The Computer Blog

Benchmarking 4 Macs – iLife and Imaginator Benchmarks

2008-06-09T13:39:00.003-05:00

If you missed out on the first blog about these benchmarks, then I’ll share again that I’m going this primarily because I bought a 3.06 GHz iMac with the Radeon 2600 HD GPU. I wanted to be able to contrast its performance with “standard” 3 GHz iMacs running the Nvidia 8800 GS and also against the other Macs in my personal stable, none of which are more than a couple of years old. Since I started that task, the 10.5.3 update has arrived; and that, in and of itself, is producing some interesting results.
For the first set on benchmarks, I used Cinebench 10 as my major benchmarking tool. For this set, I used two iLife applications and Imaginator, a third party application built to pull specifically on OS X’s Core Image graphics engine. (Thanks to Rob-art at Barefeats.com for coming up with these tests.) Let’s take a look at the iLife tests first.

The first test utilizes iMovie 7 to import a movie. The movie I used was named “Wildlife” and is a high-definition demo movie that can be found at Apple’s Quicktime website. As iMovie import the other movie, it renders thumbnails of its scenes to use in the editing process. The chart below shows the results of the test: (Less is Better.)

The most surprising result of this test was that both iMacs beat my 2.66 GHz Mac Pro. Considering the differences in CPU clock speed, this suggests that the iMovie Import process is strongly affected by GPU performance. The GPU’s in the iMacs are ATI Radeon 2600 “Pro” in the 3.06 GHz machine and the Radeon 2400 in the 2 GHz iMac. The MacBook Pro uses an ATI 1600 XT Radeon. The Mac Pro is the only machine using a Nvidia GPU and not a particularly strong one at that, i.e., GeForce 7300 GT. It appears that the recent ATI Radeon GPU’s exhibit significant performance increases over ATI Radeon chips only a generation or so back.

The other interesting thing to note is that the 10.5.3 update seems to have had a slightly positive impact on this benchmark. While the times on the 2 GHz iMac and the MacBook Pro did not change, the Mac Pro and the 3 GHz iMac were slightly faster on 10.5.3. Barefeats.com established that there is a fairly significant speed-up for those users with the Nvidia 8800 GS GPU, though the Radeon 2600 GPU on the same machine still beats the Nvidia for this task. But what happens if we move on to encoding a DVD?

The iDVD Encoding Test uses the same “wildife.mov” file as the previous test to create a disc image of a DVD that uses the movie for both its opening movies and the movie file itself. The results I got are charted below:

Now, here’s where things get really funky. Under 10.5.2, the machines line up in the order you might expect based on CPU cores and speed. The 2.66 Mac Pro is the fastest, followed by the 3 GHz iMac, the 2.33 GHz MacBook Pro, and then the 2 GHz iMac. Something unexplainable happens under 10.5.3. The Mac Pro with its Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT GPU slows WAY down as does the ATI Radeon 1600XT on the MacBook Pro. Yet, the two iMacs with Radeon 2400 and 2600 GPU’s speed up! This suggests that the update is strongly tweaked for performance for the last two generations of machines. Older machines may actually slow down with this update. That’s not the way to go!
The test using Imaginator times how long it takes a Mac to morph a picture of a leopard into a rose. As I mentioned earlier, this application pulls strongly on OS X’s Core Image functionality. The results of that test are shown below:

What’s surprising about this test is the relative slowness of the 2.33 GHz MacBook Pro and the relative speed of the 2 GHz iMac. If I largely ignore CPU speed, then the test shows that the Radeon 1600 XT is inferior to the Nvidia GeForce 7300GT which are both inferior to the Radeon 2400 and Radeon 2600 GPU’s respectively. The only other reason I can think of that the MBP would be so much slower would be due to memory allocation and paging, but that seems really unlikely since the machine is running 3 GB of RAM and I observed nothing to indicate that was happening during the testing.
Clearly, all these tests indicate that the current batch of iMacs is fast enough for use in almost any environment, including those producing graphics and video. That’s not to say that they are the right choice for a heavy production environment. The Mac Pro’s additional speed (8 core) and its expandability still make it more suitable for that; but for a small business or prosumer, making the choice between those two machines are now much harder.

For me personally, the tests have pointed out the weakness of my Mac Pro’s stock Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT video card. I plan on replacing it with a Radeon 3870 HD card as soon as it is released, which will hopefully be soon. Once that’s in, I’ll rerun the tests to provide a comparison performance between “then” and “now”.

I’d like to close this out by switching gears only slightly and talking about the 2.8 GHz iMac sitting on the shelves now in a nearby Apple Store. As part of the examination of the Radeon vs Nvidia phenomena, I went to a nearby Apple Store and ran the iDVD Encode test using a 2.8 iMac. Much to my surprise, it ran the iDVD encoding test (under 10.3.5) in 215 seconds, about 13 seconds faster than my 3.06!

Unfortunately, I only had time to run one test; but just that one tells me you won’t lose much if anything by buying the 2.8 GHz machine. Secondly, testing at Barefeats is showing that the 10.5.3 update has narrowed the gap for Core Image functions if you’re running the Nvidia 8800 GS GPU. You can’t really lose by buying either of the speedy 24 inch iMacs available.

The Cinebench Runs - Four Macs Compared

2008-05-26T19:36:00.006-05:00

As I promised, I spent some time running Cinebench 10 against most of the Macs in my house. The machines represented here are: (1) a 3.06 GHz with the ATI Radeon 2600HD GPU; (2) a 2.66 GHz dual-core, dual-processor Xeon Mac Pro with a NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT GPU; (3) a 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Mac Book Pro with the ATI Radeon X1600 GPU; and (4) a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac with a Radeon 2400 HD GPU.

There really were no surprises.

First, if you look at the “Single CPU Rendering” results, you can see that the machines line up according to clock speed, which is what you would expect. The 2.0 GHz iMac is the slowest while the 3.06 GHz iMac is the fastest.

Secondly, you can see the effect of both clock speed increases and the number of cores in the “Multiple CPU Rendering” results. Even the fastest dual core machine, the 3.06GHz iMac, cannot make up for the processing power gained by going to a dual core, dual processor set-up that is slightly slower in pure clock speed.

I think the most interesting chart, though, is the last one. This is measuring pixel shading using Open GL functions. Notice that all the ATI chipsets outscore the NVIDIA GPU. (The MacPro has the NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT video card.) I'm really interested in seeing what happens to its scores when the Mac Pro gets its Radeon 3870 HD video card within the next few weeks.

Keep the NVIDIA's weakness in mind as we take a look at some iLife benchmarks I’ll be posting over the next few days.

Barefeats Was Right!

2008-05-23T21:51:00.001-05:00

It was Rob-art’s testing at his Barefeats.com Mac performance website that alerted me to the problems with the NVIDIA 8800GS GPU chipset being used in Apple’s iMac. I keep a Mac Pro for really heavy graphics and video work and gaming, so my primary use for an iMac is to work with “everyday applications” and some light photography and video work. When I was ordering it some ten days or so ago, I decided to order a 3.06 GHz iMac with the Radeon 2600 XT GPU rather than the NVIDIA 8800GS GPU, not only to save me $150 but also to optimize the machine for the things I’d be using it for. Of course, I knew there was some possibility that updated drivers might improve the NVIDIA’s chip’s performance, but something in my gut told me that Rob is probably right about there being a fundamental flaw in the NVIDIA GPU when it comes to handling Core Image functions. I have to admit, too, I have a personal bias toward ATI chips, a holdover from my PC building days. I really love them, and I try to buy systems with them whenever I can.

Last night, I finally got the time to run a couple of the tests Rob-art used in his evaluation of the Radeon 2600 XT versus the NVIDIA 8800GS. When I ran the iMovie 7 Import test, the import time came out to be exactly the same as his (running the last generation’s 2.8 GHz iMac with the Radeon 2600), i.e., 40 seconds. While that was a bit of a personal disappointment, it showed that the GPU had more influence over the iMovie 7 import task than the CPU and that the Radeon is definitely the better GPU for the job. The extra speed of the 3.06GHz CPU came more into play when I performed the iDVD Encoding task. There, the task completed in 135 seconds versus Rob’s 147 seconds using the 2.8 GHz iMac running the same GPU. Both were significantly faster than the 3.06 GHz iMac running the NVIDIA 8800, as you can see here.

By the end of the holiday weekend, I hope to have run benchmarks using Cinebench 10, the iMovie 7 Import test, the iDVD Encode test, and perhaps one or two more test using my 3.06 GHz iMac, my 2.66 Mac Pro with its stock NVIDIA 7300 GT video card, and my 2.33 GHz MacBook Pro running its Radeon X1600 with 256MB, as well as my wife’s 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo AL iMac and her 2.0 GHz Core Duo MacBook. (I’d like to run Photoshop CS3 benchmarking tests, but the recently discovered 20 authorization/deauthorization limit for CS3 products make me hesitant to move a copy of CS3 around.) I will discuss the results here and probably also post them separately on my website to make them readily available without having to search through the blog. I am looking to buy the Radeon 3870 HD and run it in my Mac Pro when it’s released and will add its benchmarks to the mix as soon as I can. (Rob-art will have a more complete analysis on the 3870 and probably one up sooner than I will, so check there first if you’re interested in that. ) I’d especially love to tie in some Cinebench testing with the G5, G4, and AMD shootouts still posted on my site, but I’m not sure I’ve got a common version of Cinebench to run. That said, some of the machines benchmarked in those old articles are still in my family and most can run Cinebench 10 if I can get the owners to run it for me and send me the data.

It’ll be interesting to see how it all turns out and what I can put together, so I hope you’ll drop by every now and then to see what’s going on.

