erase the disk manually and do a fresh installation, mainly because I don’t tend to store much data on there so it was easy to back it up and I wanted to see how it worked from scratch – I didn’t have to worry about losing the iLife suite either because I lost that in the upgrade from Tiger to Leopard anyway. I was watching TV and doing other things so I don’t really know how long it took but it was probably a shade over half an hour for a slightly tweaked install, my 24″ iMac however took at least an hour but I did do an upgrade in place (too many apps to reinstall otherwise) and imagine that’s a little more complicated. The only incompatibility I encountered (constantly being asked for Admin password) was something called Plug Suit, it came as part of Afloat – a great little utility to keep selected windows on top of everything else but sadly does not work with Snow Leopard, a few Googles later and I managed to remove the plugin (instructions here).
On first boot you could quite easily think “hold on a minute, this is Leopard” because nothing really seems to have changed, the Welcome video and the nebula desktop are exactly the same, I even went to About This Mac to check that the version number had been upped from 10.5 to 10.6 (it had) to make sure I was actually using Snow Leopard. I really think Apple missed a trick here, for a company that’s usually so focused on marketing and user perception it seems bizarre to me that they wouldn’t take this opportunity to reinforce the value of the purchase in the customer’s mind by having an even cooler welcome video and a brand new (maybe very similar) default desktop background. I also think there should have been a (skippable) video or slideshow demonstrating “What’s new in Snow Leopard” just to help people appreciate the benefits they’ve got from the time and money they’ve put into the upgrade, it’s not that it’s really much money or time but I consider the fact that Apple didn’t do something like this as a ball dropped.
So you’ve probably guessed already that in the first instance I was a little disappointed, I even went to Apple’s Snow Leopard Refinements site to see what I could test and play with to get some inspiration. After using Snow Leopard for about half an hour though I was pretty certain of the speed improvements, even performing simple activities such as running the mouse along the Dock and opening TextEdit so I began to think to myself that for $29 (or in my case £39 for a 5-license Family Pack) the upgrade was worthwhile for the peformance increase alone.
It took a few days but I slowly began to realise that I was begining to feel the benefits of Snow Leopard, beyond the performance increases it’s the little changes that started to make a difference in how I used the OS. The most noticable change to me is that Exposé is now much cleaner and clearer, previously in Leopard the window arrangement was haphazard and therefore harder to comprehend in a split-second. I noticed that rather than command-tabbing through apps I kept coming back to Exposé, the new grid based layout is much clearer and makes it possible to switch tasks in sub-second times. I can’t really see what use I’ll get out of the Dock Exposé or the new Stacks as I’ve never really found a need for them in my workflow but they’re pretty slick and I guess it’s nice to know they’re there. The same goes for many of the other features although I’m quite excited about the potential applications developers might find for some of the ‘under the hood’ functionality such as Grand Central Despatch, Open CL and the future of 64-bit computing. I guess the new Quicktime is pretty sweet with its YouTube integration and screen/cam capturing but I’m not really planning to be the next LonelyGirl15 just yet so I’m not sure if I need that either.
If I were asked whether or not to upgrade right now I’d say almost certainly yes to home users but ‘wait’ to anyone that uses the Mac for their work, it’s still early days in terms of finding compatibility problems which is always a worry if your livlihood depends on your IT infrastructure. Other than that, I think it’s a great OS and I’ll look forward to making the comparison to Windows 7 when I get my pre-ordered copy in October.
Everyone living in a shared house will eventually run up against the problem of sharing broadband, especially if you’re downloading music, movies, games and system updates. I live with my girlfriend and a couple of days ago she was working from home and I really needed to download some Audible books for a long journey I had the next day, unfortunately whenever I tried to do this it kept knocking her off of her company’s VPN connection. Now, I’ve seen download managers and bittorrent clients with bandwidth restrictions but nothing that would throttle a web browser so I did a bit of Googling and found this helpful post. Basically I’d worked out that at full pelt I was getting 135Kbps and this caused a problem with the VPN connection so I figured that maybe a third of that (45Kbps) would be a fair amount of bandwith to take, to do implement the bandwidth cap I had to…
Once you’ve finished the downloading you wanted to limit you’ll need to flip back into the administrator profile and do this…
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment. Please note that this only restricts Port 80 which is the general web traffic port, if you had other activity going on (Skype, Bittorrent) then you’d need to add a rule for each relevant port.
