Inspirational Technology

Panther Developer Notes

Panther developer notes: Ink Services, Perl, more
Scriptable Printing: Panther's printing system supports an enhanced Apple Event for printing that enables script creators to define settings like page range, number of copies, and more. - Perl 5.8.1: - Apple is introducing a new Ink Services API in Panther so that developers can take advantage of Ink input for their applications and integrate Ink further into their software. - vImage: Apple has publicly demonstrated Panther's image editing capabilities, such as the ability to set up a folder action that automatically processes images, resizing or converting them as they are dropped in - QuickTime: In preliminary documentation for Panther's installation of QuickTime, Apple playfully dubs it "QuickTime Reloaded." Panther's version has a number of new APIs -- over 50 new documented APIs for Panther. - GCC 3.3: As Apple has announced, Panther's Xcode development suite includes GCC 3.3 as the default OS X compiler for C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++. [Studio Log]

Java 1.4.1 Update

Apple has released an update to the 1.4.1 JDK for Mac OS X, hopefully this will fix the majority of my complaints about it and enable it to run jEdit without any problems. I hope they at least fixed the crasher that would take down the entire window system.

I've been running jEdit with the 1.3.1 VM for a couple weeks and it works fairly well, but the lack of scroll mouse support is really annoying.

Cocoa Literature List

Cocoa Literature List
is page of Cocoa articles broken down by topic. Lot's of good stuff listed there.

Powermac G5 Pictures

Here's a really nice photo essay of the Powermac G5 internals. The G5 may just be a computer, but it seems that Apple's attention to detail is getting even better, the thing is a work of industrial art.

Excelsior

Michael Tsai has posted a pointer to Excelsior!, an XML data binding tool for Cocoa apps. It looks pretty decent and includes a mechanism that uses XPath style accessors to retrieve pieces of data (it's not actually XPath, just looks similar). This is a much needed tool for Cocoa applications.

Mac OS X Panther: Approaching First Candidate

MacRumors is reporting that Apple seeded Panther and XCode 7B53 versions today. Other news around is saying that they're nearing release candidate status. For me Panther isn't really all that exciting, except Expose that is. That's something I'm really looking forward to.

Porsche designs new line of LaCie drives

LaCie on Tuesday announced plans to begin shipping a new line of DVD drives designed by Porsche Design GmbH this month. The drives will offer DVD-RW and DVD+RW technologies in one device and sport FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 connectivity. The company is also offering a Porsche-designed CD-RW drive and external hard drives. [MacCentral]

Wow, it's amazing how companies so incredibly misstep like this. I have one of the Lacie d2 design hard drives and I think it looks very cool. These new drives by F.A. Porsche are just ugly and considering the comments on the MacCentral article that seems to be the prevailing opinion.

Lacie made a huge mistake with this change, slapping the Porsche name on it isn't going to save it. I'm going to guess this company must have new management or something, nothing else can explain such a serious screw up.

You might wonder why anyone would care what an external harddrive looks like, well...yeah it's kind of silly, but oh well.

Java on Mac OS X

I mentioned in my rant about window proliferation on Mac OS X that I was looking at using JEdit as a solution. It turns out JEdit is almost a perfectly workable solution, through various plugins I was able to get it to do everything that I wanted and it felt close enough to a native app to not drive me crazy. Unfortunately, all is not well in this world.

The JDK on Mac OS X has some serious problems when running JEdit. With the 1.4 JDK the VM crashes far too often. This shouldn't be JEdit's fault as it's the VM that's crashing. Unless jEdit is running some native code a Java app should never be able to crash the VM. This wouldn't have been a huge deal as JEdit is really good about saving its current state, just restarting the app is a minor annoyance. However, the real problem is that sometimes when the VM crashes it takes the whole WindowServer process down with it. This results in instant termination of all your running apps and getting logged out of the system. To say that's a bit of a problem is an understatement.

When you install jEdit it recommends that you use the 1.3 VM. Unfortunately doing this also results in the loss of a number of functions (in particular mouse scroll wheel support) and substantially changes the display of the app (i.e. tab layouts). Also if you turn on the hardware acceleration it has problems with garbled text and incorrect positioning in text areas. Running without mouse scroll wheel support is extremely annoying.

I'm quite disappointed with the current situation of Java on Mac OS X for running GUI apps. I've had no problems with it running server apps, it seems most of the current problems can be traced to the things they're doing with Swing, i.e hardware acceleration and the switch to the Cocoa toolkit for GUIs in 1.4. This stuff will be great once it's fully stable, but I've heard nothing about progress in this area for some time.

I'm still trying to make do with jEdit running on the 1.3 VM with no hardware acceleration. However, I would definitely prefer to be able to take advantage of the 1.4 features, that scroll wheel thing can really spoil you.

SubEthaEdit 1.1.3

Well Hydra finally has a new name, SubEthaEdit and an absolutely horrible one it is too. Douglas Adams references aside. Oh well, I guess it's better then calling it #####.

NetNewsWire 1.0.4

NetNewsWire 1.0.4 has been released. I've been using the beta and it's strange but I actually prefer the old broken renderer to the new Web Kit based renderer. Not sure why. I just started using it though so I'm sure I'll change my mind after a bit.

Desktop Pro Natural Keyboard

The last couple days I've been having some pain in my wrist and after examining how I was typing I decided it was time to switch back to a split keyboard. I had one of the original Microsoft Natural Keyboards several years ago, but ended up giving it to my girlfriend at the time. I liked it, but for some reason ended up preferring a regular keyboard again, don't remember why. Anyway, today I wanted to get another Natural Keyboard and it turns out Microsoft has really screwed up the product line. From what I can see they currently offer three different natural keyboards and all of them have compromises. Either they're PS2 only, have little tiny cursor keys, or are bundled with a mouse. I ended up with a Microsoft Optical Desktop Pro which is a combo keyboard mouse deal. I'm not too enthused about having to buy the mouse, but there was no option. I needed a USB keyboard with normal sized arrow keys and this is the only one Microsoft makes anymore. I also didn't want a wireless keyboard as batteries are just an extra expense for no real benefit. I never move the keyboard off the desk. Ugg, oh well. Anyway, the keyboard itself is pretty decent and the drivers for Mac OS X seem to work pretty well.

