Mac

I heard that Steve Jobs had died on the morning of October 6th. My mum, also suffering from cancer, died the same morning. They were the same age. The outpouring of grief over Steve’s death washed over the internet with tidal force, but I was dealing with a far more personal loss. As a result, I am much less emotional about his death than I might have been. I appreciate the loss his family have suffered with the clarity that only shared experience can provide, but the only thing I feel is a selfish fear that Apple has lost it’s rudder.

There are two reasons why I use Apple products. The first is because they, more than any other company in this industry, are sweating the details. A hundred little things that would seem superfluous, insignificant or “good enough” are lovingly implemented, refined and polished until they shine. Apple places high value in craftsmanship. As someone that earns their living with these products I really appreciate that effort.

The second is difficult to describe but is perhaps just another facet of that craftsmanship. Apple’s products are infused with a design sensibility and aesthetic that is hard to articulate. It’s in the feel of a Mac keyboard or in the heft of an iPhone. It’s the way everything, hardware and software, works in concert for a better user experience. That stuff is really hard to get right. It requires vision, focus and taste. As anyone that works in design will tell you, the vision of a design very rarely gets better when subjected to a committee. Focus requires discipline, ruthlessness and judgement to know what is indispensable and what is inconsequential. Taste cannot be taught, you either have it or you don’t. All this and so much more flowed from Steve.

Therein lies the rub. I don’t believe these traits can be institutionalized. It takes a dictator, not a parliament, to create these products.

There are many incredibly talented people at Apple. Tim Cook is a man that epitomizes the role a CEO should play. Apple under Steve always built products that people loved using, but Cook made them cheaper and at a scale that allowed Apple to flourish. One need look no further than the latest offerings from Dell, Samsung, ASUS and HP for proof that Jony Ive’s designs are the best in the world, worthy of being copied shamelessly. I don’t know what Phil Schiller does, but Gruber assures me he is indispensable. These employees and hundreds of others are undoubtedly the ones responsible for 99% of the work that goes into the shiny new objects that Apple builds. All of them have been given stewardship of Apple. But I fear Apple doesn’t need stewards. Apple needs a king.

We will not be able to gauge the impact right away. By all accounts (including Isaacson’s biography of Steve) there are at least 5 years’ worth of amazing products already in development. Obviously Steve will have had a declining influence on the final output, but they were still conceived while he was around. What happens after that is anyone’s guess.

If anyone ever had the capacity, the personality and the sheer unmitigated gall to build a company in their own image, that person was Steve. Alas, only time will tell if he succeeded.

Everywhere I looked people were recommending the use of either Handbrake, VisualHub or iSquint to make videos iTunes compatible. They all work but require fiddling with settings, iTunes hackery and obviously aren’t from Apple. One would be forgiven for thinking that Apple didn’t approve of this sort of importing given that these tools existed for this very purpose. Little did I know QuickTime has been exporting to iTunes forever, making it possible to convert downloaded movies into iTunes compatible formats so you can load them onto your favorite Apple device. However, this export option has always required the Pro license of QuickTime. At least that was the case until Snow Leopard and QuickTime X.

In Snow Leopard the plain old QuickTime Player has a Share menu which lets you export any video that QuickTime can read into iTunes formats for iPod/iPhone, Apple TV and “Computer”. The shared videos are added to your media library and can then be synced with whatever device you choose.

Three easy steps:

1. Open the video you downloaded in QuickTime X
2. Click on the Share menu and select iTunes…
   
3. Choose the output format of your choice, keep in mind QuickTime will not scale your movie up, so your choices are limited based on the current resolution of the movie. You’ll find that only True HD movies (1080p+) can be exported to Computer format. Don’t worry about it, just choose the best option it gives you.
   

That’s it! Nice and easy.

For those interested in the actual output resolutions, the answer is it depends on the source resolution. By and large the iPhone/iPod size will try to constrain the width to 640 pixels. Apple TV will attempt to get close to 720p and Computer will attempt to get close to 1080p.

It started with a failed time machine backup. I had just bought an Airport Extreme and decided to plug my time machine drive into the USB port on the Airport. About 20% into the backup, time machine failed with Error -8062/Error -36. It failed on multiple files and I had to exclude them from the backup before it would move forward. Wondering what the hell was going on I tried to copy one of these files. Finder couldn’t copy it either giving a rather generic Input/Output error.