Microsoft Office 2008 SP1 May Hose File Launching

2008-05-23T21:49:00.000-05:00

Though I hadn’t seen it myself, I had read at the MacFixIt website about problems some people were having with the Microsoft Office 2008 Service Pack 1 Update. Until last night. My wife mentioned in one of those asides that really mean “ I’m having a problem I need you to fix” that when she double-clicked on a Microsoft Office file, the correct application launched but the file refused to load. MacFixIT and the Mactopia websites both had a recommended fix, so I went into the troubleshooting with great hope I’d shortly have it solved and be a hero once again.

MacFixIt suggested I force OS X to update prebinding using terminal commands. So, I launched into the “sudo” world and typed “sudo update_prebinding -debug -root / -force”, hit the Return key, supplied her admin password, and hit Return again, and watched lines of code scroll quickly past as her iMac jumped though its prebinding hoops. Once it was done, I double-clicked on a Word file on her desktop. Word launched, but the file didn’t launch with it. I rebooted her iMac and tried it again and got the same result. Obviously, that hadn’t worked.

Microsoft, on the other hand, suggested if you had such a problem you use the Remove Office utility (in your Microsoft Office 2008 folder) to uninstall Office 2008. They wanted you to then reinstall Office 2008, download the SP1 (12.1.0) patch, update the installation, and then start it. So, I did all that, too. Immediately after, I double-clicked a Word file and it properly launched, so I closed Word and tried it again. It didn’t work!!! I had no idea what had changed in the five seconds since I had last launched the application, but obviously something had. So, I used Remove Office to uninstall Office again.

Using Spotlight, I hunted down every Microsoft Office related file I could find, especially preference files (.plist) and dragged them all to the Trash. I then re-installed Office 2008 from scratch. Once that was done, I confirmed that file launching using a double-click worked by using files in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats. I then installed the Microsoft Office 12.0.1 patch and confirmed that the double-click launch was still working. Out of time, I quit after calling up Microsoft Auto-Update and selecting “Manual” for the updating controller. The last thing I wanted was for that software to download the SP1 package while I wasn’t there and have my wife blindly install it (admittedly, that is something she almost never does).

Obviously, I didn’t fix the problem but have, for now, and using a workaround. I’ve asked my wife not to download and install the SP1 patch. I’m going to wait for Microsoft to issue a follow-up or wait for someone else to come up with a definitive answer to what’s causing the problem and relay a definitive fix. I’m not willing to spend all my time trying to fix the problem like I used to when I ran only Windows. I’ve got better things to do, real things to do, like working with the photos I shot at my wife’s nephew’s wedding last weekend. I realized last night I really screwed up by not shooting in RAW, but that’s a story for a whole ‘nother blog.

The iMac is Back!

2008-05-13T21:19:00.003-05:00

My wild hair won out, and my new 24-inch iMac showed up on my doorstep yesterday afternoon. I had already rearranged my office to accommodate it, so I had only to unbox the thing, photographing it as I did, and set it up on my desk. I cranked it up and quickly hit the Migration Assistant, which I used to transfer all data from my Mac Pro sitting next to it. While the Assistant did do a cursory search of the Mac Pro’s hard drive to build an estimate of over 415 GB of data and applications to be transferred (58GB of that were applications), it didn’t let me select individual applications or folders to bypass; so, I resigned myself to letting it copy everything from the Mac Pro, including many gigabytes of material I knew I’d remove. In hindsight, I probably could have manually copied over much of the data and manually loaded what few applications I was going to transport over a lot faster; it took almost eight hours for the assistant to do it all by itself. (I was going nuts during the last hour staring at too many “4 minutes to go” prompts.)

Once it finished, I uninstalled all my Adobe CS3 applications except for Go Live 9, removed my Apple “pro applications” (Final Cut Studio, Live Type, Compressor, Motion, DVD Studio Pro, Soundtrack Pro, and Aperture), removed all the media associated with those applications, reinstalled Fusion and moved the Windows XP virtual machine from my Mac Pro to my iMac (The Mac Pro still can run XP using Boot Camp.), reinstalled Zinio to get it working again, removed a copy of Xplane 8, installed a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac, and ran Software Update. That was not all I wanted to do to configure the iMac for its new duties, but it ws all I could do last night. I had to get some sleep before going back to work.

This machine is the most elegant and beautiful computer I’ve ever seen. The 24 inch screen, even though only one inch larger and sporting the same native resolution as the Mac Pro’s Apple Cinema Display sitting across from it, seems to dwarf everything in the room. It definitely commands the center of attention when you walk into my office, beckoning you like some mystical portal into worlds of the unknown.

The machine is not totally silent, but is almost so. I can hear a small fan whirring some of the time, but it’s really down in the mud and must be listened for in an otherwise silent room. Even though I have a room light hanging from the ceiling and just slightly behind my head, reflections off the glossy screen are minimal. I had worried that the light’s reflection might be an annoying distraction. It’s not.
On the surface, the machine seems on par with my Mac Pro, which is honestly a little slower with its 2.66 GHz CPU’s. Nicely enough, the iMac came with 2 GB of RAM, but I’m going to kick it up to its 4GB maximum tonight. The unfortunate part of that is that I have to replace ALL the iMac’s native RAM, and I don’t currently have another Mac where that memory could be used to expand it. I’m buying my RAM from OWC (Other World Computing) and they have a “trade-in” program but I’d only get $20 for the whole 2GB. I’d rather keep it and hope I’ll find some use for it in the future.

I like being able to control iTunes with an Apple Remote again, though it’s a bit of a pain not to have a magnet or some other container on the unit to clip it to. That’s a cheap fix, Apple. You can provide a little plastic stand or an aluminum colored clip hat snaps onto the iMac’s side or top and lets you snap the remote into it. There needs to be something other than just having it lie around.

I haven’t tested out the machine’s interface with my scanner, but I plan to do that this evening after I perform the memory swap and confirm that’s okay.

The last thing I need to do to finish the machine’s configuration is an external hard disk big enough to handle Time Machine’s backing up of 500GB’s of data (well, it’s really only about 340GB right now). Once I do that, I’ll not only breathe easier but can remove all my personal data off the Mac Pro, which will free up space on it to be used for creative purposes.

As for you, my dear reader, I’ll be running some performance benchmarks you might find interesting as soon as I can. I intend to publish results using Cinebench and Imaginator and build comparisons not only with those published using a 3.06 GHz iMac with the Nvidia 8800GS GPU but with my Mac Pro and my current MacBook Pro. I also plan on buying the new ATI Radeon HD3850 video card this month and putting it in my Mac Pro, so I’ll have comparison results with it as well. It will probably be next week, though, before the first of this happens; so, stay tuned.

Adobe's Hidden 20 Times Activation Limit - Somebody Needs to Sue!

2008-05-09T04:47:00.001-05:00

Whether you’re in a business or a ”prosumer” like me, you put out literally thousands of dollars to run and update Adobe software. A few years ago, “in order to fight piracy”, Adobe incorporated an activation scheme that played computer supercop by ensuring you only had two “activated” instances of the software, therefore enforcing license restrictions. Frankly, I’ve had no problem with that until now. Last night, I discovered that Adobe CS3 software has a limit of 20 activations/deactivations, and then it will refuse to run. Period.

In other words, Adobe is not only using activation to “enforce its anti-piracy” efforts but to ensure that the software has a limited lifetime.
This is totally unacceptable. Where is it stated in the EULA that the number of activations has a limit and that, if you hit it, the thousands of dollars you have invested in software gets flushed down the drain? Time to see if I have any legal beagle readers. If you’re one of those and a class action suit is up your alley, count me in.

Frankly, activation is proving, as it often has, to only hurt the people who are trying to live within the rules. As more of the user community becomes aware of how these types of DRM schemes are being abused by the companies instituting them, the whole thing will backfire. You can bet that if I hit the “20” time activation limit and Adobe refuses to turn my software back on, it will be the last time Adobe ever sees a dollar from me. And I will make sure that everyone I know who is even thinking about using Adobe software is discouraged from thinking about it.

So, why am I even worried about hitting the 20 activation limit? Well, since I bought CS3 and didn’t know about the limit, I’ve activated and deactivated the software several times as I’ve tried out various Macs or upgraded machines. The new iMac that will be arriving is a case in point. With its arrival, I’m changing priorities on which Mac is used for what, and that is causing me to move software around, which means activating and deactivating the software.

Are the folks in Adobe living in a cave? Do they not realize that there are lots of reasons why someone might move software packages around while still living within the terms of the EULA? Why isn’t this very important operating limit stated? Could it be that if most businesses knew it existed, they might do more than think twice about buying their software?

Somebody needs to sue.

The Return of the iMac

2008-05-08T21:39:00.000-05:00

I’ve said many times in this blog that I really loved iMacs. I’ve been using just my Mac Pro and my MacBook Pro to do all my work and while they were practical and simplified my software and data management chores, I still missed working with an iMac. The iMac is like the sexy woman next door; sooner or later, she’s gonna’ get to ya’. (Your mileage will vary; what you decide to do about that, if anything, is up to you.)

The ball started rolling over me when I bought my wife a new 20 inch aluminum iMac a few weeks back. I had been saving money to replace her two-year old 20 inch Intel Core Duo when Microcenter put the newer Core 2 Duo’s on sale. I took the plunge, and she loved the new machine. Getting her one also allowed me to play with a new iMac to see for myself the flaws and benefits of them. I could see what folks were talking about but the flaws certainly didn’t seem to impede my wife. I could side-step some of those issues anyway by buying the more expensive 24 inch iMac.
Ever since then, off and on, I’ve been stopping by the Apple Store to play with their 24 inch iMacs.