I spent about an hour remapping all the special keys on the keyboard and I think they make a great addition. You can pretty much program them to do whatever you want. With the media control center on the keyboard you also don't lose any of the functionality of the standard Apple Pro keyboard. Actually you pick up quite a bit like being able to hit play and having it launch iTunes and start playing automatically plus easily skip forward and backward. That's a great feature that I had previously been using PTHiTunesNotifier to provide via multikey hot keys. I'm actually a little surprised, but Microsoft did a great job of integrating the keyboard with Mac OS X.

The bad thing about this combo is that the mouse isn't all that great. It's designed to be usable in either hand and suffers a poorly designed shape because of this. My initial thought was that I would just keep using my Logitech Cordless MouseMan Optical and hook the Microsoft mouse to my Tablet PC, unfortunately, the mouse and keyboard share the same receiver so that's not possible. So I either end up ditching the Microsoft mouse and keep using the Logitech, or I use the Microsoft mouse and hook the Logitech to my tablet. I'd just as soon not have the mouse at all, it's very disappointing that they only sell this as a bundle.

Another small complaint about this is that the receiver is rather large and has an extra PS2 connector on the end. This isn't a huge deal really, it just conflicts with my desire for clean design.

Overall if you need a split keyboard for a Macintosh running OS X, the Optical Desktop Pro isn't a bad choice. It's just unfortunate that the price is inflated by the inclusion of an inferior quality mouse. Oh yeah, the whole point of buying this thing was to relax my wrists. They're definitely feeling much better now.

Interview with a Developer of ##### (aka Hydra)

O'Reilly is running an interesting interview with one of the developers of the app formally known as Hydra. It's interesting to read about their motivations and it's completely discouraging to think again about the problems they're having with the name.

Still thinking about Blosxom

I'm still thinking about converting this site to running on a Blosxom derivative, in particular on Pyblosxom. I spent a fair amount of time over the last week getting everything working in a test setup and I've worked everything out, except I'm worried about the performance of it. Even running on my dual 1.25Ghz Powermac there's a noticeable delay when viewing a page. This concerns me as the server this site runs on is only a dual 266Mhz Pentium II. I haven't tested it on this machine yet. This really shouldn't be a major problem as this site doesn't get all that much traffic and the network is kind of slow anyway, but CGI scripts always bug me. This is the one good thing about MovableType, it's slow to post, but that's because it creates static pages for everything.

The Perl version of Blosxom can also be used to generate static pages, the Python version can't.

So far I've written four plugins for Pybosxom to make it as compatible with the current site as possible. I had to add RSS 1.0 support, Textile formatting support and a post body summarize function. Along with these I also created a new plugin that tracks referrers and hit counts on a per post basis. That one was more my experimenting with Berkeley DB XML then anything, but it's very useful.

Anyway, now I'm stuck trying to decide whether to go with Pyblosxom, go with the original Perl Blosxom or to punt on the whole thing and just stick with MovableType.

Windows, windows everywhere

There's one thing that absolutely drives me crazy about Mac OS X and that's the proliferation of windows. I've been using Hydra (aka #####) as my editor of choice for the last few months and the number of windows I end up with is astonishing. I've been aggressive at closing stuff and right now I still have 18 windows open in Hydra alone. Back when my machine was having to reboot every day or so it wasn't a huge problem, but now that it's finally stable I can't take it anymore. I have never understood why people think having so many windows is a good thing, but all the major Mac OS X text editors are like this. The only exception is Project Builder, which unfortunately isn't all that great as a general purpose editor.

Today I finally broke down and downloaded jEdit again. This was my editor of choice back when I used Linux all the time. When I moved to Mac OS X I stopped using it because at that point in time Java was just too slow on Mac OS X. I've looked at jEdit off and on since then and have always been annoyed by it because it's just ugly and I really wanted to use a Cocoa application as an editor since I use TextExtras. Anyway, the thing I liked about jEdit is that everything is in one window and you can have your choice of ways to manage open documents. I prefer the tabbed approach and that was what I always used on Linux. It is so much more productive then trying to find a particular window in a whole mess of windows or even finding it in the list on the window menu.

What perplexes me is that people screamed like crazy for tabs in Safari and I see constant criticism (including my own) of Omniweb because it doesn't have tabs, yet every other Mac application has a gazillion windows. This doesn't make much sense to me. If tabs are good in Safari they should be good in a text editor or any other application too. Maybe I just don't understand this particular Macism.

At least to me it seems there's a real need for a solid Cocoa editor for Mac OS X that supports good syntax highlighting, has a good plugin architecture and doesn't open a new window for every file. Project Builder could actually be good if it had a better way to access files in the file system without adding them to a project. The way it works now is good for things like Cocoa applications where you have a bunch of files that make up the project, it just doesn't work very well for writing Python scripts and such. If it could just add a file system browser along with the project browser it would probably be workable.

One thing I am curious about, is if my opinion will change once Panther is out and I can use Expose. I've been seeing comments that people are starting to use tabs in Safari less often because of this. I hope that's the case, because the current window proliferation is really unproductive and in my opinion a fairly significant flaw with the Mac experience. I wonder if I'll even be able to read the windows in Expose, I must have 60 windows open right now.

Google Calculator

Google has a calculator. You just type an expression in the search field and it gives you the results. First thought ... how useless. Second thought, does it work from the search box in Safari, yes of course. Third thought, how very useful, it's actually faster then firing up calculator and clicking on the buttons (don't know why I always click instead of type the numbers, stupid me). Google: web services that actually work.

Legal Troubles For Hydra

Hydra is in trouble over their name. This naming thing is starting to get really annoying. If you ever wondered why the Xindice project has such a weird name, here's your answer. When I came up with the Xindice name I spent a lot of time using the Babelfish translator and google searches to come up with something that was somewhat meaningful somewhere, yet didn't show up in Google results. Indice is Spanish and Italian (among others) for index, it's also used in english as a plural form of index. Xindice is a made up word of course, but at least now when you type it into a search engine you're pretty much sure you'll get information about the Xindice native XML database. It also means the probability of a naming conflict is small. Obviously Google isn't authoritative on global naming, but it's better then nothing when you can't afford a trademark lawyer. I like naming things using made up words.