At this point I started thinking something was seriously wrong. The first thing I did was verify and repair permissions using Disk Utility. It found errors, and said it fixed them, but when I verified again the errors were still there. Not very helpful. Next I tried the much vaunted DiskWarrior. At $100 it isn’t exactly cheap but it came highly recommended. In order for DiskWarrior to scan your disk it shouldn’t be the boot drive. A bit of a problem since my MacBook Pro’s main drive was the one that failed. Using my other “Mac” (wink wink, nudge nudge) I used the nifty Target Disk mode of the MacBook Pro to mount the drive. DiskWarrior found something and said it was fixed, but I wasn’t convinced.

My paranoia was now in top gear and refused to let me rest after DiskWarrior’s all clear. I decided to buy Drive Genius 2  which offers a low level surface scan (also $100 but offers a competitive upgrade from DiskWarrior for $75). When you buy Drive Genius they give you a link to a bootable DVD image (unlike DiskWarrior that mails you the DVD, seriously Alsoft, get with the times). This DVD allows you to side-step that pesky boot disk problem. Unfortunately my MBP’s SuperDrive was on the blink. Enter my trusty 3rd generation 40 gig iPod. Using Disk Utility I restored the downloaded Drive Genius image onto the iPod and booted up my MBP using it.

Drive Genius started doing its thing and almost immediately discovered bad sectors on my hard drive. It was slow going so I decided to leave it on all night just to see how many errors found. In the morning it was still at only 9% scanned with over 100 bad sectors. Clearly this disk was breathing its last breath.

So, I have a hosed time machine disk because in moving from plugged in to my mac to plugged in to my airport, the old images were wiped off the disk in order to support backup over the air. I have a primary disk that is failing big time and probably not capable of giving me a solid backup.

Luckily for me, this is not quite as bad as it sounds. While time machine is nice and does a decent job most of the time, I don’t trust it too far. I use SuperDuper for real backups and I have had that going fine for a very long time. Push comes to shove, all my data is also backed up on Mozy in case a fire or something happens and everything in the vicinity of my computer dies.

Yesterday my Mac came back from having its drives replaced. I booted it in Target Disk mode and plugged it in to the other Mac. Opened Disk Utility, mounted my SuperDuper incremental backup and hit restore. 3 hours later everything starts up perfectly and I am back where I began. No fuss, no drama.

I love it when things work the way they are supposed to.

As mentioned in a previous post I dropped my iPhone a while ago and the whack caused a massive crack on the inner screen (the external glass is fine). That crack lead to the liquid crystal display (LCD) leaking liquid, causing weird grey pixel lines to come snaking up the screen. They were originally in neat little one line increments and now they’re just doing their own thing.

So I traveled to the US. I tried to get my Indian iPhone screen fixed for the princely sum of $200 at an Apple Store. End result: No dice.

The Apple Stores abroad are not allowed to replace phones that are not bought in the same country. So much for a world-wide warranty. If you break your phone while traveling you’re essentially screwed. On a side note the grey pixels appear to have stopped marching up my screen. In fact some of them seem to have gone into remission and have started working again. I don’t know how long they’ll stay this way but I hope it’ll last long enough for Apple to release their new iPhone.

I dropped my iPhone about 3 weeks ago. It has a nasty crack running from the lower right all the way up to the top left in a rather elegant arc. All the functions still work, it just looks like it got hit by a bullet or something. 

This isn’t a hacked or jailbroken grey-market phone either, just a bog-standard iPhone 3G from Vodafone. So I call them up and ask them if they can replace the screen. They tell me nobody has asked them about that yet and that they’ll get back to me. Of course, they don’t get back to me. I have to ask again and then I finally get an answer the following morning. It’ll cost me Rs. 28,000 ($600) Rs. 33,500 ($690), see the update below. The brand new phone would cost me Rs. 34,500 ($705).  To his credit, the Vodafone rep was apologetic. He said he was as shocked as I was that it cost so much. Apparently they don’t fix the screen, they just give you a new phone. I guess the Rs. 8000 off is some sort of butterfingers discount There is no discount, unless you call Rs. 1000 off and they keep the old phone a discount.

Anyway, so I go, “Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll live with my busted ass phone.”