At first, I tried to make do by using my wife’s old 20 inch iMac. I liked it well enough, but the screen didn’t seem as bright as my Mac Pro’s 23 inch Apple Cinema Display and my eyes got a bit tired after four hours of using it. So, I packaged it up and shipped it off to one of my sons, settling in to continue using my Mac Pro as my one and only desktop. But, then, both my wife and a friend of mine (who owns a 24 inch iMac, by the way) suggested I look at going to dual monitor ops and turning my Mac Pro into more of a true creative workstation. I did that last night and immediately fell in love with it. While the optimum set-up would use two 23 inch Apple Cinema Displays, I’m having a great time running one 23 inch main display and one 20 inch side display. I do not want to give that up!

I’ve also been wanting to take the Mac Pro back to its original purpose, i.e., photo and video editing, and do so with a vengeance this year, as well as start back into my fiction writing again. More of its time will be taken up with encoding and rendering duties, so I wanted another machine for my everyday correspondence and my fiction writing. Yes, I could do that at a lot less cost by simply buying another 23 inch display and throwing the job back to my MacBook Pro hooked to the 20 inch display, a mouse, a keyboard, and running the MBP off an external hard disk. But I wanted something more elegant than that. In other words, I was in love with the look and ergonomics of the aluminum iMac, and I wanted one.

To make it worse, Apple released a 3.06 GHz version...one that had crawled past the mythical 3 GHz barrier. Like Chuck Yeager crawling into the X-1 to chase the demon in the sky, it was something I HAD to pursue. It’s been too long since I’ve written any benchmarking articles about the Mac. With this machine, I COULD…

Lastly, my wife’s guilt had gotten to her; and in her state of being undeserving of a new iMac, she has been encouraging me to get one, too. Better than hers, of course. A 24 incher. And 3 GHz.

So, I did.

It’ll be here next week.

A 3 GHz iMac.....NICE!!

2008-04-29T19:27:00.000-05:00

Apple released a 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo powered iMac this week. For the first time, a consumer Mac will be operating at speeds previously reserved for the Mac Pro.
I’ve said several times in this blog that the iMac is my favorite Mac, and the one I would recommend for users wanting a desktop. The trick of making yourself happy with one, of course, is to buy one that meets or exceeds your current needs. I could happily say that a 3.06 GHz iMac would exceed my current needs, but then most any machine would since I already own a 2.66 Ghz dual processor Intel dual core Xenon powered Mac Pro and and Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. Regardless, in a true demonstration that men are only as big as their toys, I want a 3.06 Ghz iMac with a 24 inch screen, need one or not!

While acknowledging there has no be no logic in such a purchase at all, I did take a look at what the best configuration of such a machine would be for me. I would rarely
use it as a gamer but would be entirely likely to employ it running Final Cut Pro, Motion 2, Compressor, or Photoshop. So, I decided to take a look at taking the bottom of the line of the 24 inch iMacs and building it to order so I could compare its price against the base price of the top of the line 24 inch iMac. Here’s why…

I consider Rob-art’s “barefeats.com” website as the premiere website when it comes to measuring and discussing Mac performance, and a while back it posted some tests that measured the performance of the ATI Radeon 2600 HD (among others) and the Nvidia GeForce 8800GT. The Radeon is the GPU in the low end 24 incher, and the GeForce is the CPU in the high-end 24 incher. While the GeForce GPU is definitely stronger in some games, the Radeon is the faster GPU when working with “pro” applications (like those I mentioned above).

Hence the effort to price out a 24 incher with the Radeon GPU (starts at $1799) and upgrading it to a 3.06GHz CPU and upgrading the hard drive from 320GB to 500GB. That makes for a $2049 machine that will ship in 1-3 business days versus a $2199 machine that also ships in 1-3 business days. Not a lot of savings. If I was going to spend more, I’d kick the hard drive up to 750GB, adding another $94 of cost, and bringing the total to $2143, $56 less than the top of the line machine. That makes it a trade of hard disk space for a little less gaming performance but better “pro app” performance. This is the configuration I’d go after.

Will I buy one? Oh, I’m REALLY tempted! I’d love to be able to benchmark that machine using Cinebench against a current 2.0 GHz iMac, my 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, a 2.66 GHz quad-core Mac Pro, and possibly a 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo iMac, a dual processor 2.0 GHz G5 PowerMac, and a dual processor 1.25 GHz G4 PowerMac that are still lurking out in my family. More than likely, I’ll show some restraint and won’t get the thing now, if at all, though. But, with me, you never know. Sometimes my wild hair wins out, even if the rest of it is turning slightly grey!

To Each His Own

2008-04-29T19:24:00.000-05:00

It only took me four hours of using my wife’s old iMac and switching back to my Mac Pro with its 23 inch ACD to decide that I was going back to how I’ve been operating, i.e., with my quad-core 2.66 GHz Mac Pro and its 23 inch Apple Cinema Display as my main machine. Even with the iMac’s screen turned up to full brightness, my eyes were feeling tired after working on it for several hours and refreshed when back on the Mac Pro. That plus the Mac Pro’s speed and smoothness won me back over, and I also really don’t like managing multiple data sets anymore. That’s too bad for me, because I really do love iMacs.

Much to my surprise, my stepson (from my first marriage) did not want to swap one of his current systems for the iMac. So, I’m going to put the iMac up for sale using an online swap sheet at work. If I can sell it for $500 (and I believe I can move it for that price), I can offset just about all my costs of the upgrade, except for the money I had already saved up and don’t mind sacrificing. I would have the new iMac completely paid for within a month.

I’ve been playing with my wife’s new iMac, and, despite all the rhetoric on the web about that model’s screen quality (mainly about its uneven lighting and color which one can easily see), it’s screen does appear brighter than the old iMac’s. If I had the money, I could easily be talked into buying a 24 inch iMac (with its even better screen), but I don’t. Besides, even if I don’t want to admit it to myself, an iMac really doesn’t match my mission anymore. In addition to something I can use for desktop publishing, graphics work, video editing, writing, and a flight simulator platform, I need something that can act as a media server for the Apple TV in our living room. An iMac can do all that; but, at some point, its lack of storage expandability does it in. A Mac Pro really does do me better, even if it is not as elegant as an iMac.

I’ve also been playing on the other side of the Mac performance scale as I helped a friend join the Mac community by setting up an old 457 MHz G4 Digital Audio Power Mac running Panther. Most of her set-up problems were due to miscommunication between her and her daughter (who set up their internet account on Yahoo! AT&T) and not understanding for a while that mail server settings for att.net and yahoo.att.net are different. We got it all sorted out and up and running. I was pleasantly surprised at how well the machine ran Panther, its web applications (Safari, Firefox) and Office 2004. It had 1GB of RAM, a 128 GB hard drive, and a Rage Pro video card hooked to a 17 inch Dell VGA monitor. (I really think this is a 466 MHz G4 and that its clock speed is being mis-reported by the operating system.) I swapped out her CD-RW with a Pioneer DVR-105 I had sitting around and gave her a copy of Toast 7 to use with it. It works for her, and that’s all that matters.

The Demise of Go Live

2008-04-28T20:53:00.002-05:00

If you’ve ever stopped to read the disclaimers on the front page of this website, then you know that I maintain it and have maintained it for many years with the help of Adobe Go Live. I’m personally big into integration when it comes to computing, so Go Live was attractive to me because of its integration with Photoshop, Illustrator, and In Design, products I was already using, not to mention its slant toward print designers rather than web programmers.

This week Adobe announced that Go Live will be no longer supported. It’s the end of the line for that product, something I’ve been expecting for a while, ever since Adobe acquired Macromedia and Dreamweaver. I suspected Adobe’s assurances that Go Live would be supported were half-truths and it would only be supported through the version 9 release and then dropped in favor of Dreamweaver. Looks like I was right.

To their credit, Adobe is offering a $199 upgrade path to Dreamweaver CS3 for registered Go Live users (and I haven’t registered my copy so I just might now), though I’m not sure I’m going to pursue it. Frankly, I have never pushed Go Live to the limits of its capabilities and probably will not upgrade my CS3 applications anytime soon, so I’m no hurry to move. What does make me think about stepping over to Dreamweaver is the lack of documentation surrounding Go Live and the plethora that’s available concerning Dreamweaver. It saves me a lot of time when learning an application to have some good books around.

I need an application what will let me do what I need to with a minimum of hassle, including hand-coding. I realize that the latter is purer and less bloated, but time is the one thing I’m short of, and hand-coding does take time. From what I’ve heard of Dreamweaver, I’m just not convinced I’ll buy anything by moving to it, either. I will take some time, though, to evaluate my options; but my first choice would be to spend that time on learning Go Live 9 better and spend the money I’d use on the Dreamweaver crossover on something else.

Perhaps the biggest thing about this shift is how computing seems to be going full-circle with respect to its relationships with respect to prosumers and professionals. When the GUI revolution was beginning, the trend was to take the land that had only been in the hand of the professionals and redistribute it to the everyday consumer. For the last few years, though, that trend has been reversing. There is an ever-growing gap between software for the consumer and prosumer and that for the professional as evidenced by the ever-growing propensity to bundle high-powered applications and drive prices up out of reach of the average consumer.

The demise of Go Live is just one more piece of evidence of that philosophical switch.

I’m not really sure this is a good thing.

Time Machine, Airport Express, and USB Drive

2008-04-21T20:31:00.001-05:00

When Apple released Leopard and its new Time Machine feature, rumor said Time Machine would work across a network, backing up your Mac to a network drive. Users quickly realized that the promise wasn’t made to come true, and there was much consternation in the Mac community. This year, though, after Apple released its Airport Express spin-off known as Time Capsule, a combination of an Airport Express Base Station and an internal (network) hard drive, the capability that had been promised with the release of the “n” models base stations, showed up for us everyday Airport Extreme base station owners. Last week, I decided to put the capability to the test.

