While at the mall this afternoon, I stopped into the Apple Store briefly to have a look at the new MacBook. As an unabashed Mac fan, I’ve been pretty underwhelmed by the recent MacBook release so far. Charging $150 for black (the extra 20 gigs of HD space included on the black model only costs $50 if you build-to-order it in the white case) is frankly insulting. I hate glossy screens, and I was dubious about the no-latch magnetic closure. Not to mention the name- it was lousy when the MacBook Pro was anounced (and Powerbook was such a cool name), and it’s still lousy. At least it’s good for a chuckle… as Dave has been heard to say around the office “No man of woman born shall ever defeat MacBook!”
After seeing it in person, my opinion has changed little. The magnetic non-latch did seem much nicer and more secure than I expected, so I’ll withdraw that complaint. But the glossy screen picked up glare and reflections from everywhere. Despite what many claim, I’ve never found the color on glossy displays (Windows laptops or the MacBook) to be better than standard laptops. The BlacBook is still a ripoff. Did I mention that I hate the glossy display? Oh, I tried the funny looking keyboard a bit… types just as well as my 3 year old Powerbook, which keyboard I like quite well.
Prior to the release (and the news of the glossy display), I had been thinking about buy my wife a MacBook. Her Compaq XP laptop is a little older than my Powerbook, and the battery life is abyssmal. She still prefers XP- she just needs to spend some time on a Mac. I figured a dual-boot MacBook would be perfect. Given the power/price ratio on the white MacBook, I probably would have done it… but I just can’t get past the glossy screen. Instead, I’ve ordered a new battery for her old laptop.
That was hook on the invitation to today’s event at Apple (Engadget’s Coverage). In total, three new products were introduced. Herewith a few thoughts on the products and the event.
First up was the anticipated Intel Mac Mini, now with Front Row and a remote. Available in Core Solo and Core Duo flavors, the Mini is now an even more attractive option for a spot in the family room, attached to the TV. Bill Bumgarner found the specs for the Mini’s video card, and notes that it’s heavily optimized for regular and HD video playback. In fact, it can simultaneously handle dual streams. Also, Front Row has been updated to allow access to shared media, just like the iApps.
Given all the reasons to make this a Media PC, I really wonder where the video capture for Tivo-like functionality is. Everyone asked this a year ago when the Mini debuted, and I think the question is even more apropos now. I also think that if a tuner were slated as an upcoming addon (via, say, the Firewire port), then the box should really have a bigger HD. My other complaint is the price- the lower-end option is now $599, not $499. Don’t get me wrong- it’s still a lot of functionality for $600. But there was a lot of magic in that $500 price point. It just has a different feel than $600, and I’m sure that $500 price point got alot of people looking at Macs who hadn’t before.
The next item was a leather iPod case for $99. This is iSock 2.0, now with extra price gouging. It sounds like Steve only spent a couple of minutes on this, and he seems to like these kinds of things. Whatever.
The final product really blew me away – and not in a good way. The iPod HiFi has got to be the worst product offering I’ve seen from Apple in the three years I’ve been a Mac owner. Essentially, it’s a $350 speaker system for the iPod. I’m not even sure where to begin with all the things I don’t like about this product, so I’ll just fire ‘em off at random.
Why is it called the iPod HiFi? The name really sounds like a new iPod, not an accessory. It’s even listed on the iPod page at Apple along side the iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, and iPod. But it’s not an iPod.
The Dock. Is On. The Top. Pictures of the HiFi sans iPod show a sharp looking product, with typical Apple sexiness. But once you stick an upright iPod on top, it’s just ugly and unbalanced. Steve claims you can get rid of your stereo now. If I slide the HiFi into the shelf where a stereo once stood, I probably won’t have room to dock an iPod.
With Bose already offering the SoundDock for $300, is there really a market for a $350 iPod speaker? And look at where the dock is on the SoundDock. Duh.