Ahh, sweet uptime

12:25AM up 7 days, 8:52, 2 users, load averages: 0.19, 0.24, 0.30

Seven days seems like such a small achievement, but it's been a real struggle to get there with my desktop PowerMac. This is the first time that machine has stayed up that long, ever! This is what Mac OS X is supposed to be like. Not a single application crash all week either. So let me redouble my recommendation that if you buy RAM for a PowerMac, buy it from Crucial.

Mac Keyboard Shortcuts

This is a must read/bookmark for any Mac user. A list of all the standard keyboard shortcuts.

PyObjC gearing up for 1.0

This week Ronald Oussoren posted the following on the PyObjC mailing list: I think it is about time to do a 1.0 release. All bugs I know of have been fixed, and the end-user documentation is good enough. That doesn't... [Artima Python Buzz] Excellent! PyObjC is a very cool project. Especially since I like the XML support in Python so much better then what's available in Objective C.

Installing Berkeley DB XML on Mac OS X with Python and Perl API support

I just wanted to post some notes about installing Sleepycat Berkeley DB XML on Mac OS X 10.2 with Perl and Python support. The builds are relatively straight forward and Sleepycat has posted a simple script to help build Berkeley DB XML it self. However, it isn't clear what is necessary to get Perl and Python working.

The most important thing, before you start compiling anything, make sure you have the latest GCC 3.3 from Apple. This is distributed as a patch to the December 2002 developer tools. This is critical, without it Python and Perl support will not work.

Next, unfortunately, you'll have to build a new Perl and Python. The Mac OS X 10.2 Python should be the right version, but I couldn't get it to work. Building a fresh Python 2.3 does work. For Perl, Mac OS X includes Perl 5.6 and Berkeley DB XML requires 5.6.1 so you have to build a new one. I used Perl 5.8.0 and it seems to work fine. So you have to build a new Python, a new Perl and the Berkeley DB XML distribution. These should all build using the standard instructions and for DB XML you can use their script.

Once you have all that built, you can then build the DB XML Perl and Python libraries.

For Python you first need to build and install bsddb3, once that's done you can build the python support for DB XML in the usual Python fashion. Make sure the python you're using is the one you built previously. Unless you specified otherwise, it's installed in /usr/local/bin/python.

cd dbxml-1.1.0/src/python
/usr/local/bin/python setup.py build
sudo /usr/local/bin/python setup.py install

There's an example Python program in dbxml-1.1.0/examples/python/examples.py that you can run to test the build.

For Perl you just build it in the usual Perl manner. Again, make sure you use the perl you compiled.

cd dbxml-1.1.0/src/perl
/usr/local/bin/perl Makefile.PL
make
sudo make install

There are some examples for the Perl API in dbxml-1.1.0/src/perl/examples.

Another Omniweb feature

Just noticed that in Omniweb when you're viewing a web page it supports type down selection of links on the page. Just type the first few characters of the link and it will highlight the link and then you just hit enter to follow it. Pretty cool. Mozilla can sort of do this, but it doesn't seem to work as well. Safari, apparently, doesn't support it at all.

OmniWeb and eMusic

Unfortunately it looks like Omniweb has a bug that keeps it from working with eMusic. That's too bad, as Omniweb also has another feature that Safari lacks; the ability to control which files get automatically opened after download. This has always been annoying as it made downloading from eMusic a multistep process when using Safari. I just reported the bug, so hopefully it will get fixed soon.

OmniWeb 4.5 Final

OmniGroup has released the final release of OmniWeb 4.5. This is the first release of OmniWeb that uses the Safari rendering engine and it seems quite nice.

OmniWeb was the first browser I used regularly after getting annoyed with IE. It always rendered beautifully, but suffered from poor performance and weak standards support. With the new release both of those problems have been solved and it still renders beautifully. It's really interesting to compare how it looks to Safari. Even though they use the same engine, Omniweb still comes out looking better. For one thing, they use different default fonts and colors and I like OmniGroup's choices. It's actually really surprising how much of a difference there is.

It's great to see this release. A lot of people thought Safari would mean the death of Omniweb, but Omnigroup is smart and now we can get two different interpretations on the same basic rendering engine. I don't know how much I'll use Omniweb, but this release puts them back on the playing field and it's fun to check it out. Here's what I see so far that I really like.

• HTML source view with syntax checking and highlighting. This has been in Omniweb for a while, but it's a nice feature and much better then the very basic source view in Safari.

• Better looking fonts.

• Spell checking turned on by default. Safari supports spell checking but you have to turn it on for each text field, which is really pretty silly.

• Searchable history so that you can search sites you've visited yet can't quite remember where you saw something. Seems like a feature that could be quite useful. May have been in old Omniwebs, but I wasn't aware of it at the time if it was.

• Auto checking of bookmarks to tell you when they've been modified. This is a feature that I was actually thinking of firing up Omniweb to try out again. It might be enough to get me to use it more as I'm working on a project where I want to monitor a large number of sites for changes.

• Omniweb isn't overly aggressive when caching files like Safari. I had such a problem with this when editing my MovableType templates that I had to start using Mozilla to do all the edits.

• And the number one killer feature that no other browser has, zoomable text fields. This is an awesome feature that gets you out of the stupid fixed size text areas that are so annoying on web sites. When you use a text area Omniweb adds a little button above the scroll bar that zooms it out into a new window that is fully resizable. Outstanding! I'm going to play with this more, but this feature alone may be enough to get me to use Omniweb as my main browser. Like Safari's aggressive caching this has been a major problem in editing the MovableType templates as the text area is always too small.

Hmm, OK, I'm liking this thing more and more. I'm going to give it another day or two and then I'll probably spring for a license. The only thing missing is tabs, we'll see if I can live without them. I'd definitely say Omniweb is back and I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes in the future now that they can focus on value add rather then just rendering problems.

Mac OS X Directory Services

O'Reilly Mac Dev Center has posted the first installment of a series of articles about Directory services under Mac OS X, including lookng at integration with Active Directory. Looks like it's going to be a pretty interesting series on a topic that is definitely under-documented.

