Recently in Macintosh Category

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

The blogospheric din is rising about Apple's supposed $800 laptop, which if it ever happens (and I have my doubts) will really hit hard on the Windows-based laptop market.

With Linux starting to eat away at the very low end of the laptop market on the ASUS EeePC and other netbooks, Apple dominating on the high-end (where it's share is considerable), the mushy middle is where most of the action is.

Having an $800 Macintosh laptop hits the bulk of the market and would steer plenty of people away from Windows and toward OS X. And like the iPod and iPhone's tendency to get their users to think about going all-Apple with an expensive desktop or laptop machine, a relatively inexpensive laptop is a hell of a game-changer.

Should this actually happen, Apple will have what looks like the right product at the right price — and at the exactly right time.

Let's see: Windows Vista not doing so well, and certainly not driving PC sales. Economy in the tank. The holiday season upon us.

If anything, it's a good time to buy some Apple stock.

Heather Clancy at the Green Tech Pastures blog from ZDNet writes about Faronics' power-management software, which now runs in Mac's OS X in addition to Windows:

The Power Save Mac 2.0 software includes intelligent shutdown functions; the ability to schedule when a system should be awake, asleep or in standby; the ability to customize what "inactivity" means for a particular system; enterprise control; and a reports feature that generates records of energy and cost savings. The report generator creates a "before" record of your computer, as well, which serves as a benchmark against which savings are calculated.

Faronics estimates that using the utility will save you $25 per year. How much does the package cost? $14.10 per year.

Power management has been one of my biggest headaches in Linux and the BSDs. For me, even getting the CPU fan under control in my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop usually requires a bit of work. For a short bit of time, the 2.6.18 Linux kernel did this automatically, but since then I've had to write simple scripts to get the fan to only turn on when CPU temperature warrants it.

And as far as CPU throttling goes, — slowing down and using less power when it's not needed, I haven't yet been able to implement that, even though it seemingly should work on a Celeron M processor.

The biggest power-management issue I have is with suspend/resume. I suspect that suspend/resume hasn't worked that well for that long on most PCs even in Windows, but these days I figure that hardware manufacturers of Windows-compatible PCs supply drivers to implement power management to at least some degree.

Power-management is great on our iBook G4. Using that laptop has made me expect good power-management from all of my other machines. And yes, I'd like to get it.

I'm even willing to work at the command line to make it happen, but the information I have, for the Gateway anyway, is sparse at best, and plain wrong at worst.

Matt Asay thinks (and has thought for some time) that the Macintosh is the best place to do open-source development. And he points out that he's not alone in this opinion. (And here's another post along the same lines.)

I happen to have a Mac — a 5-year-old iBook G4 running OS X 10.3.9 that I just recently gutted to replace a dying hard drive — and I've been thinking more and more about running Unix apps on it.

I've been reading an O'Reilly book on the subject, and here are two places that seem essential for bringing free, open-source apps to the Mac:

• The MacPorts Project
• The Fink Project

If anything, the relative uniformity of hardware in the Macintosh world, and the tight integration between OS X and the machines on which it runs, makes a lot of the Linux/BSD problems we have in terms of hardware compatibility go away.

What I can't get with, though, is the high cost of Mac hardware and software (and yes, you are paying for both when you buy an Apple machine).

Still, this does bear thinking about. And so I will.

Why this could work for my company: While there are a great many image-editing programs in the free, open-source software world, the work we do here, fortunately or not, depends on features that only Adobe Photoshop offers. Yes, I've been learning to use Photoshop because for some of the things I need to do, there's no alternative.

And then there's Flash. I don't like technologies for which the development tools are not free and open. But there's Adobe again, with Flash development nestled in its Creative Suite.

And then there's the print publishing system that our company only supports on Windows.

And I still want to run the free, open-source applications I've grown to depend on, including OpenOffice (which is coming to Mac natively in version 3 anyway), the lightweight image editors that I still can use (MtPaint!!) for some tasks, excellent text editors (Geany, the HTML-focused Bluefish) and even full desktop environments like GNOME and KDE.

If costs be damned, the Mac with Adobe CS, Windows and X11 with all the Unix apps I want just might be the ideal platform.

But I'm not throwing Linux over the side of the boat just yet. There's the part about Apple's hardware and software being closely guarded and ... closed source. Then there's the cost. More to start with, and more continually for operating-system upgrades and proprietary software upgrades as well.

In the corporate world, where money is supposed to flow like so much water, this Mac solution very well could work.