Some will argue that the SoundDock doesn’t really compete with the HiFi – the HiFi is portable, and can operate on batteries. Ok. And in fairness, I think the integrated handles are very stylish. However, with the IPod docked precariously on top, you won’t be carrying this around like a boom box.
There’s an audio input (analog and digital) on the back, and Apple.com points out that the digital audio out on the Airport Express is the perfect input, allowing you to stream music from your Mac the HiFi. This brings up my biggest gripe. Why not build in WiFi and give it an iPod interface, and let you browse music from all over your network, just like FrontRow? At that point, you could just lose the iPod dock, or suppy a retractable cable with a dock connector, for when you do need to use it outside Wifi range.
After reading all of the anouncements, John (with whom I share an office) wondered why this even warranted a Stevenote. Upon reflection, I think there are two reasons. First, I expect Steve will personally intro each new Intel Mac, and doesn’t want to wait any longer than needed to do so. It’s important for Apple to ensure that the switch to Intel doesn’t result in a sales slump, and having Steve wow us every couple of months with a new Intel Mac and good news about the transition has to be part of the plan. Also, I think Apple wants to move towards have more of these smaller Steve events more often, instead of two Stevenotes a year (Macworld and WWDC). This trend started last fall and had continued. This will help keep momentum going year-round for Apple. I just hope the next one is better.
Update: added instructions for installing elisp packages after building.
There are as many Emacsen as there are grains of sand in the desert. For various reason (largely habit) I prefer XEmacs to Emacs, when given a choice- even when in text mode (xemacs -nw for the uninitiated; I usually alias this to emacs). And while I love a good command prompt as much as the next geek, I do own a Mac, and sometimes I want a more Mac-like experience.
Carbon XEmacs is a derivative of XEmacs, developed by Andrew Choi. Carbon XEmacs does not require X11, but instead uses the OS X Carbon libraries for its GUI display. Of the various OS X-specific Emacsen I have tried, it is my current favorite. At the time of this writing, the current version of Carbon XEmacs is Beta 4, and is available as a series of patches against the XEmacs source. This HOWTO describes how to build Carbon XEmacs Beta 4 for Mac OS X 10.4.4, and attempts to describe more generally how to build the latest Carbon XEmacs for any OS X 10.3+. Since many Mac users (myself included) are spoiled by the many binary packages and package managers (such as Fink and Darwin Ports) available for OS X, this HOWTO goes into some detail about how to download, patch, and build the source. If you already know this stuff, feel free to skim.
(If you’ve never done so before, you’ll need to install the XCode developer tools from your OS X install CD/DVD. If you’ve lost these, it’s available from Apple’s Developer site. It’s basically a click-and-forget installer package.)
Let’s do this
To begin, you will need to download the XEmacs source for the same XEmacs version that your Carbon XEmacs patches apply to. At the time of the writing, the latest Carbon XEmacs is Beta 4, which is supplied as a diff (set of patches) to xemacs-21.5.23. Visit the XEmacs.org download page to locate a suitable mirror, and download the source package for the correct version. As of this writing, all 21.5.x releases are considered Beta releases of XEmacs, so I chose the beta download page, and a local mirror therein.
When you arrive at the mirror, it will be a directory on an FTP server, full of files. look for a tarball- a file ending with .tar.gz- matching the xemacs version you need. In this case, I’ll be downloading xemacs-21.5.23.tar.gz. You will also see files with similar names ending in .patch.gz, .asc, and .md5. You will not need these (unless you need them- in which case you already know you need them. The rest of us will soldier on).
After downloading the file, open Terminal and change to the directory where the .tar.gz file was downloaded. I downloaded mine to my ~/ext directory:
cd ~/ext
If you don’t know where your downloads go, they probably go to your desktop; try cd ~/Desktop (capitalization counts). Now we’ll extract the source code:
tar xzf xemacs-21.5.23.tar.gz
Download the diff file from the Carbon XEmacs page to the same directory where you downloaded the xemacs source. Uncompress the diff file:
bunzip2 xemacs-21.5.23-carbon-b4.diff.bz2
And patch the original sources:
patch -p0 < xemacs-21.5.23-carbon-b4.diff
An aside: this is some pretty cool stuff if you’re not familiar with diffing and patching; the diff file is just a list of the changes between the original and Andrew Choi’s version, patch applies these changes to our original files, resulting in files that match Choi’s modified source. For the curious, -p0 (essentially) tells patch that it doesn’t have to adjust the paths; that’s why we made sure we put the patch in the same directory as the original zipped sources.