Real closes on listen.com Rhapsody

Real has taken over the keys to listen.com Rhapsody, I guess it's time to count the days until it goes from being a great service to utter crap. I really like Rhapsody, even though it's windows only. Having access to such a huge library is incredible and is pretty close to what I want out of a music service. Unfortunately, Real Media isn't exactly known for providing quality services and I'm not at all looking forward to their influence on the service coming into effect. Usability of the current service isn't perfect, but I'll be very, very surprised if it actually improves under the control of Real. In fact I bet it goes to hell with all kinds of crap ads, cross promotion of stupid products, spam, spyware and who knows what else. It will be even worse if they try to change it into a pay-per download model, I'll instantly slam it and never go back. The model they already have is great, unfortunately things started out poorly and there's a lot of negative perceptions that need to be adjusted. Going to a stupid pay-per download model will just ruin it. Now that I've gotten that off my chest, Real does have a good opportunity. Taking the Rhapsody model and combining it together with the ability to purchase songs for download could be awesome. That's the model I want to see. I'd gladly pay Apple $10-$15 per month for this ability with the iTunes Music Store. To be able to listen to the whole catalog unlimited while at the computer and then have the option to buy tracks for download to take elsewhere or make CDs would be absolutely great. I think Apple missed the boat on this one. Of course if Real does it, the files will be in who knows what format and will have all kinds of nasty headache inducing restrictions that will ruin it. The model is killer though, and someone will eventually do it. Apple certainly could. It's a minor step from sending 30 second samples to sending full on demand tunes and the purchasing process already works great.

Sometimes less is more

Stevenf is comparing the Sony P800 with a Palm Tungstun T2 and finding that the P800 isn't so great after all. Clearly a case of less is more and once again shows how lots of features does not necessarily a good product make. For a reminder on my thoughts on the subject just read my opinion of the Acer Tablet PC. I really wish more companies would recognize this and just build better products. I guess good products aren't what sell, although it appears the Compaq TC1000 is the most popular Tablet PC and I'd say that can be 100% attributed to it's superior usability and quality design. It sure isn't because it's fast.

If you ever want to see an extreme case of this just visit a high end audio store and then compare what's on the shelf to what you find in the local Best Buy. Best Buy is full of blinking lights and audio components with buttons for their buttons. In high end stores the higher up the line you go the fewer buttons and the fewer lights you're going to find. What you will find are products that do the job better then anything and don't need flash to sell. The most expensive components are also often the ones that are the simplest to use. It's really quite sad that companies feel that it's necessary to fill products will all this junk that looks cool, but is really pretty useless. The user experience is almost always bad and the percentage of consumers who actually use anything beyond the most basic features is tiny. I used to have a dolby digital receiver and even though I'm a complete technology geek I could barely figure out anything beyond the basics and if someone else ever came over ... well just forget about it. I'll take the simpler and more usable piece every time.

Rendezvous Implementation for Windows and Linux

Rendezvous is something I really wish Microsoft would include in Windows, until they do there's Howl. It looks like it's a fairly simple C API and works on both Windows and Linux. Pointer from Hack the Planet

Crucial is fast

As I mentioned in my post about Mac OS X and RAM I had to order new RAM from Crucial. I ordered it Saturday morning with their default 2 day shipping and even though it wasn't scheduled to arrive until Wednesday, it showed up today. Thankfully! Running on 256MB of RAM made the machine perform about as fast as my old Pentium 200, it's horrible. So I'll reiterate, I can't believe Apple still ships machines with only 128MB of RAM! I can't even imagine what that must be like. The machines should at least be usable out of the box and with 128MB or 256MB of RAM they're just not.

Extra thankfully, it seems the Crucial RAM works correctly and I'm optimistic that it finally solves the problems I was seeing. So my advice, if you have a recent Powermac that has constant but random application crashes make sure you have really good RAM. Even brands like Kingston aren't good enough and if you're buying RAM, buy it from Crucial. Even if all the RAM checks out in the hardware tests and the Apple store runs all their tests against it and it passes, it can still be the RAM. Whatever the problem is, it's very subtle. I also know that this is not just a problem with this particular box, I tried the RAM in another FW800 Powermac and it had the exact same problem. Five sticks, none of which run stable. Talk about frustrating.

Mac OS X and RAM

One of the major criticisms of Mac OS X has been that it's sluggish. This is especially common among people who just play with the systems as they come stock. Clearly Mac OS X is a big advancement over previous OS platforms and is a bit sluggish on older hardware because of this. However, Apple isn't helping things much because it doesn't ship Macs with nearly enough RAM. I'm mentioning this now because I'm forced to run my dual processor 1.25Ghz Powermac on just the stock 256MB of RAM that came with it. It's so slow to run it this way, even with only a few applications open switching between apps takes way too long. It seems it's hitting swap every single time. It makes the machine feel like it's about 1/10 the speed that it really is. Until today I had 2GB of RAM and the machine ran extremely fast, I'd seen no sluggishness at all. Take out that RAM though and performance just dies. I consider it shameful that Apple is still shipping Macs with 128MB or 256MB of RAM. That's just not enough and will kill peoples impressions of system performance if they don't know any better. 256MB for a Windows XP box is perfectly acceptable for normal usage, Mac OS X needs at least 512MB and really I consider 1GB a realistic minimum. Some Macs, including the 12" Powerbook, don't even support 1GB. Even the base G5 only comes with 256MB stock, that's pathetic on a $2000 machine.

So you might ask why did I pull the RAM then? Well, while the machine was extremely fast, it was also extremely unstable. It seems the FW800 Powermacs are VERY picky about the RAM they use. I've had system instability with this machine from the day I got it and after two trips to the Apple store nothing was found. Because of the problem I was seeing, I suspected the third party RAM and spent many hours swapping sticks to try things out. At one point I even went out and bought two brand new 512MB sticks of RAM from a different brand and had the same problem with those. This left me with five 512MB sticks of RAM and I just couldn't believe that all of them were bad. Well, I'm now pretty convinced that they aren't bad, but they are all incompatible with the machine. Even though they're all the correct kind of RAM and from reasonable brands (Kingston and Simple Tech) they cause all kinds of random application crashes.

The situation was complicated because I have actually seen two different and unrelated problems with this machine. While diagnosing the first problem I ruled out RAM problems because it occurred with all the RAM I had, including the stock Apple RAM. It turns out it was a software problem that was freezing the GUI. Unfortunately, that problem also steered me down the wrong path toward resolving the second problem. In particular I didn't try the stock Apple RAM by itself again until yesterday. My main test for the instability was playing Warcraft III. I've never been able to play it without it crashing within about 10 minutes, happens every single time. Last night with the stock 256MB of RAM only, I was finally able to play it for a couple hours. It's the first time I've ever actually had to manually quit the game, prior to that it was always nice enough to just quit for me.

