Category: Apple

Purring Leopard

Where do I begin?

Leopard upgrade couldn’t have been easier. I backed up my entire home directory and did a clean install (ditto, Murdza!). And then I manually moved preferences for the apps that I still wanted to keep around back to Leopard and tested each one to make sure nothing burns the house. That took longer than the Leopard install itself (about 45 minutes for the installation).

I have some gripes on a couple of my favorite apps not being supported on Leopard yet. But other wise I’d say the whole thing went pretty well except for a couple of stupid mistakes I made here and there.

Typically on Windows, whenever I upgraded to a new OS to a current hardware spec, the new Windows OS inevitably would slow down the hardware. But on the Macs, at least for the past couple of revisions, everything has felt snappier than the previous version (unless the hardware is really old and Apple just won’t support it outright).

Let the good times roll! (Thanks Jason!)

Rise of the Big Mac

I find it amusing to see the very few among the student body who are using unmarked laptops… and some of them are even using just plain pen and paper… 🙂 It must’ve been a long time since I went to college. The reversal in Mac:PC ratio in classrooms is astounding. I find it hard that anyone would best against Apple nowadays in both the stock market and the PC market.

What's a Dell?

Another Mac Die Hard Was Born

I was talking to Norris last night to catch up on stuff, and I asked how he liked his PowerBook that he’d bought cheap and used from another friend before he moved back to Canada. Keep in mind, Norris has been a die hard Windows guy. And when he first got his Mac, he had a few gripes and groaned about certain usability issues.

Fast forward to a few months later, now he proclaims he’d never EVER go back to Windows ever again — NEVER! Having been a Windows fan boy for so long, he explained why (almost) everything on a Mac is simply more superior and simple to use:

1. Everything just works;
2. Superior and more stable 3rd party apps; he said on Windows, you have to “figure out” how some apps work if it came from a 3rd party. But on a Mac, you just expect everything to work without you having to know how or even to 2nd guess why… Now, this was exactly what I was talking about. You miss out quite a bit of fun just by using Windows even if by some godly divine intervention your Windows box somehow never crashes or catches a virus/malware/Trojan.
3. Mac OSX is rock solid; can’t say that about Windows XP or even Vista; he had to use Vista for 2 days and was ready to throw it out of the Window at the end. He ended up IMing another friend about how to install Mac OSX on his IBM laptop — that’s how much he loves Mac OSX.
4. He proclaims that eventually people will see the light and start using Mac OSX;
5. He’s in so far as to ponder on getting certified as a Mac OSX support guy!

So I guess the lesson is, shut up and stop whining about Mac OSX if you’ve never even used it for more than a few minutes in an Apple Store. Once you’ve understood it like Norris has… well… once you go Mac, you can never go back!

On a related note, I took Bryan to the mall the other day and saw that, again, the Apple Store was pack house… while the stupid Dell “booth” got a few tumble weeds strolling by and was dead as ever. I wonder why Dell does that — setting up a booth to fail. It seems like they tried to put up some kind of physical presence to demonstrate how “great” Dell computers are… But even die hard Dell/Windows fan boys I know would be embarrassed to be seen interacting with the ugly booth.

Web Photo Woes

I never paid much attention to how photos appear on the web until recently I’ve decided that I need to diversify my income sources by branching out into photography, which has been an old love affair of mine. Over the span of a week or so, I’ve soaked up so much information on just the idea of presentation of colors that it really sickens me how Apple’s Safari (and browsers based on its rendering engine, such as OmniWeb, Shiira among others) is the only browser that gets color renditions correctly according to the artists’ intent. Nine years after the initial dot-com boom and six years after its bust, I can’t believe only ONE technology company gets web-based photography presentation right!

Without getting into too much details, basically the chief complaint is, web browsers like Firefox or Internet Explorer are only capable of displaying a very narrow set of colors that are capable of being displayed by modern monitors. This was done in the old days to insure compatibility of color display between various makes of monitors and applications via which images were rendered. But the “old days” have long gone, and browsers are still stuck in the 1990’s.