Now, time to make the donuts, er, software:
cd xemacs-21.5.23/carbon
sh build-app.sh
And now, the waiting. The hardest part, if we are to believe Tom Petty. This will take a while. On my 1.8 GHz iMac G5 (1.5GB RAM), it took around 7 minutes or so; it would probably take twice as long on my old G4 Powerbook.
When it’s done, you’ll have a shiny new XEmacs.app in the current directory (carbon). Unfortunately, your shiny new XEmacs.app doesn’t do a whole lot- none of the lisp packages that provide a significant portion of XEmacs’ features are included in the source code package. Instead, you’ll need to download them separately. The easiest way is to download the “xemacs-sumo” package, which contains all of the official packages in a single download. For multibyte character set support, you’ll also want the “xemacs-mule-sumo” package (mule is the emacs/xemacs multibyte subsystem).
From the XEmacs.org download page, find the link to download Official Packages, and select a mirror. You’ll end up in an FTP directory, as before. Download the following packages into the same directory as your other downloads:
xemacs-sumo.tar.gz
xemacs-mule-sumo.tar.gz
The packages can live a couple of different location, but I prefer to keep the packages directly inside the XEmacs.app application bundle. To unpack the tarballs to the right place run the following (remember to change the path if your downloads aren’t in ~/ext):
cd ~/ext/xemacs-21.5.23/carbon/XEmacs.app/Contents/Resources/lib/xemacs
tar xzf ~/ext/xemacs-sumo.tar.gz
tar xzf ~/ext/xemacs-mule-sumo.tar.gz
Your XEmacs.app is now fully loaded. To move this to your Application directory, you can drag-n-drop in Finder, or just:
cd ~/ext/xemacs-21.5.23/carbon
mv XEmacs.app/ /Applications/
Just double click the teddybear icon to launch. If you want to see it run in a terminal window, use this (assuming you moved it to your Applications folder):
/Applications/XEmacs.app/Contents/MacOS/XEmacs -nw
As additional (Carbon) patches against the same base version of xemacs are released, you can download and apply them in the same manner, so keep the directory around. Remember to re-build the app (and copy it to Applications) after each patching. If a new patch-bundle is release against a newer XEmacs version, just dump the old source code directory and start over from the top.
Since I was at the mall anyway Staurday night getting new cell phones & service (from Cingular- but that’s another post), I stopped by the Apple Store to check the new Intel iMacs. Needing something to use to judge speed, I fired up iPhoto and proceeded to zoom and scroll about. Snappy. Snappy enough that I had to attribute at least part of the performance to iPhoto ‘06. My iPhoto ‘05 install, containing only around 3700 of the rated 25,000 picture capacity, had been so prone to beachballitis as to be nearly unusable. Although I was a bit leary that my year-old G5 wouldn’t perform as well as the cooler-than-thou CoreDuo chunk o’ geek-porn I tried at the store, I went ahead and dropped the 79.00 USD to pick up iLife ‘06.
In a nutshell: worth every cent- and that’s just based on 10 minutes of playing with iPhoto ‘06. So. Much. Faster. No really- it is. I can actually use iPhoto again without force-quitting it every 10 minutes. And the “Scroll Guide”, a see-through pop-up bezel that shows the Month/Year as you scroll, is a nice touch. Rotating photos in gallery mode is much faster as well- nearly instantaneous, even with a dozen pictures selected.
I’ll try to post a few words about the other iApps when I fire them up (except iWeb… don’t think I’ll need that).