The real reason I decided to do it was not that I wanted to write about it but because I needed some kind of setup that was invisible to my wife. I had rigged a Western Digital 320GB hard drive with a Firewire 400 interface for Time Machine’s use, but she still had to turn it on in addition to turning on her iMac, and that was not within her normal habits. Of course, I could have just left the hard drive on all the time, but I didn’t want to do that because of the wear on the drive, the extra energy usage, and the small risk of fire. I decided to set up Time Machine using that same drive but hooked into our Airport Extreme Base Station via its USB port.

In the past, when I had tried to substitute a new drive into a Time Machine setup, I had never been successful. Instead, I always have been forced to wipe out the old Time Machine backup and restart a whole new backup on the new drive. So, I started out her reconfiguration by reformatting the drive before installing it on the network by plugging into our Airport Express Base Station. Once that was done, I mounted the disk on her iMac over the wireless part of our network (which is a “N” network but her machine only has a “G” networking card.) and told Time Machine to use the network disk as the backup device. I then commanded Time Machine to “Back Up Now” and instructed my wife not to turn off her iMac or the network set-up until Time Machine was done. While I don’t know exactly how long it took to back up her 160GB of data, applications, and operating system files, it was almost 24 hours before the dialog box of the backup disappeared. She had used the machine unfettered in the meantime while the whole thing had run quietly in the background.

Backups only take a short time now, but the sluggishness of this set-up makes me hope I never had to do a full restore from it. If I do, I will be hooking the Time Machine disk to her iMac via a direct Ethernet connection or Firewire, if that didn’t work, and hope I could bring everything back in a short period of time.

The Great iMac Swap

2008-04-15T21:16:00.000-05:00

When I learned that Microcenter was selling new 20 inch iMacs at $200 off, I decided it was time for a change. Combined with the money I had already saved toward just such a purchase later in the year, I could get my wife a new machine for only about $600. That was too good a deal to pass up, so last night we drove up to the store. I sat her down at a 20 inch iMac already on display and changed the desktop picture to a solid color to make sure she was okay with both the color gradients and the lighting differentials of the newer, cheaper glossy screens. She actually liked them better. So, I bought her the 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo model with a 250GB hard drive and Radeon 2400HD video GPU with 128 MB of video RAM and took it home.

Setting up the new iMac was relatively easy. Only shortly after we watched the introductory video did a wizard ask us if we wanted to transfer data from another Mac, which we did. I hooked up a Firewire 400 cable between machines and then booted her old Mac while holding down the “T” key on the new aluminum keyboard it had been attached to. That didn’t work; the iMac booted normally instead of into Target Disk Mode. Recognizing the problem as one due to the newer keyboard, I swapped it with the older Apple keyboard and tried again. It worked that time. The wizard on the new machine recognized both the Firewire connection and the old machine and began transferring files. It was “sit back and wait” time. My wife had over 100GB of data to transfer, so it took the machine a couple of hours to move everything over. At the end of that, I hooked up the new iMac to our network via a CAT 6 cable and ran Software Update until it had downloaded and installed every available change. I then launched several of her applications to make sure they ran error free and then shut the machine down and added a 1GB stick of DDR2 RAM to kick it up to 2GB. After putting it back together and setting it in its rightful place on my wife’s desk, I cranked it up and tested its operation again and saw no problems.

Typically, I’d take her old machine and find someone in the family who wanted it. Not this time. I’ve always had an affection for flat panel iMacs, so I’m going to use her old one in my office in the place of my MacBook Pro being hooked up to a 20 inch display. I’m going to set it up by cloning my MBP’s hard disk onto the iMac and then load copies of my iPhoto and iTunes libaries onto it, too, as well as most of my most frequently used data. Then, I’m just going to sit and use it for a while. In time, I may grow weary of having to maintain two sets of data and feel like it’s time to set the machine free and give it a better home. I may also take the calculated risk of replacing the iMac’s virbrating optical drive with a new one and upgrade its hard disk to a newer, larger one. But, for now, I’d just like to use it for a bit to kick myself loose writing. I also feel better about having a machine with an internal iSight. That way, my external and rare Firewire-driven iSight remains a spare.

Our First Apple TV Rental

2008-03-02T19:27:00.001-06:00

Ever since I bought her an Apple TV to use with our WinBook 32 inch HDTV, my wife has been dying to rent a movie from iTunes and try it out. I had some money sitting in my iTunes account from a gift card, so when Friday night rolled in and she wanted to watch a movie, I let her surf through Apple’s offerings to see if there was something she might like. She surprised me by wanting to rent “Transformers”. I mean, she’s the Walt Disney type. Anyway, using the pictorial selection buttons at the “Transformers” preview site, I selected the HD TV rental at $4.99. The Apple TV gave us a “Downloading Movie” message (i.e., something close to that…I don’t remember the exact words it used). Since this was an HD selection, I figured it would take double-digit minutes to download but after only about two minutes the movie reported it was ready to play. (We are using an Earthlink/Comcast cable set-up that often reports download speeds of 6000 kbps and 802.11N networking to connect it to the Apple TV unit.) After making the obligatory kitchen and bathroom stops, we sat down to watch the movie.

We couldn’t tell we weren’t watching a regular HD broadcast. Picture and sound quality was good (though sound is only being pitched through our TV’s internal speakers), and we experienced no picture stalls or pixilation. We paused the movie a couple of times for bathroom breaks and resumed it without any problems. When we finished the movie (and we watched it all the way through the ending credits), Apple TV told us we had 21 hours remaining on the rental. Unfortunately, I didn’t go back and try to play the rental again, though it did appear I could have.

When I checked my iTunes account the next day, I found a bill for $5.30. They obviously charged me state sales tax, which accounts for the other 31 cents. That’s not unreasonable, but the added cost is something to figure into your final bill. Whether that’s worth more to you than driving down to the local Hollywood Video, Blockbuster’s, or Mickey D’s, you’ll have to decide. It’s certainly not as cost-effective as something like Netflix. On the other hand, it cost me no more than renting “on demand” from Comcast, and iTunes has a lot larger selection, even if they’re far short of the one thousand titles Apple had promised by now. There is definitely a market for Apple TV and iTunes, even if it’s not the cheapest way to go there is.

Word 2008's Performance Not So Hot, Either

2008-02-23T06:08:00.000-06:00

As I’ve used Office 2008 more (and I’ve spent most of my time in Word). I keep backtracking on my positive opinions about Office 2008. I still like the suite, but I’m coming to understand more and more the complaints I’m seeing from other users online.

Word’s 2008 performance is, as I’ve found out, not as good as it first appeared. Even though it is a Universal Binary application and written for Intel Mac’s, I’ve seen problems with the application redrawing screen lines even in small documents. In a moderately sized document, I’ve seen OS X’s spinning beach ball as I waited for Word to catch up to me. I’ve seen complaints about Office 2008’s lackluster performance on some online forums where some users think Office 2004 performed better. (And considering that 2004 has still has support for Visual Basic, some computer pundits consider Office 2004 a better multi-platform application than Office 2008.) At other times, the application seems almost schizophrenic, opening old documents with snap and scrolling through them with ease, like one would expect. How does all this effect my recommendation for the new suite? Well, if you’re using Office 2004 and happy with it, then stay with it. If you feel you like Office 2008’s interface better and can live without Visual Basic support, then go for 2008. If you’re wondering why I didn’t list better compatibility with Office 2007’s native .docx format, then you haven’t heard that despite the promise that Office 2008 would be compatible with Office 2007, opening files in .docx generated by one application or the other is not as transparent as it is supposed to be. In fact, keeping a copy of the Office .docx converter or NeoOffice around just to do translations isn’t a bad idea, though I honestly haven’t seen that kind of a problem myself, yet.

That’s really pretty sad. When I consider that and the flail of an operating system known as Vista, I have to ask: “Has Microsoft lost it?”

Problematic PowerPoint 2008

2008-02-02T04:07:00.001-06:00

While the only problem I’ve seen so far with Word 2008 is that the last line of a paragraph does not always properly redraw, the story is much worse when talking about PowerPoint 2008. I finally had a chance to try to use it last week, and it just was not a pretty experience. The application performed so sluggishly I was wishing for my copy of Office 2004, which I no longer had on my machine.

The job became to take a template file built in Office 2003 (for Windows) and make from that a presentation I could give to my co-workers. While PowerPoint 2008 imported it without a problem, screen redraws in PP 2008 became incredibly slow. By that I mean I even had to wait for the OS X spinning beachball to quit spinning. It made trying to build only a slide that incorporated only graphics in the title bar and text in the main body impossible. Such poor performance was not only unexpected but was intolerable. Luckily, I discovered I didn’t have to complete the presentation and was able to give up on it, which was a good thing. I doubt if I could have finished it using PP2008. I was going to have to flip back to my workplace’s PowerPoint 2003 to make it work.

In looking at other user comments elsewhere on the web, I’m not the only Mac user seeing this kind of lackluster performance out of PowerPoint 2008 and, in some cases, Office 2008 in general. Some folks have found that Office 2008 is conflicting with third party font managers, but I don’t have one of those, so that doesn’t explain the spinning beach balls in my case. It’s kind of hard to understand how Microsoft and the Mac Business Unit in particular missed this one.

Add to all this the revelation that data in Office 2008 files may not be seen by Office 2007, and one has to wonder just what the hell Microsoft has been doing with their time. It looks strongly like they need to be working a lot more on product quality and less on anti-piracy; if this keeps up, no one’s going to want their stuff even if they can get it for free.

Hopefully a timely patch from MS will solve the compatibility and speed problems for what could be at least a very good product.

