Switching to Mac

A nice, honest list about switching to Mac. Without the usual hyperbole.

Planypus

In my part-time job as sometimes Organizer within the various social circles of which I am a member, I have availed myself of technical assistance in the form of an invitation/planning website whose name shell not be mentioned (but shares some letters in common with the word EVIL.) My continued use of this resource, despite an increasing number of ads and bad design decisions, was due to the fact that this EVIl site offered a few “killer” features which competitors lacked. Namely, the ability to offer a choice of dates and times and thereby choose the best one based on user feedback.

So, over the years I’ve come across a number of services which touted themselves to be EVIl-slayers. Hopeful, I’ve evaluated them always to find disappointed when my killer features requirement went unrealized. The latest foray came yesterday after reading a post by Scoble. I was yet again foiled by the lack of features. This time, however, I decided to post my dismay in the comments.

Enter Planypus, which was offered by Yan Pritzker as a possible solution to those in my organization dilemma. I checked it out. It was so close, the closest I’d seen to my organizational nirvana. In fact, when I envisioned my “Screw it, I should just code it myself” app that would meets my needs it looked a lot like Planypus. However, it still had that focus on one single date choice which makes things a no go for me. So much promise, though!

I offered some feedback on the site, sharing my hope that the feature of my dreams could somehow be added. I got a response back from Yan in about a minute telling me that not only was my feature in the works but he also offered an workaround that could simulate my multiple-date-choices using the Places functionality already present. Sweet!

I invite you (heh. get it?!) to check out Planypus. Great design and functionality, friendly and responsive development team, and it’s even written in Rails! Maybe some of these guys will be in attendance at RailsConf and I can lay the praise on them in person.

And those of you who know me, expect some Planypus invitations shortly.

John Mayer Has a Blog

Late to the game, I know, but those of you who experience the extreme what of “John Mayer Has a TV Show” will appreciate that the humor lives on (apparently) in his blog. Be sure to read the Oct. 10 entry “I’m thinking about tanning professionally” because it’s true comedy gold. A laugh riot. And I’m not just saying that.

Some quickies

• First off, the amusement level of this music video is off the chart. Warp Factor Love (via WWdN)

• AMD is releasing some new Opterons (and a new freakin’ socket, Socket F) to keep up with Intel’s new Woodcrest. I’ll wait to see some benchmarks and reviews, but I’d be more interested to see an AMD response to the desktop Conroe chips and mobile Meroms.

• Along with the indispensible Quicksilver, Blacktree has released Visor, which pops down a term from the top of the screen ala the console in many an FPS game. There are a lot of times when I switch to or load up a new term just to run a quick command (the odd host or ping, etc), this just saves a bit of time and looks cool to boot.

WWDC 2006 Thoughts

Another Jobs keynote in the can, this time courtesy of WWDC. I thought I’d save some time and post some of my thoughts to the blog, instead of repeating myself to everyone who asks, “So, what’d ya think?”

• Xserve. After installing an Xserve G5 at work a couple years I was unimpressed. The rack installation was a pain, speed was meh and the lack of any video output whatsoever was a real treat. In hindsight I thought I would have been better served if I had just user a PowerMac.

  The new Intel Xserve looks to fix a lot of those drawbacks. It’s got DVI/VGA out and also a serial console connection. The lights out stuff looks cool, bringing managability more on par with servers from HP, IBM, et al. The quad Xeon cores don’t hurt either. I don’t know about the rack installation gear but I feel better about purchasing an Xserve in the future.

• Leopard Server. Network-wide Spotlight search–nice. I’ve been waiting for this since Spotlight was announced with Tiger. I’ve got a 2TB Xserve RAID that’s just dying to be indexed. Now users will be able to search the server and other workstation storage from the Spotlight interface on their desktops.

  Looks like Apple is stuffing in some nice workgroup features into Leopard Server as well. Improvements to the email server and iChat server, plus now a wiki, podcasting and a group calendar server. For a company not yet hooked on Exchange/Microsoft this is now a viable option.

• Mac Pros. Cool, I guess. More important as a milestone, marking the end of the PowerPC era. Altogether, compared to similarly equipped PCs, the prices look competitive. Still missing some key Universal apps (namely Adobe products), so until those products become available the Mac Pros aren’t yet a viable option. Along with Mark, I’d like to see a budget single-CPU version for people that don’t need the power, but want the expandability and already have a nice monitor.

• Leopard stuff. Time Machine, very slick. And so important. Backups are something that most power users find a chore, let alone your average/newbie computer user. As more and more life content gets stored digitally on your computer backups are no longer an option. Time Machine looks like a winner.

  Mail.app continues to improve, but it’s the todo functionality along with iCal and CalDAV which have me excited. Great for workgroups in combination with Server, but also since CalDAV is standard that means no more .Mac needed for real calendar synchronization across multiple platforms.

  iChat with tabs. About time, but I stick with Adium. The video and audio recording features are cool, though. The digital media integration throughout OSX continues to leave competitors behind.

  Dev stuff. Dashcode, Spotlight improvements, Core Animation… looks cool, only a developer knows for sure. 64-bit: never hurts, bring on the speed.