…Mighty Mouse is on the way. The latest toy from Apple is (unbelievably) called the Mighty Mouse. It’s the first multi-button mouse offered by Apple, and as always, it’s innovative. It doesn’t look like a multi-button mouse, the left and right buttons are touch-sensitive regions on the top of the mouse. Instead of a scroll wheel, it has a finger-tip sized trackball that allows scrolling in two dimensions. Instead of clickable side buttons, it has “force sensitive” regions where side buttons should be.
When I first saw this, I was ready to hop in the car and head to the local Apple Store to pick one up. As I’ve noted before, the single button mouse heretofore offered by Apple just doesn’t cut it with me; I need at least 4 buttons including scroll wheel. On further inspection, however, my enthusiasm was dampened somewhat.
For one thing, the mouse is only available (for now, anyway) with a tail. I’ve been searching for a good Bluetooth mouse for use with my iMac since I bought it. I’m a bit surprised there’s no bluetooth option; perhaps battery life is an issue given the touch sensitive technology at play. Also, it appears that certain key features- namely, reprogramming the button actions- are only available when using Tiger. I have been putting off that upgrade while I wait for it to stabilize a bit. Plus, it doesn’t really offer anything I’m dying to get my hands on. I find this deficiency deplorable, since my Microsoft Intellimouse lets me reprogram my buttons just fine on OS X 10.3.
Next time I’m in the Apple store, I will definately try one out. The bluetooth issue is minor; I can alwas pick up a wired one now, and use it as a hand-me down for another machine (yes, it works with windows too) when/if a Bluetooth model appears. But to get that all-critical ability to make the side button map to my browsers back button will require Tiger, turning this $50 toy into a $179 investment. You can do better, Apple.
My 15″ Powerbook is an 867MHz Titanium – the last model Apple made before switching to the Aluminum Powerbook. Like many other TiBook owners, I suffered a broken hinge- 6 or 8 months ago. The Powerbook has remained usable, but I’ve been worried that the other hinge might break, and then I’d be out of luck.
So I recentlty ordered a set of replacement hinges from eBay. Apparently the originals were aluminum, but the replacements are steel, so I bought the matching set. I paid 125.00 USD plus shipping, which isn’t bad… I’ve seen them much higher. They arrived today, so tonight I replaced the bad hinge.
It went okay. The instructions the seller emailed me weren’t great- in fact, there were two sets, and they didn’t quite agree. In the end, I decided to wing it- I’m fairly adept at fixing things, and it wasn’t too bad. Not exactly for the faint of heart- there’s a bit of prying and bending of the screen’s back coverplate. But the job is done, the hinge is replaced, and it seems to work well. I think I’ll hang onto the other until the original needs replacing.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have access to my digital camera, so I have no pictures of the process. As I said, the instructions I recieved weren’t great, but they did outline the basic steps, and I could find no better via Google. I don’t know the source, so I won’t republish them here, but if you need a copy, drop me an email and I’ll pass them along.
One other tip- work on any Apple laptop requires very small Torx screwdrivers (T-10 and smaller), generally in a few different sizes. I’ve never had any luck finding a set locally- at least until a few months ago. My local Lowes now carries a set of “Task Force” Torx drivers, with sizes T-4 through T-10 plus T-15, for five or six bucks, if I recall. Definately worth having on hand.
Update 9/10/2006: I’ve improved this procedure, and removed the need for NFS. See HOWTO Backup an Entire Windows Drive with OS X and Ubuntu for details.
My wife’s XP laptop continues to get slower. She’s had it for about 2 1/2 years, and it’s still running the original XP install, so no surprise that performance is lousy. I’ve considered dropping a desktop Linux install on it, but she has a couple of apps that still require Windows. For now, I decided to format her hard drive and revert it to factory condition with the restore CDs that came with the machine.
So now I needed to back up her machine. It doesn’t support Firewire or USB2, so external drives were out. In the past, I’ve always copied alot of files over the network, but this is time consuming, and usually error prone- If windows decides it can’t copy a file, the whole copy operation stops, and you have to figure out what has copied and what hasn’t.