Academic Copies of Microsoft Office Are No More!

2008-01-22T20:24:00.000-06:00

I’ve seen a lot of references to the “Home and Student” version of Office 2008 as “academic” versions. Apparently, even some vendors have not noticed the licensing sea-change that began with Office 2007 for Windows. Academic versions of Microsoft Office do not exist. They have been replaced with “Home and Student” versions of the same.

Yes, the difference is subtle but important. “Student and Teacher” versions of Office, like you’d find with Office 2003 and 2004 and previous versions, were truly academic versions, i.e., you had to be student or teacher to legally use them. Now, it’s true that Microsoft did not enforce the “academic” requirement either at purchase or during use (at least for Office 2004), as did companies like Adobe that required one to produce a student or teacher i.d. just to get the package home. The only checking the software did was across one’s own network where it looked for more than one installed and open copy using the same key and shut down the “second” open version if it was found. But the licensing still required the software to be used by a student or teacher or in an academic environment. Otherwise, legally, even for home use, you had to buy the “regular” copy of Office and pay the premium. That is no more, and that’s great news for the everyday home user. The distinction is now that the software must be used for “non-commercial” use, which is why the package was renamed to “Home and Student”. Even better, Microsoft held the cost down to $149.99 for the package, squarely putting it within reach for most users. I suspect, at least on the Mac side of the house, this was also to keep it within reach of the cost for Apple’s iWork Package, which retails at $79. While that’s about half as much as Office, it doesn’t leave such a big gap that most users wouldn’t leap it to have a full version of Office instead. (If you shop around, you can find retailers who offer it for less than the suggested retail. For instance, Amazon.com is offering it for $130.99 with free shipping as I write this.)

So, have at it! If you’ve been wanting a copy of Microsoft Office for use at home, now you can get one relatively inexpensively on either the Windows or Mac platform. Of course, if you’re using it as part of a home business, “non-commercial” use goes out the window, and you’ll have to commit to the “regular” version of Office to stay legal. (If you need Exchange Server support for Entourage, you’ll also need to step up to the “higher” versions of Office.) For the rest of us, the Home and Student version will be enough.

First Look - Word 2008 for Mac

2008-01-16T17:59:00.000-06:00

Office 2008 for Mac was released yesterday; and, of course, I had to go out and get a copy of it last night. I’ve been running it since and have to say that it was worth the money I paid for it. The best value is the “Home and Student” version of the soft ware which, for only $149.99, lets you install three copies of itself as long as they are for “non-commercial” use. I have a copy of the premiere version with the Microsoft Media management and Exchange Server functions coming; more on that later when it arrives which is still some six to eight weeks away. For this review, too, I’m only going to discuss Word 2008. I haven’t had the time to do anything with Excel, PowerPoint, or Entourage other than glance at them.

That said, other than the fact that this is a Universal software package making Office finally Intel-native, the best description I can give you of the new software is in two words: “iWork competitor”. I say that not because I think iWork has anywhere near the depth that Office does but because the Office and, specifically, the Word interface copies Pages' and at least one feature of Keynote not previously found in PowerPoint is now there.

Like Pages, Word’s default workspace has a large, grey toolbar with only a minimum of functions, i.e., New, Open, Save, Print, Undo, Redo (greyed out unless active), Format (painter), Tables, Columns, Show, Navigation, Gallery (greyed or active depending on what View is selected) icon. The usual toolbars one expects to see in Word are still there and selectable, but the default workspace has the main toolbar and opens the Formatting Palette. Frankly, I like working with that configuration and my wife does, too; she feels it’s easier to find everything that way.

The “Show” icon controls whether publishing marks are shown on the page, and the Navigation icon controls whether a “navigation bar” is presented along the left margin of the screen. The bar contains thumbnail presentations of each page in the document, and you can scroll to and select any you wish. The Gallery icon is inactive if the document is in Draft View but active in Page Layout or Publishing Layout View. If it’s active, a very small bar with the following tabs appears: Document Elements, Quick Tables, Charts, SmartArt Graphics, and WordArt.

Clicking on a tab opens another small toolbar and a larger bar containing thumbnails of the templates or types of items available for each category. Clicking on one of the thumbnails or icons reformats the current document to match what is shown. This provides a very fast way of applying a template to a new document or applying a specific format to a template or document instead of doing it at the formation of the document as you would do in Pages or Office 2004. Luckily, the toolbar containing the tabs (Document Elements) is not very intrusive if you’re not using any of its functions but are simply typing in Page Layout or Publishing Layout views. When I had seen the demos of this functionality a few months ago on a Microsoft website, I wasn’t sure if this feature would turn me off so much I wouldn’t want to use this version of Office; but I’m finding it’s not getting in my way and might even come in handy.

As you might expect, overall responsiveness of the application is excellent.

In Print Layout view, Word presents your document as a single or dual page layout view depending upon the screen resolution, the assigned width of the document, and the amount of Zoom. In Draft view, it always presents a single page layout view. (I usually run it in “Page Width” mode while in this view.) It switches between views instantly (on my 2.33 GHz MacBook Pro with 3 GB RAM). I’ve seen a few graphics artifacts (incomplete line redraws) but they’ve cleared with any kind of screen re-draw.

Like Office 2007, Office 2008 saves its files in the new but proprietary Microsoft XML format. I’ve opened XML formatted files from Office 2007 with 2008 and vice versa quickly and with no losses. Keep in mind, though, that Office 2004 users or Office v.X users will not be able to open your files unless you save them out in the “Word 97-2004” format on a Mac or “Word 98-2003” format on a Windows PC. You can choose to do this each time you save a document or go into Preferences/Save and change the default format to the older “Word 97-2004” format so you don’t have to worry with it. For the time being, since I’ve upgraded all the Macs in our house to the Office 2008, I’m saving files in the new .docx format if they're not leaving the premises.

While I really like Office 2007’s new ribbon interface, I have to say I like Office 2008’s interface better. My wife does, too. I suspect the only time I’ll be using Office 2007 now is when I’m using Windows, either via VMware’s Fusion or Apple’s Boot Camp. I like this new Office, and I’m glad I bought it.

Does that mean I don’t have a use for Pages? Nope. I’ve used Pages to make some really nice newsletters, so I tend to turn to it for simple desktop publishing needs first. I’ll look at Office 2008 if Pages won’t do what I want or if Office has a template I like better. But I doubt if I’ll use Pages for any word processing; I’ve never liked it much for that, preferring Word instead.

My wife tends to use Keynote rather than PowerPoint, and she says it’s better. Maybe so. My workplace is still standardized on PowerPoint, so I tend to use it more and reserve looking at Keynote for only personal needs, and those are few and far between.

I’ve only glanced at Numbers and have no plans to use it instead of Excel. The opposite is true of Entourage. I never use it any more, preferring Apple’s Mail and iCal instead. I’ll look at Entourage a little more once I get the “premium” version of Office 2008 with its improved Exchange server support.

Would I recommend this version of Office? Yep. If you’ve got an Intel-Mac, it’s a no-brainer. Even if you’ve got a PPC Mac, you still might want to take a look at it. Its new features and integration between applications makes it a better value than Office 2004, as good as that suite is. I can’t address the performance side of that recommendation, however; I don’t have a PPC Mac in the house to run a comparison on. Drop me a line if you can comment on that. I’ll post your comments here.

Comments on The MacBook Air

2008-01-16T17:54:00.001-06:00

As it had been rumored, Apple introduced “the world’s thinnest” notebook computer in an aluminum case, a full-sized keyboard, a 13 inch LCD backlit display, and only one USB port and a micro-DVI port. It’s a sweet looking machine; and it better be for its $1800 price! Personally, I first thought it would be just the thing for a true “road warrior”. But, then, as I looked at the specifications, I found something that could almost be a “show stopper” for me. The machine’s battery is not user-accessible.

It’s probably no coincidence that the battery on my MacBook Pro is giving up the ghost as I write this, subjected to too much power and not enough conditioning as I used the machine as my desktop replacement at home. Using the “Coconut Battery” utility, I checked the battery and it confirmed what I already intuitively knew, i.e., my battery’s capacity had degraded to about half of what it was when new. The battery is between a year and a year and a half old and was one of those sent to me by Apple when the first battery was identified as possibly defective (the Sony fire deal). I dropped by the Apple Store last night and chunked down $129 for a new battery. I’m keeping the old one to use at home when I’m running the MBP as a desktop hooked into a power adapter. The new battery is the one I will use when I take the MacBook Pro to work or hit the road and need the most battery capacity.

Back to the MacBook Air. How long can one expect the machine’s internal battery to last? My guess would be between one to two years, depending upon how the battery is treated. At that point, an owner would have two options. If he was outside the machine’s warranty period, then he might take the risk of replacing the battery himself since there are bound to be third-party suppliers by then. If he was still within the warranty or simply don’t want to do the work, he’d have to turn his machine into an approved Apple Service provider to have them replace the battery. I can’t say for sure how much that would cost, but that’s an invisible cost you’ll need to plug into your cost/value analysis. (Note: Since I wrote this, Apple has published a cost of only $129 to replace the battery in the MacBook Air. The downtime is advertised to be 5 days, but at least the cost isn’t any more than buying a battery for a MacBook Pro. Also, one thing I didn’t think about and has been mentioned by someone at another Mac related website is that many business users carry an extra battery to deal with the torture of extra long flights. You’d have to find an airliner with a power plug or someone will have to invent a new battery attachment to be able to extend runtime with the MacBook Air.)