  Spaces: Virtual desktops–amazing innovation… ummm. Whatever. Dashboard is still not a killer feature for me (the Dictionary is the only thing I’d miss were it gone.)

• Final thoughts. All this typing is tiring. (Ben, you got a lot of catching up to do!) I’m glad to see the transition to Intel is complete. Nothing terribly exciting about the new hardware. I’m still waiting to see the Merom MacBook(Pro)s arriving with the heat issues hopefully solved. I’m hearing we might see those in September.

  Leopard, from first glance, looks like a solid upgrade. Moreso than Tiger, certainly. Will have a better idea when it gets closer to release and those Top Secret Features are revealed. The Spotlight and Mail/CalDAV stuff will be more of an impetus for upgrading my desktop people (many of them still run Panther, never saw a need to change.) I’m also glad the OSX versions are spacing out a bit more, easier on the wallet.

And I really need to get to MacWorld in January. Catch the Jobs fevah up close and personal.

boot camp

So, in an interesting move from Apple they’ve released Boot Camp, a utility for creating an XP install CD that will work on the new Intel Macs. With full driver support. So they’ve gone from “We won’t stop you” in regards to installing Windows on Macs, to “Here, let me help you!”

I think with a VMware version coming out for OSX Intel and now the ability to dual boot without massive hacks, my barriers to switching complete to Mac at home (and heck, maybe at work!) are just about nil. I’m still not going to jump on the bandwagon just yet but towards the end of the year when some of the bugs are worked out, I think it’ll be time for some shopping!

Top 5 TV Shows

Dear readers, let me put my couch time to work for you! Here are, in my opinion, the top 5 television shows of this year.

1. Boston Legal (ABC, Tuesdays @ 10:00)
2. Battlestar Galactica (SciFi, Fridays @ 10:00)
3. Veronica Mars (UPN, Wednesdays @ 9:00)
4. Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, Sundays @ 10:00)
5. Prison Break (FOX, Monday @ 9:00)

Honorable mentions:

• Bones (FOX Wednesdays @ 8:00)
• The 4400 (USA)
• Doctor Who (BBC)

This post has been sitting in my drafts for a while now because I wanted to say something about each show. But they really share the same criteria that made ‘em Top 5 material: Excellent writing, fantastic performances and interesting characters. Saying that over and over again would just be repetitive.

Got a top 5 (or whatever) of your own? List them in the comments.

–edit–

The reasons Doctor Who is in the honorable mentions and not Top 5: It’s been… 6 months?… since the season ended so the memory has dimmed a bit. Also, I really liked Christopher Eccleston as The Doctor. His run only lasted this one season so I’m not sure if this new guy will measure up. Other than those reason, this latest incarnation of Doctor Who is easily Top 5 calibre.

NIN Show - MCI Center

1. Pinion
2. Love Is Not Enough
3. You Know What You Are
4. Terrible Lie
5. The Line Begins To Blur
6. March Of the Pigs
7. The Frail
8. The Wretched
9. Closer
10. Burn
11. Gave Up
12. Eraser
13. Right Where It Belongs
14. Beside You In Time
15. The Collector
16. Wish
17. Only
18. Reptile
19. Suck
20. Hurt
21. The Hand That Feeds
22. Head Like A Hole

Setlist from the DC Nine Inch Nails show I saw last night. Fucking amazing. Took some pics but no flash so we’ll see if they turn out.

Powerbook Woes

So, a couple months ago, shortly after Tiger was released and installed, my Powerbook crashed. Well, it hung and I had to power it off–it didn’t come back quite right. I figured I did something nasty by the sudden power off, journaling filesystem be damned. I ended up re-installing Tiger again over a wiped hard drive and life seemed dandy again.

Until two weeks ago. System took a dive again. This time the Apple Hardware Test software is reporting errors with the hard drive. So it looks like the hard drive is toast, I’ll have to pay some $$$ to get it replaced since I never bothered with the extended warranty.

For a little while I was pissed at Apple. 1-year hardware warranty and I’m SOL unless I’d payed $350 (which I thought was a bit much) for AppleCare. Jokes on me, I’ll probably pay that much to get the HD replaced. Not really an expense I need right now.

But then I looked on the flip side. I’m using my Powerbook. How? External firewire hard drive. I’d used Carbon Copy Cloner (basically an rsync GUI) to make a complete, bootable copy of my system a while back. While I was using the OS. Booting into this system is as easy as holding down the option button after turning on the Powerbook. Boots seamlessly off the external hard drive, and even runs a bit faster I think because of faster HD speed. You can’t do that in Windows, and I imagine it would be a pain in Linux or any other OS.

So, while I no longer have a portable laptop until the internal hard drive is replaced, I’m got a very usable Apple desktop by virtue of an external hard drive. With the bluetooth mouse and keyboard I already had it’s actually even more usable. Even after this, I’m still a huge Apple fan. Hard drives have defects, they die. Shit happens. But at least I have a usable system while I wait.

1.5 Update

Jay updated his blog to WordPress 1.5 and I did likewise. So I’m testing the Trackback stuff, the new admin panel and post stuff and also some Markdown lovin’ at the same time.

Jay, fix those permalinks! mod_rewrite is your friend.