Now I understood why my images appeared muddy on Flickr. But since there are way too many of them to fix and re-upload, I’ve gone to hell and back trying everything to make sure the richness of colors captured by my camera is properly displayed on the web. But I think I am only half way there in finding an acceptable work flow that works for me.

So anyway, this is just a rant on one of those tech things….

Why I May Have Taken Macs for Granted

Sometimes I wonder if life with modern computers (as in after 2005) running Windows XP and Vista has gotten better over the years. I’ve known about PC vendors including trial wares on their boxes to earn a few bucks (which to me was incredibly annoying because as a systems administrator, I had to go through each box and uninstall each one of them every single time, which is really a waste of my time). But maybe, I told myself, it’s gotten better.

Another huge problem I had when supporting Windows running on PCs was drivers — often when I reinstalled Windows on any machine, the first thing I had to do was to go to the PC vendor’s site to download drivers. That was painful sometimes because they weren’t always clear on which drivers you had to use (yeah, part numbers and version numbers are really helpful… NOT).

Today I read a funny post on the experience of dealing with a Sony Vaio. Sony’s one of the computer vendors I absolutely hate to support for the reasons explained on Steve’s blog… but that was during 2000 and 2004. I can’t believe people are still stupid enough to keep buying computing crap from Sony as if they were really superior products. “Idiots!” I say.

I’ve told quite a few people that running Windows on my Mac has been a much pleasant experience than it is on an actual PC box designed with Windows in mind. Steve’s experience pretty much reflects that of my own (as do a few dozen comments left on that entry). Too bad BioShock is probably never coming to the Mac… But it’s good to know that at least Windows boxes are good for at least something other than doorstops.

Computer Virus — It All Started on An Apple Computer

I know the old Mac OS had troubles with computer virus. But I had no idea the whole thing all started on an Apple Computer!! According to the article, the first Mac virus even predated one on a Windows OS by a whopping four years! This is further proof that Apple is always ahead of Microsoft in everything (ahem, sarcasm at work here). 😉

Further reading here.

Parallels v.s. VMWare Fusion

Ever since Mac’d gone Intel, a number of virtualization options have opened up for us Mac users. Among them, the biggest names are Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac and the much anticipated VMWare Fusion. I’ve also tried lesser known contenders CrossOver Mac (except it was the Linux version that I used) and Wine. But the results were less than satisfactory. So I am not going to bother with them.

This CNet article covers some pretty basic benchmarks for using Parallels and Fusion v.s. Apple’s Boot Camp. My own experience echoes that of CNet’s results.

Parallels
Pros: Nice touches on providing Windows Task Bar when in Coherence mode. I find myself needing access to the Windows desktop from time to time. I also like the fact that I can access the full “Start” menu from the Dock. Boots and runs fairly fast.
Cons: Somewhat awkward to use when Mac’s Exposé is invoked. Fusion does a much better job at this; seems to slow down the overall performance of the machine somewhat. But I can’t prove it scientifically.

Fusion
Pros: Excellent integration with Exposé — each window that belongs to Windows actually scales! Supports both cores of my MBP! Virtual Appliances can be really helpful!
Cons: Poor implementation on giving user access to the Windows Desktop or the Task Bar when in Unity mode. Awkward “Launch” tool bar — I wish I can make the damn icons smaller. Instead of the “Applications” menu, Fusion should implement what Parallels does, full access to the “Start” menu from wthin the Dock.

It was relatively easy to enable my MacBook Pro’s iSight to use it with Windows Live Messenger (I hate it) on both softwares. But I did have to get iSight’s driver for Windows (stripped from Boot Camp) to get it to work.