But in the real world, who can afford it?

For many, the solution remains free, open-source operating systems with greater stability, longer support, better hardware detection and configuration, full power management and better applications that can do all the things we need to get done.

And as Linux in general, and distributions like Ubuntu in specific, gain(s) traction, hardware makers just might start paying attention to drivers that make their equipment work seamlessly with Linux without making the user dive head-first into geekery. That would level the playing field considerably, but the issue of mixing proprietary software with FOSS still looms over the discussion. (And yes, I'm not mentioning WINE on purpose, though maybe I should.)

Let's get to it: I have one Web site that I work on infrequently that requires Internet Explorer, but since I barely have to do anything on it, I am free to use IE, or not.

And I waited at least a year to "upgrade" my IE6 to IE7 on the XP box at work. Yeah, it's an upgrade because now IE has tabbed browsing -- a feature Firefox has had for years, and which IE probably would've never added had FF not had it first.

I like IE6 because it was a fast program -- it opened fast and did the rest of its thing fast. And I could use it as an FTP client.

Now that I have IE7, sure there is tabbed browsing, and it looks a little better, but it's way slower than Firefox, and I pretty much only fire up IE for ONE Web site because it's at the top of my IE favorites and the bottom of my FF favorites.

IE loads more slowly, the favorites come up slower -- basically it gets beat by FF in performance by every measure. (I'm running a 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM.)

And I can run Firefox in Windows, Linux, BSD and Mac OS X ... and I do (though I'm partial to the Mozilla-derived Epiphany in the GNOME desktop, as well as the Seamonkey browser/e-mail client/HTML editor suite -- also based on Mozilla).

Truth be told, if it really bothered me, I'd try to roll the box back to IE6, if that indeed can be done. Since IE7 installs over your IE6, I think it might be a problem to "go back."

Note: While I can't get the same FTP functionality out of IE7, I have a Windows workaround: Open up My Computer from the Start menu, and type your FTP address in the search bar. The window functions pretty much like IE6 -- it's the same "Explorer"-like interface Windows uses to let you examine your own files, and it does FTP just like IE6. Thanks, Microsoft!

I used to think IE was the best browser for OS X, too -- that final version of IE5 for the Mac was a masterful, innovative application, and I'm sorry Microsoft abandoned it. Safari doesn't have enough critical mass to cut it -- many Web sites don't look so hot in it -- so Firefox is pretty much the browser of record for the Mac, too.

And Mozilla is making hand-over-fist money by getting a cut of the Google searches made through the browser. All it means is more money that Microsoft isn't making.

Hope you're happy, Microsoft!

My buddy Stevie (yep, I call him "Stevie"; don't know what he calls me back) announced the new MacBook Air today. It's the ultra-small Apple laptop we've all been waiting for. And by "we," I mean people who use hundreds to wipe certain unmentionable areas (note to rich folks: those bills ain't all that sanitary).

The thing looks absolutely stunning -- and for $1,799 it damn well better be. Anyhow, Apple really knows how to break new ground, and this is new ground, alrighty.

Notable: The low-end MacBook Air comes with a garden-variety spinning 80 GB hard drive. For more cash, you get a 64 GB solid-state drive. Hell, the drive alone (the flash drive, that is) must cost $500.

And the thing weighs 3 pounds. That comes out to $599.67 per pound or $37.48 an ounce. At least it's not worth its weight in gold, 3 pounds of which would cost you $43,320 if you paid today's closing price for gold futures on the Comex exchange of $902.50 per ounce. So call the MacBook Air a bargain.

But it does look great, right? And while I might suggest that Stevie Jobs make something -- any damn thing -- under $1,000 (and no, Mac Minis don't count), he's a whole lot richer than I am, so why should he listen to me?

In reaction to recent security breaches, the U.S. Army is adding OS X servers to its data arsenal.

The Army isn't exactly saying that Macs and their OS are superior from a security standpoint to competing systems, but I do find the explanation interesting:

The Army isn't using any particular software package or OS X technology to improve security, though. Instead, it's hoping that having a more diverse mix of systems will make its networks harder to infiltrate. The security of the UNIX core of OS X, combined with the fact that less hackers are interested in Macs, were also given as reasons for introducing more Apple hardware.

...

Outside security vendors have leveled a number of criticisms against the Army for its Apple program, and have pointed out that Apple issues significantly more patches than Microsoft. The Army responded by saying that a large number of patches shows a greater commitment to security by Apple. Ultimately, the Army seems to be banking on paying off the extra cost of Macs by making its networks at least a bit less vulnerable to Windows security exploits.