So, the moral of this story is that if you have a PowerMac, buy lots of RAM and ALSO make sure it's from a vendor well known for Apple compatibility. From what I've seen from reading the support forums on Apple's site, Crucial seems to be the safest place. I ordered two more sticks of 512MB RAM from them last night, hopefully it will actually work right.

With PCs I always bought the cheapest RAM I could find and never once had a problem, and I've owned a lot of PCs. I also never had any problems with the RAM I bought for my Cube and my Powerbook using that same philosophy. It makes me really wonder if there's a design flaw in these FW800 Powermacs that limits their RAM compatibility. There are a number of people posting on the Apple discussion boards that they have similar problems. What's so bad about this though, none of the memory tests detect the problem and the machine seems to work fine most of the time. It's just plagued with a higher then normal quantity of application crashes. Worse still, sometimes the application that crashes is the window server, this problem manifests itself as you being instantly logged out and taking all your open apps down with it. It's a nasty, nasty problem and extremely destructive to productivity.

Playing with Synergy

I've been experimenting with different ways of using the Tablet PC together with the Mac and in my efforts I decided to see if I could figure out a way to share the keyboard and mouse between them. I'm not aware of any software that can do this directly between a Mac and a Windows XP machine. I'm not talking about a KVM switch type of thing, I have one of those too and I don't like it. I want to share via software over the network so that mouse movements on the Mac are translated into mouse movements on the Tablet and you can do things like share the clipboard across as well.

For the most part I use the Remote Desktop client (RDC) and it works pretty well, but I don't like the fact it locks the Tablet display. I'd like to be able to still use the Tablet PC screen while also using the Mac's keyboard with it. I'd rather have a more RDC like integration, but more for just sharing the keyboard and mouse rather than doing remote display.

Right now I'm playing with Synergy. Synergy allows you to share a mouse and keyboard between multiple machines running Linux or Windows. It basically does exactly what I want, except it doesn't appear to support the Mac yet. What I've been experimenting with is using another windows PC to run the Synergy software and then using it to control the Tablet PC. So basically what I have is an RDC connection to my Dell laptop running Windows XP and then use it to control the tablet. It almost works too. The major problem is that the mouse doesn't track right, it jumps all over the place. The keyboard does work though. You can also copy from the Mac and then paste on the tablet, but going the other direction doesn't seem to quite work. The clipboard makes it to the Dell Windows PC, but not through the RDC connection to the Mac.

I also tried ShareKMC and it has the same mouse problem.

Overall it's been an interesting experiment, hopefully some day Synergy will add support for Mac OS X. When it does, it should be an excellent solution for integrating multiple machines together.

Backing up an iTunes Library

As I've been ripping my CD collection (1,000 ripped so far, about 1,500 still to go) and downloading from eMusic I've built a quite large library of music. This represents way too many hours of time to reproduce so it's pretty critical to back it up. I've struggled with this issue for a long time and have been mainly relying on multiple hard drives to handle backup duties. This is actually the most cost effective mechanism, but at the rate I'm consuming disk space it's also problematic. I'm currently up to about 100GB of data and will probably consume another 150GB before I'm done with my CD collection. I'm also uncomfortable with having everything tied to the one machine. So I finally broke down and bought a DVD burner so that I can have a portable non-HD based backup. I picked up a Pioneer DVR-105 at Frys for $179, this is basically the same drive as what Apple calls the Superdrive and will work with iDVD if installed internally in the machine. I don't really care about iDVD, but it's nice to have it available.

Tonight I started the process of backing everything up. I figure it will take about 23 discs to handle the current data and then I'll add discs as necessary going forward. I'm looking at doing the backups in iTunes and the process I'm using seems to work fairly well. Here's the process as it stands.

• Create an empty playlist
• Add the entire library to the playlist (just drag the Library icon)
• Set Preferences/Burning/Disc Format to Data CD or DVD
• Use a blank DVD-R and tell iTunes to burn the playlist.
• iTunes asks if you want to burn it as a data DVD which you do.
• ITunes then tells you the entire playlist won't fit and asks if you just want to burn the part that will. So yes.
• When the disc is done iTunes automatically mounts it and switches the view to the disc.
• Find out how many tracks burned on the disc.
• Go back to the backup playlist and select the first track in the list.
• Scroll until you find the number of the last track that was burned. This will be the same as the number of tracks on the disc.
• Hold down shift and click that track.
• Hit delete to remove all selected tracks from the playlist.
• Burn another DVD and repeat the process until all the tracks are gone.

For ongoing backups I'm planning to leverage iTunes smart playlists by creating a smart playlist that shows all tracks added since the date of the last backup. Using that playlist I'll then use the procedure I outlined above. After each backup I'll just update the date on the smart playlist. I'll probably do this about once per month and rely on HD backup during that period.

I figured this is a much easier way then trying to backup from the file system directly. The problem is spanning discs and keeping track of where you are in the process. It will also be kind of a pain going forward as you add more tracks

Hopefully this will work fairly well. The one thing I'm a little concerned about is restoring the discs. The files are written to the discs in a flat manner, rather then using the directory based mechanism iTunes usually uses. What I figured I'd do was just reimport the files off the DVD into iTunes. This is the one problem with these discs though, as I'm pretty sure it will import the file as a new record in the iTunes database. This means you'll lose all the existing metadata that is associated with that song. This is one advantage to just backing up the files from the file system directly.

Does anyone know of a better way to handle this kind of thing without resorting to a backup program like Retrospect?

Two Computers, One Set of Speakers

Since I've been using my Tablet PC a lot to listen to music from listen.com Rhapsody, I wanted an easy way to share the speakers that are hooked up to my desktop Mac. My first thought of course was to just run a splitter to the speakers and then hook it to both systems. My second thought was that that is probably a bad idea, but I tried it anyway. It of course isn't a good idea. The much simpler solution is to run the line out from the Tablet PC into the line in on the Mac. You then just need a simple piece of freeware called LineIn to pass the line in through so that it can play through the Mac's speakers. This works quite well, so now anytime the Tablet is docked it plays through the speakers on my Mac and then if you undock it you can just plug in headphones to continue listening. It also allows you to control the volume using the keyboard controls on the Mac.