I wanted something similar to Ghost. Ghost is a PC backup solution the PC admin folks at work used to use. It’s now a Symantec product, but I don’t think it was at the time. The original was great- a single floppy (we used floppies back then) would boot, connect to the network, and copy the entire hard drive to an image file on a network server. Modern versions allow you to grab files from inside the image; I don’t recall if the original did. This is a feature I need; I’m not restoring the whole image to a drive.
I tried to find an open source alternative (the current Symantec Ghost is overpriced, and I don’t trust Symantec software at all) without much luck. I found Partition Image for Linux, but the images can’t be opened for access to individual files. While researching, I came up with another idea… make a direct copy of the windows partition from a Linux Live CD (such as Knoppix) using dd. I figured the image might be mountable, just as you can mount an ISO CD image file.
A word about efficiency: This method copies the entire partion, empty blocks along with the rest. So, copying Sherri’s 27G partion would result in a 27G image file. However, I have the space on the iMac, the backup is only temporary, and I wanted to be sure I had everything. Seemed worth a shot.
In order to make the backup over the network, I needed to share a directory on the iMac as an NFS share, since I’d be connecting from a Linux Live CD. OS X supports this, but not via a nice little applet like with Windows Sharing. You need to fool around with netinfo, which I dislike, and run several daemons. Since this is only for temporary use, I decided not to get my hands too dirty, and found a shareware utility called NFSManager to handle the details for me. Once I had created an NFS share, it was time to use it.
I booted Sherri’s laptop using a Knoppix LiveCD, opened a shell, and mounted the NFS share (/Users/jclark/Netmount on the iMac):
sudo su
mdkir /mnt/mac
mount -t nfs 192.168.1.105:/Users/jclark/Netmount /mnt/mac
The first line makes me root for the ensuing commands. I then make a mountpoint, and mount the NFS share to the mountpoint. Interestingly, when I ran the mount command, the command appear to hang, but opening another terminal showed that the mount worked.
The laptop only had one drive (C:) so I suspected that I only needed to backup /dev/hda1, but I checked it with QtParted just to be safe. QtParted is a GUI shell around GNU parted, and is accessible from the Knoppix start menu. I would have used parted from the command line, but couldn’t find it in the Knoppix install.
Once I had confirmed what I needed to backup, making the image was simple:
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/mac/laptop_drive
The transfer rate was about 10G/hr, which isn’t too bad I suppose. When it was finally complete, I tried to mount it under OS X using the mount command, with no success. A little while later I realized I hadn’t specified to mount it via loopback (in other words, treat a file like a drive). After a few minutes trying to figure how to do this in OS X, I got lazy and Googled. One of my hits suggested an idea for opening a floppy image that seemed too good to be true, but I tried it anyway.
I renamed the image file, adding .img to the name, and then double clicked the icon in Finder. A few seconds later the drive image was mounted, and I had access to the entire drive backup. Very cool.
Now all I have to do is restore her factory drive image, clean off all the crap it came pre-loaded with, patch the crap out of XP, reinstall her software, and restore all of here files.
Maybe I should just buy her an iBook….
As stated recently, I’ve been looking for a 5 button bluetooth mouse to use with my iMac. One of the contenders has been the Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer for Bluetooth, but I’ve resisted buying it because I’m not sure how I like the positioning of buttons 4 and 5, and due to the asymetrical shape. Also, I didn’t really want to pay for the bluetooth adapter included with every MS Bluetooth mouse, since my iMac has Bluetooth built in.
A neighbor offered me his MS bluetooth keyboard and mouse kit, which he wasn’t using, to try out. I left the keyboard and bluetooth adapter in the bag, but hooked up the mouse. After installing the latest bluetooth firmware update and bluetooth software update from Apple, the mouse seems to be working reasonably well. However, OS X is not a support OS for Microsoft’s Bluetooth offereings, and the Intellipoint 5.1 for OS X software I’ve been using won’t recognize the mouse. This leaves me with no way to map buttons 3, 4, and 5 to any type of functionality.