I find Apple's recent efforts in the server space to be an interesting development. The more competition in the server area, the better. I think there's a definite space for Apple in betwen the high end of Solaris and traditional Unix, the Windows Server offerings and the vast Linux server market. If I knew more, I'd say more, but I don't, so I won't.

Tom Gapen, who watches Apple way more closely than I do, tells me that Think Secret regularly breaks news about Apple. And Apple doesn't like not having control over ... just about everything.

But now Think Secret and Apple have come to an "agreement," and the blog will go away.

ZDNet on the Think Secret settlement.

Ed Bott of ZDnet has been measuring his PC power consumption.

Not surprisingly, you save a whole lot of power by using S3 sleep mode to dramatically reduce power draw during times when the PC is turned on but not being used. Bott seems to suggest that S3 is something that Windows Vista offers and XP doesn't. I'm not an expert in this realm, other than to report that sleep or "suspend," as it's often called, rarely works in most Linux distributions, and that these days a lot of effort is being expended to get suspend working in laptops under Linux.

But here's Bott on S3 in his experience:

I ... attached a Kill A Watt meter to the Dell C521 PC that I’ve been using for my ongoing Media Center experiments. At rest, it uses about 64 watts, and its power consumption is roughly equivalent to the HP server over time. However, it’s dramatically more power-efficient, thanks to Windows Vista’s sleep mode. In the past 24 hours, it has used less than 0.5 kWh. Over the course of a month, that’s about $1.20 in electricity. The secret of its power-saving success is S3 sleep mode. When this system kicks into S3 mode, it uses a mere 3 watts, according to the Kill A Watt device. That 0.5 kWh equals 8 hours a day of full-power usage, coupled with 16 hours in sleep mode. If I were to leave it on with sleep disabled, energy usage would triple. Using the default Balanced power settings for the three PCs in this house will save more than 1000 kWh over the course of a year, or $82.

He promises more on S3 mode in a future entry. I'll be looking for it.

Suspend works great on our iBook G4, but with Apple and OS X, you expect stuff like that to work -- and you usually get what you expect.

According to NPD, via Microsoft-Watch.com, a full 20 percent of retail sales of Microsoft Office these days is the Macintosh version. And even more startling, 10 percent of the U.S. retail sales for Windows Vista Business and Ultimate also come from Mac users.

What's the deal? Macintosh users love MS Office. And ... OpenOffice is weak on Mac OS X, Apple's own iWork isn't making much of a dent ... and the student-teacher edition of MS Office retails for a very reasonable $149..

The article from Microsoft-Watch.com muses over whether Microsoft wants to be in the business of boosting a rival platform (OS X over Windows). What is unsaid is that Microsoft could play hardball and cease support for Office on the Mac, as it did for Internet Explorer years ago. But that would only strain the now-cosy relationship between Apple and Microsoft, one that pretty much splits the market between them both and chokes out other competitors in the software space.

No doubt, MS Office is a major factor in allowing Mac to be chosen for corporate and other office environments, but you can bet that Apple would pump a whole lot more juice into iWork if MS Office weren't available. Running Windows (and Office) in Boot Camp wouldn't be as desirable, especially for the non-technically minded.

In a way, it's a mutual-aid society -- both Microsoft and Apple hedge their bets and keep their businesses going with the kind of cooperation that keeps Microsoft's Office on the Mac, Apple's iTunes on Windows ... but curiously doesn't give Mac users the same MS e-mail program or Web browser. Again ... if Firefox weren't available, Safari would have to be better -- and be supported by the code at untold numbers of Web sites that currently only offer partial functionality to Safari users.

But when it comes to MS Office, the rock and hard place, between which both Apple and Microsoft are caught, is made less rocky and hard by all the money they use for profitable padding in between.

The new KOffice 2.0, sometime in the first half of next year, according to reports, will run on Linux, BSD and -- for the first time -- Windows and Macintosh platforms.

For those who don't know, KOffice is the office suite meant to complement the KDE desktop environment used in many Linux and BSD distributions.

Well, KOffice isn't new, per se, but it's new to non-Linux/BSD users. While I've had a hell of a time getting the typographical quotes to face in the right direction in KWord, the word-processing component of KOffice, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that, overall, KOffice is a better-written piece of software than the big dog in free office suites, OpenOffice. The reason: Java. OO uses a lot of it, and it's dog slow. I'd like to say it's OK for Web apps, but even there Java gets its butt kicked by Flash. KOffice is faster and that's the lack of Java talking. At least that's the way I, a non-programmer, sees it.