Python 2.3 released

... and if the release of Python 2.3 w/first class OS X support were not enough ....

Excellent. And, of course, PyObjC will continue to provide first class support for integrating Python and Objective-C, including full blown Cocoa application development using Python in place of Objective-C.

... and on my son's third birthday and everything. [bbum's rants, code & references]

Use a Linux box as an iTunes music server

Mac OS X Hints has a nice tip on running an iTunes music server on Linux. This isn't just sharing the files via Samba or NFS, it's to enable the music to show up as a shared library in iTunes just like if you were sharing music from another Mac. Very cool.

When DRM goes bad and some alternatives

There's a follow up from the person who was having trouble with the iTunes DRM when he moved to Canada. It appears Apple is trying to make it right, but this is just further evidence of why DRM on purchased music is simply not a good idea. He points to eMusic and Magnatune as legal sources of music in DRM free MP3 format. I've recommended eMusic many times, but wasn't aware of Magnatune.

Magnatune is a label that publishes music for purchase electronically. The music has no DRM and when you purchase you can choose either MP3 or uncompressed WAV files to download. They even let you choose your own price, with options ranging from $5 to $18. $8 is the recommended price on everything I looked at. Overall a pretty interesting experiment and something we will hopefully see more of. I've been sampling a number of their artists and there's some pretty interesting stuff there. The artist gets 50% of the album purchase price. I haven't bought anything yet, but I probably will. Obviously it's a small label and you won't find any major artists there, doesn't mean the music is bad though.

Buzz Anderson to Apple

Looks like indie developer Buzz Anderson of Sci-Fi Hi-Fi and PodWorks is now a former indie developer, and has taken a gig at Apple. Congratulations to Buzz. Hopefully he can continue to write on Sci-Fi Hi-Fi. More Apple employee blogs are a very welcome thing.

More BuyMusic.com Rumblings

Well there's sure been a lot of discussion about buymusic.com in the last couple days. None that I've seen has been the least bit positive, including my own opinions. Here's a particularly interesting post from someone who actually bought something from the service, to say the experience appears to have been painful is an understatement. It also seems that they've tightened up the site so that you can only view it with Windows IE. This is quite simply foolish, although I'm sure all the negative things being said by people coming in from Macs hasn't made them too happy. If you really want to visit the site you can either turn off javascript or change the user agent in the browser, but who cares, there's really no reason to visit the site.

This is critical though, it's extremely important that windows users don't use this service. People need to make it clear to the RIAA, once again, that this is not what people want. DRM on purchased music is simply unacceptable, even the relatively liberal DRM on the iTunes Music Store purchased music is proving to be problematic on some unexpected levels. What's going to happen five or ten years from now when you try to play this music that was purchased? It seams the only way to ever get this message across is to insure that all these services continue to struggle until they bend to a point that is consumer acceptable. Right now the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) is close, but it's still not good enough. BuyMusic.com is a massive step backwards.

If you're a windows user who wants to listen to digital music legally, use Rhapsody to find and listen to the full length recordings and then order the actual CD from half.com or some similar place. Rhapsody has by far the best selection of any service, is only $9.95 per month and is reasonably friendly to use. Just don't think of it as a download service. That's not what it is. It will give you the instant gratification to hear the music before the Cd arrives and it will save you money by allowing you to ignore all the CDs that turn out to not be all that great when taken as a whole. I was highly skeptical of the Rhapsody service, but I've grown to really like it. Also eMusic is another great service that is actually multi-platform and has no DRM. I personally love the selection, but it isn't for everyone.

Legal sources of digital music are slowly getting better, but as consumers we have to speak loudly by rejecting the services that are not any good. BuyMusic.com is not any good.

Penny-Pinching PowerBook

Do you need portability for email and word processing, but don't want to plunk down a pile of cash for a new Apple laptop? Diehard Mac user Michael Norton describes his penny-pinching Odyssey that explored the PowerBook 280c and the 1400. [O'Reilly MacDevCenter.com]

This is kind of a pointless article, but it was still a fun read for some reason.

Hydra 1.1.1

Hydra 1.1.1 has been released. The biggest change in this release is the addition of a live HTML preview window that uses the Safari engine for rendering. I played with it for a few minutes and looks like that will be a really great addition. It works quite well. It's good to finally see some decent applications embedding web browser support on Mac OS X, the old Apple browser component was quite pathetic.

Hydra has become my preferred editor for things like scripts, XML and HTML. It becomes particularly powerful if you use something like TextExtras to add additional capabilities and a script menu to the application. What's really cool is that you can write the scripts in any language and they'll be usable in any Cocoa application that supports NSTextView. It's definitely a geek oriented feature, but it's very handy.

Review: Listen.com Rhapsody

I'm a big music fan, no really I mean a big music fan. I'm one of these people who devours music, lot's and lot's of music in all different genres. I have music playing just about all the time. I have a huge CD collection and have been building an even larger MP3 collection from eMusic, the iTunes Music Store and any other place that I can find legal music. To this point eMusic has been my favorite service, since I'm just the type of person who can appreciate the selection that they have to offer. However, last week I finally decided to give LIsten.com Rhapsody a real try.

Listen.com Rhapsody is a music on demand service that gives you unlimited access to their entire catalog for $9.95 per month. You use their proprietary software to access the service, select the music you want to hear and play that music back. The service also offers the ability to burn individual tracks to CD for $.79 each, although not all tracks are available for burning.

The first catch with Rhapsody is that I'm a Macintosh user and the Rhapsody software only runs on Windows. Fortunately I also just acquired a Tablet PC with one the specific goals of it being to access services like Rhapsody. What makes this workable is the Microsoft Remote Desktop Client for Mac OS X. I don't often say nice things about Microsoft, but the Mac RDC client is quite nice and makes it perfectly livable to have a Windows PC to complement your Macintosh. I basically treat the RDC client as if it was the Rhapsody software running on my Mac and it works quite well. Of course, I'd much prefer to have a native Mac OS X client for the Rhapsody service, but as it stands the current solution works.