Overall, my experience on both Parallels and Fusion is a pleasant one. Windows seemed to install faster on my virtual machines than they ever did when I had a real PC hardware to play with. Actually, it took longer to get Windows Updates to run and complete than the initial installation process. Oh, the ironies… I hope Microsoft continues to crank out crap ware like this for as long as they can afford to. The world just loves more crap ware shoved down its throat.

Jason Taking the Leap

So Jason finally did it. He finally got a Mac. And it’s not just “any” Mac… It’s an 8-core Mac Pro (as in 8 processors)! For someone who always tried to quarrel with me on the age-old issue of “Mac v.s. PC”, he certainly took a big leap of faith in a completely different direction.

In college, I always got calls from Windows/PC friends for support (we had no choice; the only 3D apps worth our time were all on Windows/Unix); but very rarely from Mac people. And then slowly, over the years, people started getting Macs. And the weird thing happened — Once I help them get over the initial “culture shock” of the way the Mac OS works, I rarely get any support calls from friends/families anymore… EVER! Sweet.

But I still miss the “support calls” sometimes… They also served as “what’s up” calls as we got busier with our professional lives.

Apple Javascript Documentation Ignores IE

I was reading through some documentation on Apple’s Developer Connection site when I noticed that Apple completely left out IE when recommending developers to test their Javascript codes on other browsers.

Apple documentation ignoring IE as recommended browser to test Javascript with

Granted there are actually a number of other browsers not listed there, given IE’s lion’s share in the market, I found it amusing that they chose not to mention it at all. Considering Microsoft bailed out Apple at the brink of its demise back in the days, perhaps Apple ought to be a little nicer to Redmond even if they know Microsoft is just making bad copies of whatever Apple makes anyway…

Testing Localhost Developments in Internet Explorer via Parallels on Mac OSX

Developing web applications can be a frustrating job solely because so many people still use various versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer — possibly some of the worst browsers compared to most of the other modern browsers in terms of adherence to web standards. But I can’t just not test my applications against them simply because I hate them… So the war continues…

One of the problems of testing web apps under Parallels with IE is, instead of testing development URLs such as

1
http://localhost/

, usually IP addresses have to be used, like such

1
http://192.168.0.100

, to reach OSX’s localhost server (because

1
localhost

on Windows would entail having an actual web server running under Windows). The problem with that is that some applications such as WordPress need to have a full absolute path in order for it to work properly (especially when dealing with themes). I’ve tried a couple of workarounds, but nothing is as simple as using Apple’s own Bonjour technology.

I found a post that explains how to set it all up. Even though his example deals with running Ruby on Rails, the idea is exactly the same for other development environments such as PHP and Java (enable port 80, 443… etc). Now I am a happy camper…

via [the naked brain]

Awesome Check Delivery Status Widget

Developers who write apps for the Mac OSX Platform never seizes to amaze me with their innovative approaches to how things ought to work…

The Delivery Status Widget is one of those apps that’s just way cool. This is something I’d never expect seeing having written on the Windows camp (the snobbish Apple side of me speaking)… On Windows, I used to hate having to install unnecessary applications because you just have no idea what it’s doing to your system (“fantastic” DLLs, “awesome” registry keys… etc). Sometimes uninstallers even screw up the system… But of course, that was back in 2004, how much has changed… Now Windows is more stable than EVER before… (yeah, right).

Delivery Status Widget

Speaking of widgets, it seems like Vista has some cool stuff going on albeit being just copies of the Mac OSX Dashboard widgets in looks and functionalities. But it’s like this… what do you expect out of Redmond nowadays anyway. Chee-hoi claims that “under the hood” Vista is going to really kick ass. That may be the case if whatever Microsoft promises can be fully materialized before people just start walking away and do themselves a favor by getting a Mac…. that or before Microsoft’s bloatware and vapor ware just implodes. 😉

Yeah, I know… It’s Wednesday… and my snobbish Mac side has already taken over… Bad Mac, HEEL!

via [Gizmodo]