That’s not to say I feel you wouldn’t find the MacBook Air worth it. It all depends on your needs. If I were ever to graduate to being a full-time fiction writer doing book tours around the country, a machine like the MacBook Air would be perfect. I’d write the battery change-out off my taxes as a business-expense, as needed, and press on. Lots of people will feel that way. It’d be a prefect little machine for a doctor to haul around in a hospital or a pilot to use to stay in touch with his loved ones or check the weather. It might be perfect for a college student if it weren’t for the costs of the battery swap and the associated downtime, whatever that might be. Buying one now though for an entering college freshman guarantees that the machine will be in the shop at least once for a battery swap, if not twice or three times, before the student is done. Meanwhile, their MacBook or MacBook Pro-toting friends will have swapped out batteries while experiencing no downtime.

The other thing Apple didn’t address was how one performs a reload of all the operating software. Let’s assume you need to wipe the machine’s hard drive, so you do that, and you didn’t buy the optional external DVD drive for $99. With absolutely no software on the MBA’s hard drive, how will it know to access another PC’s or Mac’s optical drive? I sincerely doubt the task will be handled in the machine’s firmware or EFI. I’d be nervous about owning the machine without the external DVD drive, which means you’d have to carry that with you, along with a USB Ethernet connector and a USB modem to cover all your bases. The whole mess would probably still weigh less than my MacBook Pro, but the difference might not be enough to justify the greater expense.

My wife and I both think the MacBook Air is really neat, but its lack of functionality and mainly its cost put it out of reach for us. We’ll see what happens in another year when my wife’s MacBook needs replacing or once we see one for real in a few weeks. After all, sexiness sometimes wins out, despite all your logical and best-laid plans.

Musings at the Beginning of MacWorld Expo Week

2008-01-13T20:08:00.000-06:00

Once again, the annual cycle in the life of a Mac user begins. For the last few weeks, Mac users and their publications have been swimming upstream, like salmon preparing to spawn, toward the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco where we know new Mac products will be announced. Speculation is ripe there will be a new sub-notebook, a flash-drive based model similar to yesterday’s 12 inch PowerBook. A few years ago, before I bought my MacBook Pro, I would have been in the market for just such a thing. But too much money has passed between Apple and me to make that likely, at least from what I can foresee right now.

I’m more interested in the possibility of an iMac-like docking station. Speculation had it that this device would be usable with a MacBook. Much to my chagrin, because I’d really love such a set-up, I suspect that’s true for one simple reason. The MacBook’s optical drive is on its side, the side that would be “open” to the user when the MacBook was in place inside its shell. The MacBook Pro’s optical drive is on its front, implying (from the device’s patent drawings) that the optical disk would have to eject downward toward the desk (not practical) or upward through its top (awkward). If Apple does release such a docking station and applies it to its consumer-based laptops only, then it’ll be another shot across the bow of its professional laptop user base. We’re already suffering from the
hard drive in the MacBook being user-upgradeable but the MacBook Pro’s is not.

On the other hand, if the iMac-docking station is introduced and works with the 12 inch portable only, both MacBook and MacBook pro users will grudgingly accept that. That’s not to say there wouldn’t be a lot of pressure on Apple to adapt the docking station for its other products. It’s just that everyone is used to Apple introducing a new concept you have to buy into, as expensive as that might be. Bad for us; good for them.

If I get surprised and they introduce a 20 or 24 inch docking station that works with the MacBook Pro, essentially converting my portable into a working iMac desktop, I probably will buy that product. It would be more elegant than the solution I’m using now, i.e., a MBP plugged into an external keyboard and mouse, even though it would be no more efficient or flexible. It’s a quality of life improvement I’m after. Less chords. More pleasing appearance and interface.

That’s not to say this week won’t already be expensive enough. Along with the keynote on Tuesday, Microsoft will be releasing the new Intel-native Office 2008. We will buy one copy of the Home and Student version primarily for my wife’s use, though I also intend to load one copy up for me to evaluate. (I’m awaiting a copy of Office 2008, the Special Media Version, which won’t arrive for another six to eight weeks. That was part of Microsoft’s Black Friday deals, one of which –the $100 rebate—they’re reneging on by claiming I didn’t include the front cover from user manual of the Office 2004 Student and Teacher version I bought and I damn well did!) That said, it actually looks like Best Buy may have the best price on the software, and we plan to buy it from there. This Sunday’s newspaper ad touted the Tuesday release; I’ll let you know whether the local store has any copies or not then.

I’m really not looking for Apple to introduce an iLife09 and hope they don’t; I haven’t really pushed out the investment I made in iLife 08!

Will Apple respond to user criticism of the glossy-only iMacs by releasing a matte screen version? There’s been no mention of this in any of the rumor mills, but it is something I’d like to see.

I think it’s likely, though, that Apple may indeed announce the release of 3G capable iPhones. As compelling as that extra speed might be, I don’t see a large horde of present day iPhone users selling off their phones to get the newer models. We certainly won’t. But that might become an option when our current AT&T contracts expire, though a year and a half or so from now that may be. If our current iPhones were still working well, I could see us offering the old phones to younger family members who might otherwise not be able to afford them and paying the extra money to upgrade phones and service.

Apple will undoubtedly hand down some surprises Tuesday; they always do. To be honest, though, I’ll be content if this is an “off” year when Apple doesn’t do something that really rocks the computer world or releases something my wife or I “just gotta’ have!”. Otherwise, I’ll be just like Wimpy in the Popeye cartoons but with a slightly twisted quip:

“I’ll gladly pay you back on Tuesday for a new Apple today…”

On the Road with only an iPhone

2008-01-07T17:27:00.000-06:00

For our Christmas trip this year, my wife, my dog, and I hit the road for a long trip to Missouri followed by an excursion to the wild, red-rock country of southern Utah. I had purposely left the computers at home to avoid any possibility of theft, damage, or other form of mishap. After all, we were going to be either on the road or camping in cold, snowy, backcountry. What good would computers do there? And who would want them?

Both my wife and I took our iPhones, and they proved to have more utility than I first thought they would. I mean, a cell phone is a cell phone, right? (I’m just kidding!)

Our route up to northeastern Missouri was via Interstate 45 to Dallas and Interstate 35 through Oklahoma City, Wichita, Kansas City, and north until we picked Missouri Six. During most of the trip, we had good (AT&T) phone and Edge (data) coverage which we used not only to keep Connie’s parents posted of our progress but to check road conditions and weather ahead. Once we were heading east on Missouri Six, AT&T coverage became spotty, especially as we raced up and down the country’s hills. In Green City, Connie’s old home, we pretty well lost all coverage but maintained our online abilities by hooking into the Ayers’ wireless network. It was nice being able to check e-mail every now and then and let folks know we were not back in Houston where they thought we were.

The first major demonstration of the iPhone’s utility came as we readied to leave. Our original plan had been to drive to Denver in one day, stay there overnight, and then finish the drive to Moab, Utah the next day. As our time to leave approached, however, it became evident that a bad snowstorm was moving in from the west. Fetching down reports from the National Weather Service while online on my iPhone convinced me the odds of being stranded in one of the little Kansas towns that dot I-70 were good. TO avoid that, we would drive to Wichita on the first day, arriving before the winter storm hit there, ride it out overnight in a La Quinta, dog-friendly hotel, and then make a decision whether to jog back north to I-70 and continue as previously planned; jog south to I-40 and press west to Albuquerque; or even continue south and return to the warm swamps of Houston. Sitting in the warm confines of the Ayers’ kitchen, I surfed over to the La Quinta website using Safari, placed a reservation at the hotel in Wichita, and used Google Maps to locate where it was.

Once in Wichita and established in the hotel, I used the iPhone and Google Maps to find out what restaurants were nearby. We drove to an Outback Steakhouse to discover the wait was more than we wanted to endure, so we relocated to a iHop, where I got happy with a steak and eggs.

The next morning, we used the iPhones to check road conditions and establish a reservation at the La Quinta in Golden, Colorado. And that night, we used Google Maps again to locate restaurants close by. We ate at a local Italian restaurant named Abrusti’s instead of the roadway visible “Mickey D’s”.

We didn’t need iPhones much for the snowy, windy, icy drive through the Rockies. It was all we could do to keep the truck’s nose straight on the snowy, icy roads! We stopped in Vail to visit the Swiss-chateau-like McDonald’s and in Grand Junction at the Red Lobster for lunch. But, then, when we decided to stay in the Moab La Quinta that night instead of heading into Devil’s Garden’s campground in Arches National Park, I used the iPhone to place an online reservation while we were driving in the truck!

Now, THAT is utility!

That’s not to say there weren’t a few hang-ups. La Quinta supports both “normal” and mobile websites, and I was constantly getting shuffled off automatically to the mobile website, even when I didn’t want to. (The iPhone handles mobile websites just fine, but it really was built to handle regular web sites with their greater flexibility and options.) Secondly, Google Maps can be a bit fickle. For instance, a search for “Moab UT hotels” showed me every hotel in Moab Utah except the La Quinta, making me think at first there wasn’t one there. The search terms “La Quinta Utah” automatically took me to the one in Moab. AT&T coverage in the north side of Albuquerque was almost non-existent, something I wasn’t expecting out of New Mexico’s largest city.

Still, the iPhone demonstrated its greater portability and almost equal utility to traveling with a computer on this trip. If there’s one old saying that true, “Don’t leave home without it!” applies to the iPhone as well. The only thing that would make the whole thing sweeter would be the inclusion of a GPS that linked with Google Maps and could show you instantly and continuously where you were!

Sense Errors

2007-12-17T19:59:00.001-06:00

You would think if I was writing about “sense errors”, I’d be talking about seeing funny, not hearing well, or feeling like I was toppling off a mountain all the time. What I’m writing about, though, is the class of errors that started popping up when I tried writing some CD’s. I first noticed some problems a few weeks ago when a multi-session CD I’d burned using Toast on my MacBook Pro was not recognized by Toast running on my Mac Pro. I’d noticed that problem off and on since I’d transitioned to Leopard but wasn’t sure what the real root cause was.