Anyway, on to the actual service. First we have to be clear, Rhapsody is not a download service. It's a music on demand service. This means you have to have a computer connected to the network to listen to the music. For people who spend large amounts of time at their computers like, well, me for instance. This isn't really a bad thing. However if you're the more mobile type who actually has a life away from the keyboard it might not be as appealing. The Rhapsody service does offer the ability to burn CDs, but I'll offer my opinion on that feature later.

For music on demand you browse the collection of music and add tracks or albums to your playlist and the client then on demand downloads the song and begins playing. While you can think of this as a streaming service, it's not really streaming in a technical sense. It's simply downloading the file when you ask to play it and then beginning play before the download is complete. Because of how this works the software does cache some number of the downloads, so playing a track again does not necessarily result in it being downloaded again.

On my Cable modem connection the performance of this mechanism is pretty good. However, all is not perfect and this is where we encounter our first glitch with the service. Since it's downloading each track individually there is a pause between tracks while it buffers enough of the download to begin playing. This pause can be very distracting on some albums where the tracks are intended to play together with no breaks. I first noticed this while listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and it was very annoying each time a song changed. On most albums this won't be a problem, but for people who like music put together in longer forms, like much classical music, it will be a real problem. It's unfortunate that the service is marred by this problem as they clearly have ways that they could have minimized the problem with a little extra work on the client. Starting to download the next track on the playlist before the current one finishes playing is one obvious alternative.

For the most part playing works pretty well. I've experienced the occasional glitch where it seems to not quite download the song fast enough, but that's been pretty rare. The experience on a lower bandwidth connection may be a different thing altogether.

Since Rhapsody has licenses from all five major labels and a number of independents the selection on the service is pretty good. Obviously, no service has everything yet and Rhapsody is no exception, but of the services I've tried so far, it does seem to have the overall best selection across all genres. It's also not plagued by the partial album problem as much as the iTunes Music Store (iTMS). In addition, because of the nature of the service, when you do encounter a partial album it's no where near as annoying as it is on iTMS. Here you're paying $9.95 for unlimited access and you're not actually buying individual albums. On iTMS when you encounter a partial album it means a waste of money to buy the partial set of tracks if you think you still might want to hear the whole thing. On Rhapsody there's no incremental cost involved so it isn't as big an issue.

Particularly notable artists that I've found on Rhapsody include: Wynton Marsalis, Annie Lennox, Doc Watson, Johnny Cash, Mogwai, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Son Seals, Jack Johnson, Coldplay and Mono. Some that are missing that I would love to see added include: Goldfrapp, Evanescence and Lilith. Obviously this is a small set of what exists, and it seems that they're adding a couple hundred albums a week. Jazz looks pretty good and classical is better then most services, but not great (the pause between tracks is an issue as noted), Blues is good for the modern stuff, less so for older recordings (eMusic is particularly strong here), folk and country look fairly good though I'm a bad judge for country. Rock/Pop is of course well represented with the usual suspects missing (Metallica, Madonna). Overall the selection is good, if still very incomplete.

I used to be an audiophile, however, I hung up my golden ears when I decided to trade quality for convenience and move to 100% computer based music. Given this, to me the sound quality of the service seems quite good. I believe the files are encoded at 128kbps, I'm guessing in Windows Media format, but the exact format isn't really clear. All I can say is that I've been quite happy with the sound quality for how I use it. I've mostly been listening through a pretty good quality set of Sennheiser headphones that are fairly revealing and I haven't noticed anything annoying about the quality. It seems at least as good as the 128kbs AAC files from the iTMS and I haven't noticed any major difference with the 192kbs AACs I've ripped from my own CDs. Is it CD quality? No, certainly not, but it's good enough for the type of service it is. Definitely better then any FM radio and better then the digital music services available from digital cable companies. Plus you can't argue with the ability to select whatever music you want and play it on demand with no waiting to download the entire thing.

Even though the service is primarily a music on demand service, it does offer the ability to burn CDs of tracks from the service. This ability has an additional fee attached, currently $.79 per track. With this you can burn one copy of the selected tracks. Any additional burns incur an additional charge at the same rate. The price just covers burning to a CD, it does not cover retaining any kind of digital format file on the computer. I haven't actually used this feature, because I find it to be a poor value. In fact I think the service would be better off without this feature, because I believe it skews peoples perceptions in a negative way. The $.79 per song burn price is a very poor value, but the $9.95 music on demand service is an excellent value for what is actually a very good service. The problem comes in trying to compete with free downloads and this is an unfortunate situation. The Rhapsody service can't offer the same kind of capability while retaining reasonable pricing and in making that attempt the real value of the service can easily be lost in the negative feelings brought on by the poor value of the burn capability.

Other then the poor value of the CD burn feature, Listen.com Rhapsody is an excellent service for music on demand. If nothing else, it's worth $9.95 per month just to be able to preview the full length album prior to purchasing it someplace else. I enjoy the service greatly. I do wish they would release a Mac OS X client, but as it stands the service is usable and a good value. Since I spend so much time at the computer I actually prefer this service to the iTunes Music Store and it makes a good complement to the more eclectic selection found on eMusic.

There really isn't a single service that is perfect. Fortunately, it's fairly inexpensive to subscribe to more then one and by using them together you have access to a library of music that is vastly larger then anything previously available. I personally own ~2,500 CDs, and the selection within that collection is vastly smaller then what is already available in these services, this to me is truly exciting and I look forward to the day when the RIAA finally decides to allow the construction of a complete music service. Until that time Listen.com Rhapsody is a pretty good start and I highly recommend it.

A tale of two tablet PCs (Part 2)

In the last episode I offered a "review" of the Acer 110TCi. OK, so it was really more of a rant about the incredibly poor usability design of the product, but you get the idea. I ended by asking the question of whether or not I've now changed my mind about how the Tablet PC can be useful to a Macintosh user. The answer is no I haven't, you just have to have the right hardware. Hardware designed with some actual thought into how it will be used.

First let me be clear, if Apple made a Tablet PC like device, I'd forget all about the Windows XP driven Tablet PC of today. Unfortunately, it's doubtful Apple will offer such a device, even though there are rumors circulating that one is being manufactured. All is not lost however, there does exist a Tablet PC that a Macintosh user can, if not love, at least can like. If you're a Macintosh user and are interested in buying a tablet to complement your existing Macintosh setup, I highly recommend the Compaq TC1000.

The Compaq is far from a perfect device so to start I'll mention the major criticisms often leveled at it.