And what is the No. 1 reason that OpenOffice has seen such growth over the past few years? It's Windows port. Not everybody has MS Office -- either paid for or stolen -- and OpenOffice is the only thing keeping Microsoft at bay. And with KOffice on the scene for Windows users, it's just another choice that is a) free and b) not Microsoft.

And while OpenOffice has full implementations that run on Linux, BSD and Windows, the suite's Mac OS X port is still in its not-ready-for-prime-time stage (they'll never get that Aqua version done). But with KOffice available sometime next year for the Mac and Windows, the one thing the computing industry needs to be healthy -- choice -- will be in more abundance than we've seen since the days that non-MS programs like WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 had market share, relevance and the loyalty of PC users.

From the Linuxworld.com.au article written by Rodney Gedda of Computerworld:

With OpenOffice.org receiving a lion's share of commercial support and market awareness for a free office suite, KOffice 2.0 has the potential to challenge its dominance with innovative features and a leaner code base.

"KOffice is much more lightweight," KDE project spokesman Sebastian Kugler said. "One often hears that OpenOffice's codebase is quite complex and rather large. While KOffice is lacking some functionality compared to OpenOffice, it's certainly catching up - and eating less valuable developer time in the process."

"Mid- to long-term I think this will make a huge difference. Having a clean code base makes bridging those gaps and implementing new and innovative ways of working in the office space much easier. KOffice is also much easier on your system resources."

The KDE project pitches KOffice as "the most comprehensive office suite", as it consists of 11 applications - from the standard word processor and spreadsheet to the Krita image manipulation tool and Kivio flowcharting application. KOffice even has its own database creator and alternative to Microsoft Access, dubbed Kexi.

While some claim that the availability of free, open-source applications to Windows and Mac users hurts open-source operating systems, I completely disagree and contend that giving a Windows or Mac users free apps provides both a great advertisement for the all-open-source environment of Linux as well as easing their transition away from proprietary OSes entirely. If they're using OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Abiword and the like on their PC, it's that much easier to throw a Linux distro on the box and use the programs they're already familiar with.

And the arrival of KOffice on Mac and Windows desktops will only speed that process along.

You know how I'm always preaching the religion of backups -- and double- and triple-backups?

Well, I started hearing some strange noises from the nearly 5-year-old iBook G4, and while we have most of the critical files backed up on CD-R, we really needed at least one (if not two) backups of ALL the user files.

For the Mac, Superduper is the go-to backup program, even though I'm not its No. 1 fan. I only say this because I can't seem to figure out how to do different kinds of backups on different days (say ... a full system backup weekly and user files every day into separate partitions to provide a daily snapshot of the drive over the course of a week). But Superduper works well enough. I've been using it on my mom's G5 for quite awhile now.

But I wanted to do something different. I didn't want to buy a backup drive.

I wanted to use my iPod. You see, I have a 30 GB iPod Video that only has about 3 GB of stuff on it. And I'm not exactly a daily iPod user. Most of the time in the course of my daily life, I need to hear what's going on around me, and I pretty much only listen to music in my car. And the el-cheapo iPod FM modulator that I bought for about $9 worked like total crap. My occasional workout lately has been swimming -- no iPod there. So I pretty much never use it.

So that spare 25 GB is fair game for an essential system backup. My iPod was already set up to be used as a disk for data files, so I figured I'd try Superduper. I downloaded it and dragged the proper image into the Applications folder (ah ... the simple pleasures of Mac app installation -- it should all be this easy). Then I selected the "to" and "from" drives.

I was only doing a backup of the user files. I don't believe in "full" backups -- with a Firewire drive you can even make a bootable backup with Superduper, and many modern Windows PCs can boot from a plain old USB drive. I think an occasional rebuild of the entire OS from scratch is a good thing -- it clears away the cobwebs.

And it takes way less space and time to backup the user files only.

So when I started Superduper, it warned me with something like, "the drive in this iPod will be TOTALLY erased to make this backup." And I wanted to keep my music files on there, so I stopped the process immediately.

I then did it the quick and dirty way. I opened the iPod's Finder window, opened up another Finder window for the Mac's hard drive, and then dragged the Users folder into the iPod's Finder window. The backup began and took about a half-hour. I can't do an easy incremental backup like I can with Superduper (only moving new or changed files), but at least all my essential files -- this is our main computer, after all -- are backed up.

