Apple

I was beavering away last night on the shrink wrapping of Idea Jam when my aptop started to make the most god-awful noise. One of the fans seems to have become warped, but the problem is that now it doesn’t actually do the job of cooling the machine any more so after about 20 minutes use it shuts itself down with warning message. Now I do have Apple Car but when I spoke to them, they said the best they can do is fix it in 5 days which just isn’t an option for me. So it was off to the Apple Store on Regent Street this morning to get a replacement (5 months earlier than planned). Since my last purchase they now sell the high spec machines in the store so within ten minutes I was back out with a top spec Mac Book Pro 17″ (2.6ghz processor, high resolution and 200gb 7200rpm disk). And then two hours later all of my files had been restored from my last Time Machine backup and I’m up and running again.

Not really a planned switch but painless (other than to the bank balance). I’ll get my old machine fixed and then sell it on eBay to try and affray some of the losses so I guess I treat this as a late Christmas present to myself.

One of my Christmas presents was a Belkin Cushtop which is basically a hard, angled cushion that allows you to sit with a hot laptop (such as the MacBook Pro that I use) on your lap for literally hours on end with no problems. I used it all day yesterday just sat on the sofa catching up with work and I must say it’s very good, no back ache, burned legs or burnt out laptop, so if you like to sit in a comfy chair with your computer for extended periods of time I can definitely recommend it.

I thought I’d have a play with Jailbreak on my iPod Touch. And boy am I glad I did. The iPod is good out of the box but now that it’s been jailbroken it’s become a truly great piece of kit, with the full email and calendar clients from the iPhone, Google Maps and various other toys to play with.

With the launch of the iPhone here in the UK today this has made me even less likely to get the iPhone at least for another year or so. Once the iPhone gets up to 16gb and 3g then it might become a more attractive proposition, but until then the Touch will do me nicely.

So the first thing I discovered coming into the office this morning is that NetInfo Manager is no more in Leopard. Once I had gotten used to it, it turned out to be a really good way of managing hosts file entries, but for some reason it has been dumped in favour of going back to the old Windows way of managing hosts files. The problem then comes in location the file to edit. So for my own benefit, and that of anyone else who has similar problems, you go to Finder, open the Go menu, select Go to Folder… and type /etc in the search box. This takes you to a hidden folder which contains the hosts file. Before editing it the first time you’ll need to give yourself rights to the file by right clicking, selecting Get Info and granting yourself read and write access. After that the file seems to work just the same as its Windows equivalent. This is progress I guess.

Well I couldn’t hold out any longer so this morning I spent a few hours upgrading my laptop to run OS X 10.5, better know in this incarnation as Leopard.

It wasn’t entirely painless but that was more because I decided that rather than do a straight upgrade I’d do a clean install and move software across. I’m running out of disk space so it provided a good opportunity to clear out some rubbish at the same time. I do have some non standard settings though to support my Java development. So in the end it took around four hours but all seems to be up and going again.

It’s also worht mentioning the superb backup software called Super Duper! which gives a great feeling of security. It allows you to take a complete, bootable image of your disk, so even if everything goes wrong I know I can restore my old setup within an hour. Even better than that it’s free for the basic version. If you run a Mac you owe it to yourself to check out (forget all this namby pamby Time Machine rubbish!).

So I’ve had the iPod Touch for a few days now and I did promise I’d write about my first impressions…

The Good
I’ve never used an iPhone (we’re a little backwards here in the UK) so I can’t comment on how the screen compares but from my point of view it’s the best screen I’ve seen on any mobile device, ever. I was slightly worried that once I’d had my fingers all over it for a day nothing would look good but it’s so bright that the image cuts through any greasy fingerprints. As a pure user interface the new iPod is just so intuitive that anyone can pick it up and be using it within seconds. Coverflow is a nice way of getting around (strangely I never use it on the laptop) with the draggable images you can get around your music collection faster than on any other device. It does rather rely on you having album art for all your music, but I went through that pain a while ago so not a problem here.