Today for the first time I used Apple’s Genius Bar, for those of you that haven’t used it (or don’t own a Mac) I’ll explain what it is. Essentially it’s an in-store helpdesk, if you’ve got any problems with your Mac hardware, software or accessories you can pop into the store and they’ll do what they can to help you out. The other day the scroll-wheel on my wired mouse stopped working an (as I Twittered) it felt like having my arm cut off. I’m just so used to scrolling as part of my web workflow that everything felt so much slower without the ability to scroll up and down without moving the cursor. Luckily I had a spare Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse combo so I switched to that for a while but the ergonomics aren’t quite the same and I much preferred the plain Apple white mouse – I had to get if fixed. So this morning after visiting a costume hire shop (my work’s Christmas party has a 70’s theme) I thought I’d pop up to my nearest Apple store and get them to have a look. I booked a slot at the Genius Bar on the web so that I didn’t have to wait around (it’s a Saturday leading up to Christmas, it’s busy), after wandering around the shopping centre buying imported American cereal, chilli sauce and cornbread mix I went to the Apple store in time for my 12:40pm slot. I just walked right up to the concierge, she checked my time slot and summoned one of the ‘Geniuses’ over to help. We sat down at the bar (it really is laid out like a bar, complete with bar stools – no beer or free nuts though), I explained the problem, he tested the mouse on his laptop and then set about performing a strange trick with the mouse and a piece of A4 paper. Essentially the little wheel was gummed up with finger-grease (eeew) and after testing the up/down and left/right scroll capabilities we were all done. In retrospect I could’ve tried that myself and considering the fact that I’m a techie (or ‘IT Professional’ in résumé-friendly lingo) I probably ought to be ashamed of myself. But I’m not – in fact, I’m kind-of pleased with myself. I’m pleased because I took that leap of faith in Apple, I had a problem with some Apple stuff so I took it to the shop and they sorted it out. This seems like a very simple concept but the fact that they’ve got a dedicated area of the store with dedicated staff just to help people out with problems to me seems brilliant. You won’t get that level of service with a Dell, an Asus or a Compaq that you buy from a regular high-street retailer – you’d be lucky if the Saturday jobber in Currys even bothers serving you. Now I know that my problem wasn’t exactly quantum physics and I’m sure that these ‘Geniuses’ have their limitations but the fact that they’re there gives me comfort, especially as I tend to buy gear online. Knowing that theres someone in-store to help me out if I need it is great, especially given that many retailers have utterly disconnected physical and web presence. It’s absurd how many times I’ve heard something like “Oh, we can’t help you with that – you bought it On-Line, it’s a different department.”. Usually you’re asked to email something like: wasteofmytime@uselesscustomerservice.com and they get back to you with a within three working days with a ‘ticket number’, the whole thing ends up taking a pathetic amount of time to solve and often involves sending physical (i.e. snail mail) letters to confirm x, y and z. In this case I think that Apple have definitely got it right, my only criticism is that there aren’t that many Apple stores around the country and even I had to travel for an hour to get to my nearest – at least I got to play with the ’shake’ functionality on the new iPod Nanos, damn they’re sweet.
I recently attended the BMF motorbike show near Peterborough, at the event I captured around an hour of HD video (1080i) on my Canon HV20 camcorder and I wanted to create a couple of YouTube videos to share the experience. Being an awkward type I decided that iMovie just wouldn’t cut it, I’m not against iMovie per se but I really want to learn how to use professional tools rather than rely on consumer-level software. It took some serious head-scratching, teeth-sucking and general messing around but I was quite pleased with the final results… BMF 2008 – OCC, Grand Prix & Flying Gunners The elements I like most are the intro (visual effects and overlaid titles) and the “lower thirds” (little strips popping up at the bottom telling you what you’re looking at), the parts I like the least are the audio mixing (I didn’t add any filters or compressions) and the track changes on the soundtrack (I didn’t cross-fade the songs).
I decided to install Drupal on my web server and instead of downloading the install files to my desktop, unzipping them and then uploading them back to the web server (which takes ages over ADSL) I thought I’d have a go at downloading them manually over SSH. In effect SSH is a method of connecting to your Linux web hosting service as though you were actually at a terminal logged in to that machine, in effect you have complete control over your web space with the ability to use the array of commands available to all Linux users. Most web hosting companies offer SSH access on their decent packages and I definitely recommend it as a shortcut for various things such as deleting files, setting permissions and editing config files (yes, I actually like vi). So, if you’ve got SSH access, how do you use it? First you’ll need to find out the Host Name, Username and Password from your hosting provider, then one of the following – depending on whether you’re a Windows or Mac user… If you’re on a Mac running OSX you’re in luck, you already have an SSH client to hand, if you go to Applications then double-click on Utilities you get an array of useful applications – be careful here but the one we want is Terminal. Once you’ve launched Terminal type the following: “ssh username@system”, you will then be prompted for your password and you’re in! If you’re on Windows then get yourself a copy of PuTTY, a small but fantastic little application that’s free for both commercial and non-commercial users. As an aside, the PSFTP client on offer there is also a great secure FTP client. Now, if you’re not used to having command-line access to systems and especially if you’ve no Linux skills at all I’d suggest you read some good starter materials and learn more about Linux – messing with the command-line is very dangerous and there is no undo feature! I may start writing some posts about both the Linux and Windows command-line but in the interim please feel free to ask for advice, just leave a comment on this page and I’ll get an email, alternatively send me a direct message on Twitter.