I do plan to get an external drive or two -- probably USB if I can get them cheap enough -- and back up the users files with Superduper, continuing to do so on a regular basis.

But having an additional backup on an iPod is, indeed, a great thing.

Soapbox time: The Mac is already f'n expensive. Apple should include an easy-to-use GUI backup utility. When you get into the Unix-y guts of the Mac by opening up the Terminal program, there is not only one way to backup files, but FOUR (thanks for this info goes to O'Reilly's MacDevCenter -- and get "Learning Unix for Mac OS X" already!).

For me, either I'm thick as a brick, or the "easy to use" claims that every other Web site seem to attach to Superduper are overblown. I think Apple can -- and should -- be doing way better and giving its users a FREE backup utility that is integrated into the GUI. Will this be included in the forthcoming OS X 10.5 Leopard?

Once again, not holding my breath. But if Steve Jobs and Co. were to come through, it'd be nice.

Morale of the story: You cannot master Mac OS without getting deep into its Unix base. Get the book now! Sure, there will probably be an update for Leopard, but just get it now and get your hands dirty.

At least according to MacRumors.com, with information via Apple Insider and Think Secret.

Meanwhile in the world of Linux, the new openSUSE 10.3 is out, Fedora 8 is on the way, as is Ubuntu 7.10.

Tuaw.com reports, via Mac OS Rumors, that the Mac Mini -- Apple's diminutive, somewhat less expensive PC -- will be replaced in the product line by an even smaller computer dubbed the Mac Nano. It's supposed to be no bigger than the space needed to contain the hard drive (most likely a 2.5-inch notebook model.

Also in the rumor mill: A smaller Mac notebook and an enhanced Apple TV.

Mac OS Rumors on the Mac Nano:

We have the privilege of being able to exclusively report on information provided to Mac OS Rumors by one of our oldest and most reliable sources in Cupertino: the Mac Mini is dead.....Long Live the Mac Nano!

The exact naming and marketing details are not as firm in our sources' estimation, since he's not an Apple Marketroid(TM)....but the new Mini will be as small in the horizontal as an internal optical drive will allow, and a little over 2/3 the height. Overall volume will be shrunk almost 25%, weight by about 20% and an all-new enclosure will be strikingly different from the design that has been the Mini's defining feature since its introduction.

Ilene is starting her college-teaching gig this week, and today she found out that the built-in projector in her classroom accepts VGA output only. So the composite video/S-video adapter I got a week ago at Fry's won't fly. They didn't have the VGA adapter, but the Apple store does, so I ventured out today and am at the Apple Store now, blogging on the new 20-inch iMac with 2 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo processor and SuperDrive. The whole thing costs $1199. For that price, it should have 2 GB of RAM, not 1 GB, but I quibble.

Safari starts almost instantly, the screen is set up to look really slick (all the colors are changed, and the thing looks definitely modern). I even like the aluminum finish.

Where Apple loses me -- and anybody who can type -- is with this lousy keyboard, with chicklit keys that are way too far apart. They screwed up the Macbook with these awful keyboards, and now they've taken the desktops down with it.

I can barely type with this thing. The keys aren't where they're supposed to be, there is very little "play" in the keys, no bounce when you depress them. It's just depressing. First the damn thing is way overpriced, then I can barely type a sentence without seven mistakes.

But the BIG TALK AT THE WESTFIELD TOPANGA APPLE STORE is the recent visit by Stevie Wonder. I bet he hated this lousy keyboard, too.

And p.s., Apple -- if you're going to do an aluminum PC and aluminum keyboard, what's with the WHITE PLASTIC mouse. You're messing with my feng shui.

I am a regular Mac user, and this is awful. For our iBook G4, we still use an old Apple Extended Keyboard with the Macally adapter that converts the old Apple keyboard ADB signal to USB. The Apple Extended remains one of the great keyboards of all time, and this is a travesty -- A TRAVESTY, I TELL YOU -- that makes the Macintosh worthless to writers of all types -- and all people who type. My fingers would ache after a day working on this thing.

Steve Jobs, maybe the collar on your black mock turtle is too tight, but I can't believe anybody signed off on this piece-of-crap keyboard.

File under "holy crap": Movable Type does NOT like Safari. I can't automatically insert a link, or do bold, italic or blockquoted material without hand-coding it. Can't they just give it up and load Firefox on these things?