Macs

New from the expo: The Mac mini The iPod shuffle iWork iLife ‘05 The other announcements aren’t terribly exciting and the lack of a Tiger release date was disappointing. More tonight.

The Macworld Expo San Francisco keynote is less than 4 hours away. The whole Mac community is waiting with baited breath. Personally, I want to find out more about Tiger. In particular, a release date more specific than “first half of 2005” and hopefully sooner rather than later. We also get to find out which rumors were worth something. The current most popular rumors are: iWork Apple’s new office suite flash-based iPod headless iMac the $500 Mac Mac OS X Tiger info and release date Powerbook updates with slightly faster processors I still don’t get the head-popping excitement being generated by the flash-based iPod. Shortly after the keynote is done, I’ll do a quick summary. Later tonight, I’ll do my little rant on what all the news will mean for the future.

This weekend, I was downloading some software that was compressed. I have those files automatically open with Stuffit Expander (as is the default on most setups). I noticed though that Stuffit Expander was bouncing over and over… and over… and over again. I assumed it had hung, force quit, and tried opening it again. Same thing occurred. I tried reinstalling Stuffit. It kept doing it. I left it going for a while and eventually it started. I thought that was mighty strange. I was starting to get worried that it was particular to my Powerbook and that I’d have to think about reinstalling the OS. ...

The infamous company MacMice has announced a new product called “The Ball”. I’ll admit, it sounds a little dirty to me (and would probably illicit a snicker or two from less mature audiences). It follows its brother product, “The Mouse”, not in nomenclature, but in appearance. It’ll fit in with your other Mac peripherals. What makes this trackball cool though is the fact that it’s Bluetooth. In fact, it’s the first Bluetooth trackball I’ve ever seen. That alone makes it pretty cool. However, I’m not sure that it’s $90 worth of cool. I never really understood the practicality of wireless trackballs either, so this isn’t something I’m likely to get.

The stability and speed of Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) built a strong userbase that continues to this day (even with 10.4 Tiger right around the corner). It haunts developers, keeping them from using neat tools like Cocoa bindings which are present in Panther but not Jaguar. It also haunts its users with old issues that many of us have simply forgotten. A poster in the Macworld forums recently posted that he mistyped his password and much to his surprise, it was accepted and login continued like normal. Disturbing, no? Even more troubling was that not all passwords were accepted either. This problem was a result of an old authentication mechanism, which used at maximum, 8 characters. But OS X (and more importantly, Keychain) supported longer passwords. The (rather half-assed) solution was to simply truncate the password for comparison. In other words, if my password was areallylongpassword, then only areallyl was necessary for login. Additionally, input passwords were also truncated (therefore making this normally completely transparent for the user). That meant you could tack on extra chracters and it would be acceptable. So, all of the following would work: ...

As we draw close to Macworld Expo San Francisco, the number of rumors generally increases. The reason is multiple fold. First, supposedly more leaks happen closer to the expo. Second, people’s desire for rumors increases exponentially. Finally, it’s a quick and easy way to draw traffic as a Mac based website. Yes, I’m a traffic whore too, so let’s review Flash-based iPod For almost as long as the iPod has been around, this has been the popular rumor. And why not? It seems like a natural progression. Flash memory based MP3 players tend to be smaller and cheaper than hard drive based players. The ridiculous, respect-less rumor wells throw caution to the wind, ignoring hard real analysis (done by such people as John Gruber). It combines tiny size (as if the iPod mini’s compact flash hard drive is bloating it terribly and flash memory is that much small) and low costs (as flash memory is so cheap, still hundreds of dollars for any significant size) to make for a some people’s wet dreams. Ignore the fact that the iPod’s main attraction is having your entire music collection in your pocket. We’ve got a rumor to foist upon the public and get attention. To make the situation worse, iPod sites such as iPodlounge are encouraging the rumor with iPod flash Concepts contest. Dangle some expensive headphones in front of work starved artists and watch as you get hundreds of designs that are either physically impossible or hopelessly stupid. Yeesh. ...

Probably one of the most frustrating aspects of moving from Mac OS 9 or Windows to Mac OS X was the lack of a PDF browser plugin. It can be almost maddening in academic environments such as U-Mass as most assignments and documents aren’t published in HTML. They’re published in PDF because of the guaranteed formatting and handling of special symbols (such as the formulas that plague a young computer scientist). ...

I’m indecisive about my browser on my Macs (the choice is easy for PCs, Firefox all the way). Pre Safari and Firefox, the choice was easy. Camino (formerly Chimera) was the end all for Mac browsers. Now my choice switches between Firefox and Safari. Firefox is fast most of the time, but after some use seems to slow down. Safari is fairly fast, but tends to have pregnant pauses when connecting to servers (or at least this is what the status bar tells me). ...

To follow up on my old post, Brad Oliver has posted a new beta build of the Knights of the Old Republic game. Of particular note is that even in its current rough form, users with Radeon 8500, 9000 or 9200 cards will see double framerates. However, in some cases, this is doubling 2-3 frames per second to 6-7 FPS. I’ll probably just keep playing with my Powerbook, although the initial problems have left such a bad taste in my mouth that I haven’t returned to the game since discovering that fact.

Fire up software update or download the delta or combo installers. The enhancements, straight from Apple are: Applications Allows TextEdit to open certain RTF documents that previously wouldn’t open, resulting in a “TextEdit Open Failed. Couldn’t open file” alert. Resolves an issue in which Safari, Mail, and other networking applications that use DNS lookups could experience intermittent connectivity issues with Security Update 2004-09-30 and Mac OS X 10.3.5 or later installed. Addresses an issue with Blizzard World of Warcraft in which the game’s frame rate could drop considerably when in “Ghost mode,” if the computer uses an nVidia graphics card. Resolves an issue in which enabling Vertex Shaders in World of Warcraft could lead to unexpected graphics issues when using an nVidia graphics card. Addresses an issue with World of Warcraft in which incorrect colors or unexpectedly flashing objects could appear when using an ATI Radeon 9600 graphics card, making gameplay difficult. Improves compatibility for Pacific Tech’s Graphing Calculator 3.5—some 3D surfaces might not render in Mac OS X 10.3.6. Other Addresses an issue in which a brief “flash of lines” may appear on the screen when waking the computer from sleep after the “Flurry” Screen Saver has run, if the computer uses an ATI Radeon 8500, 9000, 9200, 9600, or M9 graphics chip. Improves compatibility for FireWire-based audio interfaces, including the Edirol FA-101 FireWire audio interface. Enables E*TRADE PDF account statements to be viewed in Preview. An Apple Cinema 22″ ADC display, when connected to certain PowerBook computers, no longer shows random “stuttering” or other graphics anomalies in the Finder and DVD Player. Addresses an issue in which shadowed text in a PDF file may print differently than it appears on the screen when printing to a raster printer. Filenames longer than 31 characters are no longer shortened when the file is saved on a server via Apple File Sharing. Resolves an issue with Mac OS X 10.3.6 in which some FireWire hard drives would not appear (“mount”) on the desktop. Addresses an issue with Mac OS X 10.3.6 in which DVD Player might not open on some Power Mac G4 computers that use an ATI Radeon 9800 AGP video card. Resolves an issue that prevented printing to some Windows-based print servers.