I use multi-session CD’s to store software updates in case I need them again in the future. I was checking one to see what patches and updates I had stored on it using my Mac Pro. The CD slipped into the drive (a Pioneer DVR-112) and then spun and spun, never appearing on the desktop. I popped it out and then slipped into the SuperDrive on my MacBook Pro, and it read the CD without a problem. I then transported the CD back to the Mac Pro, inserting it in the machine’s second optical drive (a Pioneer DVR-111), only to find it wouldn’t read the disk, either. That made me think I had some kind of problem with that media, which were Maxell CD-R’s. To verify that, I put a Verbatim printable CD-R in the MacBook Pro, burned the same files to it as I had on the other CD, and then popped it into the Mac Pro. It read the disk. That confirmed it was only a media problem, I thought, right up to the point where I tried to burn a disk (using Toast 8) and the DVR-112. Toast quit before writing, giving me a “0x00008” error code. I began to suspect the drive itself was having a problem.

To verify both drive and operating system operation, I inserted both a Maxell CD-R and a Verbatim CD-R into the DVR-112, let it spin up and mount each CD on Leopard’s desktop, and dragged several folders to each one. When I tried to write using Leopard alone, the drive wrote a little and then issued a “media sense error”; and this happened with both types of media used. When I repeated the steps using the DVR-111, it burned the Verbatim media without a hitch but then couldn’t verify the disk and spit it out. The drive choked altogether on the Maxell CD. Was there nothing that worked?

I decided to reinstall the OS 10.5.1 update to see if it might help straighten out things, so I surfed over the Apple site and downloaded it. Once I had installed it, I tried burning a mini-size TDK CD using both drives. The 112 choked again, but the 111 worked just fine. That convinced me the 112 was having some kind of problem under Leopard, even though it had performed a test burn under Windows XP without a problem. Powering down the Mac Pro, I replaced the 112 with the 111 and put a Pioneer DVR-107 in the 111’s old slot. Using some TDK CD-R’s I bought to try, I performed test burns in multi-session mode and all drives and they all worked fine.

I’m using the TDK CD-R’s now for storage. The Maxell’s have been relegated for use only on my MacBook Pro and when I’m going to “close” the disk. (Every machine can see them, then.) It’s a shame I can’t tell you I haven’t seen this problem before, but I have and on both Mac and Windows’ platforms. You would think at this stage of the technology that all burners and media would be compatible, but that’s just not the case. Additionally, I suspect that the firmware in the Pioneer DVR-112 (V 1.29) has some problem with Leopard it doesn’t have with XP. Hopefully, I won’t have any more problems like this for a while. God save me when it’s time to cut a DVD…!

The Incredible Shrinking iTunes Store

2007-12-12T19:50:00.000-06:00

If you’ve been to the online iTunes Store lately, you can see the result of the spat between Apple and NBC over movie and TV show pricing. A significant amount of what iTunes had to offer came from NBC, though there’s still plenty of TV shows that remain for consumers to pick from. Unfortunately for me, NBC bought out the SciFi Network (a move that sent a well-warranted shudder through me when it happened) so that my favorite shows, like Battlestar Galactica and Eureka, are no longer there. That’s a loss for all three of us since there are few other shows I’ve been willing to spend money on.

Even worse, Apple has given in to several of the major movie studios and will be raising iTunes movie prices from $9.99 to about $15.99. At $10, I’ve been willing to buy a few movies from the iTunes Store whose DVD’s I did not already own. Most of the time, these are movies I love but I know my wife won’t be much interested in seeing. Additionally, there was also enough of a monetary savings where I was willing to bypass the other things that actually owning a DVD brings with it (like better resolution and special features). But with the prices at the iTunes Store rising as much as 30%, that no longer holds true. For instance, I can buy the Battlestar Galactica’s RAZOR for $16.99. Why would I not want to do that when it’s available at that price? And if part of the movie studios’ overall plan is to jack up DVD prices, think again. Buying a DVD movie is not something I ever have to do.

In my house, I have a Samsung DVD-R/RW attached to my TV cable box, a Mac Pro sitting in my home office and just waiting for something to do, a copy of Handbrake as well as Mac the Ripper and Cinematize, video editors in the form of iMovie and Final Cut Pro 5, as well as iTunes and iDVD. I’m going to leave what you think I can do with that set-up to your imagination. I will say I have the means to bypass the whole unpleasant situation and my iTunes library and my iPod won’t suffer one bit. I’d rather continue to buy the final season episodes of Battlestar from the iTunes Store at $1.99 each; but there’s no way I’d pay five bucks for one when I have the means to capture it for a lot less, and anyone who thinks I’m going to sit at my computer and watch these episodes online is crazy.

I keep hoping that some sanity will rule, but it won’t. There’s big egos involved. Unfortunately, in the end, everyone will be the loser; but I‘m going to make sure I lose least of all.

Wrong About Fusion--It's a Winner!

2007-12-10T19:28:00.000-06:00

In a blog posted a few weeks ago, I stated that I thought Parallels had more features than VMware’s Fusion. Well, I spent a lot of time over the last few days working with VMware’s Fusion; and I have to say I was wrong. I like Fusion a lot better for several reasons.

First, though they are evenly priced in the stores, VMware is still offering $20 off if you buy from them online and from some online retailers. Where Nova seems to be pushing its customers to upgrade to Parallels 3.0 to get Leopard support, VMWare provided Leopard support via an upgrade issued at no cost to the user. The best Nova has done was offer a version two to three upgrade at $50, though there was a window for you to get the upgrade free if you bought Parallels after May 7, 2007. That window is gone. Parallels 3.0, which you must pay full price for, is the only game in town.

Secondly, Fusion seems to be faster than Parallels at accomplishing most tasks. I haven’t performed any official timing to be sure; that’s a strictly subjective judgment. But when booting the Guest OS hosted on an internal volume vice Boot Camp, Fusion seems to boot the OS terribly fast. Like Parallels, Fusion installs a set of “tools” when the OS runs that enhance things like cursor display and graphics performance; but unlike Parallels, Fusion did it automatically when I installed XP under it.

Thirdly and lastly, I was really wrong about Parallels having more features than Fusion. One of the things I wrote about was how much I liked Parallel’s Coherence mode, and I didn’t think Fusion had anything like it. It does! It’s called “Unity” and not only does it make it appear that Windows applications are running on the OS X desktop, but the Windows Start Menu is accessible from VMware’s Menu Bar on the OS X desktop. You don’t have to mess with the Windows’ Start Menu at all!

Unlike Parallels, Fusion also has a setting that enables 3D acceleration. After selecting it, I tried running Windows’ Pinball game. Most of the time, the game ran well with excellent graphics, but occasionally the Windows’ video driver would get reset to 8 bit color, something that would have to be corrected the next time the Windows desktop appeared. I didn’t try anything more rigorous, like one of my flight simulators; but I might do so sometime in the near future!

Overall, Fusion responded very quickly. I could tell the difference between allocating Fusion and its OS 512MB of RAM and 1 GB, the latter being where my set-up is today, and it whizzed along under the latter.

Earlier, I had decided to stay only with Boot Camp to avoid triggering off XP’s activation scheme. That was before I tried Fusion. Now, I’ve reloaded XP and all its applications under Fusion and have deleted my Boot Camp partition. I don’t have any more problems trying to set the right resolution on my MacBook Pro running Boot Camp when hooked to an Apple Cinema Display, and I simplified my overall system set-up. I can access all my Windows applications from my Leopard desktop. Boot Camp is great when you want Windows’ full performance and can stand having the machine dedicated to only Windows for a time; but if you want good Windows’ performance, great features, and easy set-up, try VMware’s Fusion. You can download a trial version that’s good for 30 days at VMware’s website.

Playing with Leopard and Virtual Machines

2007-11-25T10:03:00.000-06:00

Even though I have my MacBook Pro set up to run Windows using Boot Camp, I decided a few weeks ago to install some kind of virtualization software on it to allow me to run Windows (and Office 2007, specifically) without having to boot out of OS X. That would also allow me to access the other application I use most often, i.e., AOPA’s Real-Time Flight Planner directly from Leopard’s desktop.
The two major virtualization packages are VM Ware’s Fusion and Parallels Desktop 3.0. I decided to take a quick look at both of them using trial versions that can be freely downloaded from each manufacturer’s website. You can reach those sites by simply asking Google to find either Fusion and Parallels.

I started by downloading VM Ware’s Fusion. Its installation was straightforward. On the first launch of the application, a wizard detected my Boot Camp installation and automatically configured Fusion to run from it. The Windows desktop appeared inside a large, silver window that was slightly smaller than the entire desktop and required using scroll bars to reach parts of it. One of the buttons on Fusion’s toolbar was “Full Screen”, and clicking on it replaced the Leopard desktop with the Windows desktop surrounded by black borders. (To get the XP desktop to fill my screen, I would have had to change the screen resolution within Windows itself.) Redraws of my mouse cursor as it moved across the Windows desktop sometimes showed abnormal artifacts due to an apparent slow refresh rate. An advisory message told me I needed to install VM Ware Tools to improve graphics and mouse response, so I clicked on the menu items to do so but didn’t see any kind of noticeable response. Windows then said I needed to activate it, but it crashed before I could. All in all, though it hadn’t been too bad, Fusion just hadn’t provided the kind of system response I was hoping for. It could be that my version had not been tweaked for running under Leopard. And my overall impression was that Fusion simply didn’t seem to have the feature package Parallels did.