Safari is just lovely, surprisingly fast, and works with all of the websites that I go to regularly. The process of connecting to wireless networks is pretty painless (indeed seamless if the network is open) and then with the pinch / double tap approach to zooming in and out you can very easily get to all of your important sites. What I’m picturing here is that I won’t need to lug my laptop bag around with me all day at Lotusphere (or similar situations) and just use the Touch to check email, blogs etc. All I need now are good web-based IM clients for MSN / Google Talk and Skype. Any ideas?

The wireless iTunes Music Store is superb, in fact I think I may even prefer it to the real thing. I don’t know about you but I find navigating around the normal ITMS quite slow and clunky, the wireless version is so cut down that it’s a joy to use.

The photo and video functions are incredible, I’ve never seen anything so well done in such a small device and I can imagine that on a plane or train journey the ability to watch movies on a good sized screen will be a real boon.

The Bad
I’m not yet convinced by the keyboard. Firstly, why can’t it display in landscape mode? When I’m browsing I want to be able see as much width as possible, but really I won’t be using it much so can live with it. I imagine it would be more annoying on the iPhone where you might be texting or emailing a lot more.

Talking of the iPhone, I fail to understand why the calendar has been crippled so that you can’t create new entries on the Touch but you can sync your calendar with your computer. I guess this is a pure marketing move to keep differentiation between the iPhone and the Touch. The lack of the Mail app falls into the same category, not a problem as I use Gmail, but if you wanted a POP3 client then the Touch is not for you.

The Not So Sure
I’m not a big YouTube user, I just watch the things I’m sent. Though I guess if you need to kill a few minutes then it may be worthwhile. Just not my thing.

Now Greyhawk posted about his problems with accessing the music functionality and I have to agree that if you drive with your iPod regularly then this is not the one for you. You really have to be looking at it to be able to control it whereas older models you could do it by touch alone (ironically). But I don’t really use mine in the car, just on the bus and at work when it’s sat next to me. That being said, if there were some way to re-program the Home button so that a double click paused your music that would be lovely.

Overall this is obviously the way that portable media devices are going in the long run. In a couple of years time as battery life and storage catch up I can imagine the day when my ultimate pocket device is a reality

I went to the pub with some friends last night (not a big change from normal there), but when I got home, slightly the worse for wear, a new toy was waiting for me. So really, I ask you, who needs sleep? I just sat there for a couple of hours playing, getting all of my music, photos and video across onto it, using the Wi-Fi. In the cold light of day I feel pretty terrible, but I can assure you that’s entirely due to the beer and lack of sleep. Full review of the Touch coming when I am fully compus.

Given that I am a sucker for all things Apple, the announcement of the new iPod Touch which is basically an iPhone without the phone bit (I guess an “i” then?), had me running to the online store to order one. It won’t arrive untilthe end of the month but I can’t wait, it looks so shiny 🙂

I’ve been using Parallels for over a year now and generally I’m very happy with it. But a few people recently have said I should check out VMware Fusion. It’s a direct competitor for Parallels with one obvious selling point, that you can use VMware images created on other operating systems on your Mac. So I built a new XP machine and have been using it instead of Parallels this weekend. Overall the two products are almost exactly the same. I have had a few problems with VMware in single window mode where I can’t use the keyboard so I have to use the Unity mode (the equivalent of Coherence mode in Parallels) but Unity actually seems better to me than Coherence anyway so that’s not a big problem. There’s no appreciable speed difference which would be my main requirement at this point. My MBP is getting on for 18 months old now and the 2gb memory and slower hard disk are beginning to be bottlenecks for my system’s performance.

I think I’ll probably stay with Parallels for the moment, but it’s nice to know that if necessary I can run a VMware image as well on my Mac as I could on a Windows machine.

You may remember that a couple of months ago I mentioned a VPN problem I was having with my Mac. Well for those three of you that are using the VPN-1 SecureClient for OS X, there has been a new build of the client software released which fixes the conflict with Airport. It also seems to be generally snappier so well worth a download.