The OS can recognize these buttons, however. I can map them to Expose functions in the Expose preference panel. However, I can’t map them to keystrokes (as the Intellimouse software did), and other applications (most notably Firefox) do not recognize the native button clicks or allow a way to map them. I’d like to map button four to Firefox’s Back button (aka Cmd+Left Arrow) and Button 3 (wheel-click) to the Firefox cmd Open Link in New Tab (Cmd+Mouse Click).
My primary need is for Firefox; I’ve looked for Extentions that would enable this functionality, but all I’ve found are extentions to enable mouse gestures, a feature I’m not fond of. I also stumbled across something call USB Overdrive, and OS X app to enable extra buttons on a USB mouse. Unfortunately, it’s designed of OS X 10.1, hasn’t been updated in over three years, and states that Bluetooth support would appear “in the next version”.
So, does anyone know how to generically map buttons 3,4, 5 in OS X, or a way to make Firefox recognize these buttons? Until I can configure this mouse the way I want it, It’s not going to be of much use.
Yes, this is late. Steve Jobs’ Macworld Expo Keynote was days ago. It’s been a busy week. Nevertheless, here’s a few thoughts:
* iLife ‘05- can’t wait to play with the new Garageband. Notation rocks.
iWork ‘05 – Two products does not a suite make- perhaps. Although it feels ‘thin’ with only two apps, Pages appears to be two apps in one- word processing and dektop publishing. OS X already comes with an e-mail client. I doubt many people need a desktop database (a la MS Access), but a 21st century version of Hypercard might get some attention (maybe a desktop Wiki, Apple style?). A spreadsheet would be nice.
iPod Shuffle – These will fly off the shelves. If it was available before Christmas, I might have chosen this instead of the full-sized iPod. When a co-worker mentioned Friday she’d like an iPod for exercising, but the price was high, I showed here the Shuffle online. She was ready to order one on the spot.
Mac Mini – My Shuffle-wanting co-worker then remembered her home computer doesn’t have a USB port (yes, it’s old). I showed here the Mac Mini. She’s ready to buy one of those, too. I expect they’ll sell a bundle of ‘em. I do think they should have supported PS/2 Keyboard & Mouse connections… so many people sill have these. They could offer a little USB adapter that accepts both a PS/2 keyboard and mouse, sell it for $39 like the iPod Shuffle accessories.
“The Year of HD” – Whatever. If I had $3500 for an HD Camera, I think I could find other ways to spend it. I suspect most consumers feel the same way. As far as video professionals and Apple, I don’t know enough to comment.
For a couple of good reads on the Mac Mini and Apple’s marketing prowess, have a look at this Urban Mainframe piece and this incredible “infographic” at NiXLOG.
As the International Olympic Committee considers adding the sports of “Spreading Apple Rumors” and “Suing Apple Rumorsites” to the official list, one of the rumors to come out of last week appears (sadly) to be true:
On Tuesday morning at 9:00 AM Pacific Time, Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs will deliver the keynote address for Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, Calif. Unlike years past, however, there will be no live webcast of Jobs’ keynote speech.
In a statement released this morning, Apple confirmed that it will webcast the keynote — but doesn’t plan to do so until 6:00 PM Pacific Time Tuesday, nine full hours after Jobs’ keynote is scheduled to begin.
viaMacCentral
What a shame. Having purchased my Powerbook two years ago this February, last year’s MacWorld Expo Keynote was the first I watched, and I watched part of it live (I lost track of time at work, and tuned in late). As a fan of Apple’s products, it was exciting. Steve Jobs is certainly a showman. By the end of the presentation, I’d blogged about Apple’s new goodies twice, and the next day I ordered GarageBand and the first Jam Pack on the Apple store.
I’ve been looking forward to this Keynote ever since. I’m sure if I watched it live, I’d end up blogging about it during the show. By the time I see the recording tommorow (which will be 9pm EST), all of the news will be old. What a shame.