After uninstalling Fusion, I surfed over to the Parallels site and downloaded the latest trial version of Parallels Desktop 3.0. The Parallels trial period is a bit stingy; it only lasts for 15 days while Fusion’s lasts 30. The Parallels installation also went smoothly; and just like Fusion, Parallels detected the Boot Camp partition and then set itself up to work with it. The initial part of the Parallels launch went smoothly, but when I commanded XP to start, I got an error message stating it “could not allocate enough memory to the monitor PE!” I found a discussion of that problem at a Parallel’s forum. There didn’t seem to be a cure, but knocking down the amount of virtual memory assigned to the virtual machine might help. I tried that but got no improvement until after a second reboot when Parallels launched XP normally. Once I got to the XP desktop, I flipped the system from windowed mode to full screen mode to Coherence mode; and it responded beautifully. Coherence mode is my favorite; the XP Start menu and bar resides at the bottom of the screen and the Leopard Dock rides up the right, and Windows applications appear on the Desktop as if they were native OS X applications. I did some writing (of this article, actually) using Word 2007 in Coherence mode. It worked great.

However, Finder’s menu bar was showing me a battery icon that was nearing empty. To shut down XP before my battery died, I commanded XP to shut down, but it hung. I tried bringing up Task Manager to see what was going on but had no luck. I tried commanding XP to shut down again but saw no response. Ultimately, I wound up doing what I didn’t want to do, i.e., commanding Parallels to Force Quit.

At that point, I wasn’t sure if the Boot Camp partition had been damaged, so I rebooted into Windows using Boot Camp. The first black screen appeared followed quickly by the dreaded message I’ve seen too often when Windows wouldn’t boot; it could not find the file “hal.dll”. I rebooted back into OS X hoping Parallels might fix the situation. If not, I’d have to reinstall XP; and if I did that, Parallels was coming off my system.

The first time I tried to restart Parallels, I got the “memory allocation monitor” message again. I reset the virtual machine memory allocation down to 512K from 1024, quit Parallels, then relaunched it and tried again. This time, Parallels launched XP and it appeared to be normal. Once in the XP desktop, I commanded it to shut down, and it did but not until I manually quit several routines it reported weren’t responding. I rebooted back into XP using Boot Camp, and this time it all worked as it was supposed to. Then, I went back into OS X and uninstalled Parallels. I decided, just like I had some time ago, that the risk of having Parallels corrupt my boot partition was a risk I simply wasn’t willing to take.

My wife uses Parallels all the time and exclusively. She has no problems with it; so, despite my own decision not to use it, it wouldn’t take a lot for me to change my mind about it. VM Ware’s Fusion is a worthy competitor for Parallels, though the latter seems more feature-rich. I believe Fusion will need another upgrade to crank out its best performance under Leopard while Parallels could use the same to make it more stable.

I found out recently I qualified for a free upgrade from Parallels 2.0 to 3.0 (by buying P2 after May 7, 2007). I’m still waiting for Nova Development to send that my way; and when I get it, I’ll decide whether I’m going to give that to my wife (probably) or use myself. If the latter, I’ll blog about it again; but, for now, it looks like Boot Camp is good enough for me.

Leopard, Part 3 - Bugs and Bitches

2007-11-07T01:59:00.001-06:00

As much as I like Leopard…and make no mistake about it, I do like Leopard…there are, as you might expect with any new operating system, bugs that aren’t working right and things that Apple changed that just don’t sit well. In this part, I’ll cover the bugs I’ve seen and the bitches I have so you'll be informed of what you might encounter if you decide Leopard’s right for you.

Let’s talk about the “bugs” first.

The most noticeable problem is occurring only on my Mac Pro. The specific steps that cause the problem are: (1) start a movie or video in iTunes player window in the bottom left corner of the application, (2) double-click on the window to turn it into an individual window playing the movie, (3) allow the movie to play for a few seconds, (4) then pause the movie and close the window so that the movie jumps back into the iTunes player window. Now, (5) click on the window’s tiny “down arrow” to close it altogether. The window will begin to close but then hangs with about 20% to go. The spinning beach ball appears, and the application now hangs. Interestingly, I found I could clear the hang by swiping my mouse cursor up the Dock to make some of the Dock application icons magnify and jump back. For a “permanent” workaround, I've gone into iTunes’ preferences and changed them to always play video in a new window. I’ve had no problems with playing video in this mode. I’ve tried reinstalling the latest version of iTunes to see if that would fix the problem, but it had no impact. (The latest version, iTunes 7.5, also did not fix the problem.)

The second bug is one that is being widely discussed within the Mac community and has appeared on every one of my machines. When trying to “Repair Permissions” using Leopard’s Disk Utility, the utility goes into a “barber pole” mode that seems to spin almost forever before any permissions are checked; and once they are checked, the following warning message appears: “Warning: SUID file System/Library/CoreServices /RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent" has been modified and will not be repaired.” It also shows lots of "ACL missing" messages (Access Control Lists). While this problem has not interfered with operation in any sense, it has occurred on every Mac that has been upgraded to Leopard. Speculation is this will be fixed by Apple soon, though Apple has not made any official statement about the problem.

The third problem is also one that has occurred on every Mac upgraded to Leopard. Essentially, I believe the keychain structure within Leopard has changed, and the operating system the user keychain isn’t found and/or integrated. (The keychain on a Mac is the application that stores all user passwords in an encrypted form.) This manifests itself with an error message that says the user keychain can’t be found and it gives you two buttons, i.e., Cancel or Reset to Default. Fearing that “reset to default” would cause me to lose any hope of keeping my previous keychain together, I clicked on “Cancel”. Apple shortly thereafter published a software update to deal with the error, which I have downloaded and installed. So far, I have not had to re-input passwords to anything; but I also cannot access the keychain and find the old user keychain I used to be able to see.

Obviously, I don’t fully understand the technical details behind either of these, and I’ll write more about them as I come to understand them.

A really great new feature in Leopard is Boot Camps’ ability to now allow you to designate a hard disk other than the boot disk as the Windows hard disk. As a result I decided to modify the current hard disk configuration of my Mac Pro and designate my Bay#3 hard disk as “Windows-only”. The Assistant that accompanies the Boot Camp application states it will rename the Boot Camp hard disk “Windows” during the Windows loading process, but it failed to do this when I used Boot Camp to reinstall Windows. Instead, it left it named “Untitled”. I worked around the problem by booting into Windows and using tools within XP to rename the hard disk “Windows XP”.

I’ve only had a few applications that Leopard rendered problematic or useless. Juniper Networks VPN client crashes on launch. (To be honest, that was not unexpected. I had seen the same problem when Tiger came out, so I figured the company would be behind the power curve here.) Roxio states that Toast 8 is not fully compatible, though I have used it to add files to a CD being used to store updates. Adobe states that CS2 products may not be compatible, but so far we’ve had no problems with Photoshop CS2 on my wife’s iMac. Parallels 2.X seems to work problematically. It worked until I booted into Windows using Boot Camp but then declared it couldn’t find drivers it needed and to try restarting Parallels in a few minutes, something that never worked. (Parallels has a recent update to Parallels 3.0 that is Leopard compatible.)

That’s all for the bugs we’re experiencing. Let’s move onto bitches, i.e, those things I hate that are characteristics of the new operating system.

The Semi-transparent Menu Bar – Someone please tell me what a semi-transparent menu bar was meant to accomplish. It doesn’t look slick; it looks cheap. And Apple gave me no way to turn it off. Please, Apple, give me the choice of turning the thing of and making it take on the silver bar look that matches up with the other Leopard windows.

The White Dot on the Dock; Bring Back the Arrows! — In earlier versions of OS X, a black arrow points to an application on the Dock that is open or opening. In Leopard, the arrow has been replaced by a white dot that’s barely noticeable when the Dock is on the right or left side of the screen (when the Dock is 2D and dark) and invisible when the Dock is on the bottom (when the Dock is 3D and reflective). Bring back the arrows!

Arbitrary Change of the System Preferences icon – There are several changes that Apple appeared to make for the sake of change, and this appears to be one of them. The System Preferences icon has been for some time the white box with an Apple in the center of it. Now, it’s a silver gearbox. The icon makes sense, but I have to stop and think about what System Preferences looks like now.

Applications Folder/User Folder Confusion on Dock – In general, Leopard uses embossed folders to designate special folders such as Applications, Music, Downloads, etc. As Leopard boots, the embossed Application folder is what first appears on the Dock but is superseded by the Address Book which is stacked on top of other application icons that are barely visible. An embossed Applications folder stacked on top of the others in the user profile supercedes the User folder, which used to be represented by an easily understood House. This stacking and replacement creates a lot of confusion as well as the impression that Apple realized late in the development cycle it was creating a problem for the user. Put the House back and leave the Application folder embossed instead of making me look at an Address Book icon and making me tell myself it’s NOT the Address Book application.

Inconsistent Startup Disk icon usage – Earlier versions of Boot Camp placed a Startup Disk icon in both Mac OS X’s System Preferences and in Windows’ Control Panel. Leopard uses a “Startup Disk” icon in System Preferences but then uses a “Boot Camp” icon in Windows’ Control Panel. It’s inconsistent and confusing. I’d like to see “Startup Disk” in both places.

The Windows hard disk automounts on the Desktop – I like an uncluttered Desktop and allow only external hard or removable disks, optical disks, or connected servers to mount on it. Leopard mounts your Windows hard disk on the Desktop whether you want it there or not and gives one no obvious control to turn it off. Give me some control over that, Apple! It’s a pain in the butt to have to “Eject” it after every boot!

And with that, I’m going to stop here. If I did any more, you might get the impression I don’t like Leopard and I really do, and that’s even before I’ve had a chance to play with its really nifty features like Time Machine or iChat’s still photo or video backgrounds.