First it's slower then any other Tablet PC. There's no debating this point. It uses a Transmeta Crusoe processor running at 1Ghz, but because of the design of the Crusoe it doesn't really feel like a 1Ghz PC for many operations. In particular launching applications and running those applications for the first time will be slow. This is because the Crusoe has to translate the Intel X86 instruction into the Crusoe's own VLIW (very long instruction word) instructions. What's interesting though, is that as you use an application more, the Crusoe optimizes parts of it and the end result is something that performs perfectly fine. It's kind of weird, but for what it gives you it's probably worth it. Of course, what it gives you is better battery life. An extremely important feature for a device intended to be used the way Tablet PCs are used. From what I've seen so far, the TC1000 performs vastly better in the battery department then the Centrino based Acer did. With the Acer I always felt like I should be plugging it in as I watched the battery meter drop, and with the Compaq I watch in wonder at how long it lasts. (one caveat here is that the Acer I had did have a defective wireless card so it's possible that the battery life was adversely affected by that, but I've seen similar reports elsewhere as well.) So coming at this as a Macintosh user, speed is not the most important thing, it's the other qualities of the device that will make or break the experience. The device does need to be faster, but even with this considered I still find it to be vastly more usable then the much faster Acer.

The second major criticism of the TC1000 is that it doesn't have a pressure sensitive pen. The TC1000 uses a different digitizer then all the other Tablet PCs. Most have Wacom digitizers, but the Compaq uses a Finepoint digitizer. For me I don't see this as a real problem. I played with the pressure sensitivity on the Acer and clearly for an artist it will be important, but for the average user I doubt it's really necessary. Would I like to have it? Sure. Do I miss it, not really. The primary reason for this is that the pen on the Compaq works dramatically better then the pen on the Acer. In particular the calibration is much more consistent, the Acer would constantly have problems with the pen near the edge of the screen. So far I haven't seen any of this with the Compaq. Again the caveat is that I'm not positive that the Acer was working correctly, but also again I've seen many reports from other people that the Wacom digitizers have lots of problems with pen calibration around the edges. The other downside of the pen on the Compaq is that it requires a AAAA bettery. This is definitely annoying, but I really like the weight it adds to the pen. The compaq pen feels much more like an actual writing instrument, rather then the cheap plastic excuse for pens I've seen on other Tablet PCs. The Acers built in pen was especially bad, and while it includes another larger pen as well, there's no way to attach it to the device.

There is one other thing to mention while talking about the negatives of the Compaq device. The TC1000 is still a first generation unit and is sure to be upgraded in the near future. There are various rumors floating around, but nothing concrete has been seen. It seems the two most common rumors are that the next gen will either switch to a Centrino or use the next generation Transmeta chip called, I believe, the Astro. Whichever route they go, I really hope they don't trade battery life for a small boost in speed.

Ok, wait, one more thing worth mentioning. Heat, the Compaq can definitely get warm and this hasn't been helped by the fact that the AC in the house isn't working correctly right now. It has a fan and the fan does make noise. In a lot of ways it seems pretty similar to the fan in the Apple 15" Powerbook. When it comes on you know it. This is actually what I consider the most serious flaw in the current design. It would be bad to have the fan come on while sitting in a meeting or something. However compared to my old Dell laptop the Compaq is whisper quiet so maybe it isn't all bad. On the Acer I don't think the fan ever came on.

So now having gotten the major faults of the Compaq out of the way, what's good about it? Well that can be summed up in one word, design! Which provides a benefit in the form of another word, usability! The Compaq engineers clearly thought about what they were doing. They didn't release a device that was full of features at the expense of usability and refinement. Where the Acer felt like a cheap plastic, piece of junk PC, the Compaq feels, well ..., it feels like it could have been an Apple product. It's not quite all the way up to Apple standards, but it comes far closer then any other PC I've ever seen and it's a thousand times better then the pathetic Acer.

The Compaq feels like a device that you can use as a companion (exactly what I was looking for). It has a very stiff frame and a piece of glass over the screen. This gives it a very solid feeling and makes it feel like it would be safe to carry it around. The edges are smoothed and rounded with no bulges that mar the clean lines of the device. Basically it feels good in the hand, a very nice thing considering how Tablet PCs are intended to be used.

The glass over the screen has a number of nice features. It protects the screen, it alters the glare profile so that you can actually use it while holding it in your lap, it's much easier to clean, it allowed the for the face of the device to be entirely flat and it makes writing feel a little more natural then writing on the screen usually does. The downside is that looking through the glass does slightly alter the quality of the image. I've seen this described as being like looking through a very, very shear nylon stocking. It's a little annoying, but given the benefits of the glass and the way it makes the device feel and work I will take the glass every time.

All the cable connections are either on the top edge or the bottom edge of the device when in portrait mode. This design makes perfect sense. It's intended so that if you lay the device flat on a desk, all the wires that would go off the back of the desk(power, ethernet, USB, VGA) are on the top and those that would likely go toward the user (headphone and microphone) are on the bottom. This allows you to plug it in and still be able to pick it up and hold it fairly easily. With the Acer you would have wires protruding from three sides in this scenario. The one thing that bugs me a little is that the headphone cable ends up stabbing you in the stomach when you hold the device. I kind of wish they would have put the headphone and microphone jacks on the bottom of the left side instead of on the bottom of the device. This would still allow clean wire routing, while also allowing you to recline while listening to music through the headphones and reading on the device in portrait mode.

The Compaq has a number of buttons on the side of the device (esc, tab, Q and email) along with three user programmable pen activated buttons(launch input manager, launch journal and screen rotation) on the face of the device. All of the side buttons, except the email button, are also user programmable. In addition, there's a jog dial on the side that allows you to scroll through documents and serves as a return key when pressed. The button layout isn't perfect, I'd actually like to see a few more buttons that are user programmable, however compared to what was on the Acer this is a vast improvement. The pen activated buttons on the face are in particular, a sign of the considerably greater refinement to the Compaq device. The jog dial is also much easier to use then the button mechanism on the Acer and it doesn't fatigue your finger at all (something that was a big problem on the Acer).

To go along with the longer battery life in general, the Compaq also has the very nice feature that you can swap the battery without shutting the machine down. This is something that Apple machines have done for years and why it's not a standard feature on all PC laptops I'll never understand. Again a n