In case you hadn’t guessed I’ve just upgraded to the new Sony Ericsson W960i, now I’m still not 100% sold on the phone itself (more info to follow as I decide) but I’m jumping in with both feet and making it my primary phone right away. In order to do that I need to be able to sync the phone with my Macbook (without which my life would fall apart), the problem is that blessed Sony Ericsson have thusfar failed to release a plugin for iSync. Fortunately the Internet came to the rescue (see here), in case the file there gets knocked off of the file host I’ve decided to host the files myself here: Sony Ericsson W960i iSync Plugin. All you need to do is extract the contents of the zip and place the entire ’Contents’ folder in the following directory under Macintosh HD: /library/PhonePlugins/SonyEricsson_W960i_isync_plugin_v1_07.phoneplugin/ Restart iSync and you should be able to connect to the phone, it worked a treat for me and I even received a call whilst the phone was in the middle of the sync and the call had the real contact’s name on it! I will submit a more detailed review soon but for now it’s worth noting that the aside from the lack of an iSync plugin (which I’m certain will come) the W960i does work as a Mass Storage device out of the box and charges from USB so whilst there’s no actual software it’s Mac-friendly enough that I can get away without switching on the dreaded Beige Box in the corner. |
Whilst I’m mildly reluctant to admit it, I was one of those sad people so excited by Apple’s scheduled July 27th announcement that I stayed behind at work so as not to miss the Engadget live-blogging coverage and despite the fact that every man and his dog will be blogging about the iPad over the coming weeks (and yes, 
In terms of actually using the device, the demo shots of browsing the web, watching films and thumbing through Google maps all look absolutely superb, very slick, very iPhone, very Apple. I was especially impressed by the look of the calendar since the iPhone has been a godsend in terms of managing my personal life and anything that can help me remember where I’m supposed to be and when is a real boost for me! Despite being a gamer I really wasn’t that interested in that part of the presentation, there seems to be an obsession with trying to present the iPhone and now the tablet as hard-core 3D gaming platforms when I’m quite sure that they’re both rubbish for racing sims and first-person shooters. I’m not saying that games don’t have their place in a mobile lineup but the physics-based genres are far better enjoyed on the XBox 360 or PS3, the real strength of a touch-screen mobile platform is for genius-like casual games such as 
The biggest leap forward provided by the iPad is by far and away it’s use as an e-book reader and for reading newspapers, whilst the rest of the features are stunning by themselves the real revolutionary change that this device (and devices of it’s ilk) will bring is in how we consume ‘print’ media. Steve’s presentation really made me feel sorry for Amazon’s Kindle, seeing a photo of the chunky white keyboarded 1980s-style device followed by as shot of a Jonathan Ives masterpiece must have ripped the heart out of the Kindle team at Amazon. That’s not to say that Amazon as a whole lose out here, their app will most likely work on and compete with Apple’s own iBooks offering and that sort of competition can only be good for end users – my only big worry with the e-book future is that so far all of the major stores are using DRM, meaning that if you bought a book on one store you won’t be able to transfer it to another.
So, what’s the point of the iPad then? I’ve heard a few people saying that they really don’t see the point and that’s it’s nothing more than a big iPod and to an extent they’re absolutely right, it’s not portable like a phone and it’s not as functional as a laptop. I don’t even think Steve’s cheap shots at the netbook market were quite warranted since I’ve no doubt that the iPad would be useless if I were trying to work remotely from a Starbucks typing emails and using a VPN client to remote control my work desktop. This is something I have done on little Dell Mini 9 many times and it really does work, the tablet market isn’t meant for people who want a laptop and it isn’t for people that want a netbook.
Like many an Apple user I’d been looking forward to getting my hands on Snow Leopard for a while, perhaps since Bertrand Serlet’s presentation at WWDC 2008 announcing “zero new features”. That might sound silly but the vibe given was clearly that Apple weren’t planning to mess with the user interface too much but instead focus on improving performance and tweaking existing functionality and that sounded great to me given that Leopard already catered for almost all of my OS requirements. So coupled with the “evolution not revolution” approach and the price announced at only $29 I was practically on the edge of my seat with anticipation.