That worked for about 2 weeks. But now, there’s this grey line of pixels snaking its way up my screen from the bottom. It’s actually growing one line of pixels at a time, starting from the right where the hit occurred and working its way to the left. Once the line of pixels fills up with grey it goes up to the next line. It’s on the fourth line now and it started about 8 hours ago. I wonder if the whole damned screen is going to be grey when I wake up tomorrow morning.

Update:

It’ll cost just Rs. 1000 less than a brand new phone and they take away the old phone to give me a “replacement”. I had to drive all the way to the main Vodafone store to find out this nugget of information and they didn’t even have a 16gig phone in stock essentially making my trip a complete waste. What a bunch of incompetent twits. I think I’m going to try and get it fixed in New York next month. I’ll call the Brooklyn store tonight and see if that’s possible.

This happened about 2 weeks ago. I was on a Skype conference call with Rackspace and Mosso trying to get a really ridiculous level of redundancy setup for a client. That is not the point of the story.

The point is Rackspace put us on hold. When Rackspace puts you on hold you hear music piped from a local radio station in Texas. They were playing a song that sounded good to me, so I switched Skype’s output to speaker and used Shazam on my iPhone to figure out what song it was. Shazam, for the uninitiated, records the audio it hears on the iPhone’s microphone and uploads it to a server that figures out what song it is. Shazam has not failed me yet. The result showed up in about a second and I searched for the song on Amazon MP3, bought and downloaded it. All this happened before the support guy took us off hold.

If you had told me this was possible when I was 15 I would have thought you were on drugs.

The song was Leon Russell’s – Roll Away the Stone.

It’s been a year and change since I switched to a Mac. Over that period I’ve collected an assortment of software that I use all the time and find indispensable now. I wanted to have a list just in case I needed to get a new Mac up to speed.

It later dawned on me that other people might find the list useful as well. I think all these apps are fantastic, many of them made even more fantastic by the fact that they are from small indy developers. Be warned, some of this stuff needs to be purchased for it to work right. Good software costs good money. Anyway, on to the list: 

1. iWork ’08 - Microsoft Office can suck it
2. CS4 Design Premium – Tools of the trade
3. Coda - The best damned web site development tool out there
4. VMWare Fusion – Current virtualization tool of choice
5. MacFUSE – Read/Write NTFS (among other things)
6. MozyHome – Cloud backup
7. SuperDuper! – Disaster recovery image creator extraordinaire
8. Logbook – Backpack journal logging client
9. Twitterific – Twitter client of choice + iPhone client
10. CoverSutra – Rate songs in iTunes using keyboard shortcuts, also, looks fantastic
11. MediaLink – Shares my Mac’s media library with the Playstation upstairs
12. Adium – MSN and more
13. Skype – VOIP done right
14. LoudHush – Asterisk IAX client for Mac
15. PodWorks – Copy songs off iPods/iPhones straight into iTunes
16. VLC – Because QuickTime isn’t good enough
17. Perian – Also because QuickTime isn’t good enough
18. Things – Task management + iPhone sync
19. NetNewsWire – RSS reader of choice
20. Firefox (with Firebug and View source chart)
21. PoxNora – Addictive little bugger
22. LaunchBar – Current launcher of choice, Quicksilver/Butler close second
23. OmniGraffle – Flowcharts and diagrams
24. Xtorrent – BitTorrent client of choice
25. Amazon MP3 Downloader – Yes, I buy my music
26. Cha-Ching – Money management
27. Colloquy – When EFNet beckons
28. GoToMeeting – Easy cross-platform conference + VOIP + screen sharing
29. Handbrake (and the replacement icon because I hate pineapples) – Video encoding
30. Transmit – FTP client of choice
31. Proxifier – For circumventing draconian Omani internet restrictions
32. Remote Desktop Connection – Windows RDC for Mac
33. smcFanControl – Currently boosting MBP fans to 4000rpm, India is hot
34. ScreenFlow – Kickass Screencast creator
35. VoodooPad – Wiki notes
36. StuffIt – For those pesky old archives and RARs
37. Sequel Pro (used to be CocoaMySQL) – MySQL manager

Saw this on Business Week. I think the man raises some valid points. Apple products have long tempted me to switch from the hell that is the PC world but the pricepoint has always been a tad too high. I tend to “convert” to PC terms and find that I usually get a far better deal.

Of course I’m still waiting for the day that Apple finally decides to release their OS on the PC platform. How I shall enjoy removing Windows from my system. MUHAHAHA!