Category Archive for ‘apple’ at Agylen

Archive for the 'apple' Category

MacBook Pro is coming

Published by ugo on March 15, 2006 in apple and personal. 1 Comment

I should have done it before, really, but wasn’t able to find the right people to talk to in order to upgrade the location contract of my old PowerBook to a brand new MacBook Pro, until today.

So I finally ordered a 2GHz model, with 2GB of RAM and a 100GB, 7200rpm disk. This particular configuration won’t be delivered before 15-20 days, they said. I could have got one immediately, but with a 5400rpm disk. I suspect the faster disk is going to make quite a difference in I/O intensive applications like compiling lots of source files, which I do often, thus I opted for the faster one even if it means having to wait. I expect this machine to be screaming fast.

The best thing is that by doing a “technology upgrade” of my current contract, I will be paying a monthly fee that is just a bit more of what I’m currently paying for the PowerBook.

Starting the count-down now…

Technorati Tags: macbook.

…and we’re giving away an iPod too!

Published by ugo on March 2, 2006 in apple. 0 Comments

If you were still mulling over whether to send a submission for our logo contest, please remember that the deadline is 7 March 2006 23:59:59 (GMT).

As a sign of appreciation towards all those who sent their submissions — some of which are really very good — we’ve added a prize for the first runner-up: a 1GB iPod Nano. We feel good music helps to do good programming, so maybe it goes the same way for graphic design also!

First prize is still a much coveted MacBook Pro. Remember that it’s a fast, fast, fast machine!

Technorati Tags: open source, sourcesense, ipod, giveaway, contests.

Edgeio

Published by ugo on February 27, 2006 in apple, personal and web. 0 Comments

Today edgeio finally launched. I was thinking of putting my PowerBook up for sale, but I have it on lease and the contract hasn’t expired already. I think it will in March, then I’ll be able to redeem it and sell it. At the moment, I only see one listing for a PowerBook, at $800. Mine is actuallly much better, at 1.25GHz, running OS X 10.4, no missing keys and an almost-new battery. I wonder if I’ll be able to sell it for $1000, but somehow I doubt it.

Technorati Tags: edgeio

Will Apple Adopt Windows?

Published by ugo on February 19, 2006 in apple. 0 Comments

John C. Dvorak: “Apple has always said it was a hardware company, not a software company. Now with the cash cow iPod line, it can afford to drop expensive OS development and just make jazzy, high-margin Windows computers to finally get beyond that five-percent market share and compete directly with Dell, HP, and the stodgy Chinese makers.”

It might be true that Apple has always been a hardware company, but it’s mostly the software (i.e. OS X) that makes me buy Apple computers. If I had to run Windows on my machines, why not buy a Sony Vaio instead of a MacBook? Or I would probably run Linux instead.

How to create a video podcast

Published by ugo on February 8, 2006 in apple and fun. 0 Comments

A great tutorial on creating a video podcast … the French way. Might not be appropriate for a work environment, but then again who would want to work in a place where this is not appropriate?

(Via Melablog.)

Design fancy logo, win a MacBook Pro

Published by ugo on February 7, 2006 in apple and opensource. 8 Comments

Would you like a brand new, Intel-powered. MacBook Pro? All you have to do is design a logo for our new company. We will select the one we like most and award the winner a 1.67GHz MacBook Pro. Head on to the contest section of the website and be sure to read all the rules.

You might want to know who we are and what we do. You can read about us on the contest’s brief section, but the short version is that we are a bunch of Open Source enthusiasts who decided that founding a new company was the best way to further our passion and our interests. I’ll probably tell you more on this in the coming days.

Tunatic

Published by ugo on January 12, 2006 in apple. 1 Comment

Tunatic is a nifty little app that listens on your microphone and connects to a server to identify the song that it is listening to. While this might be useful for the times when you’re hearing a song on the radio or the TV and can’t make out what the song name or artist is, it can also become mildly addictive, as you throw at it more and more songs to see which ones it recognizes and which ones it doesn’t.

I have to admit it’s pretty good at guessing most songs, which makes it even more addictive, even though it failed to recognize a classic like Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung”.

I wonder what the business model is. It’s true that when a song is recognized, you can click on the little arrow at the right to open a page with some affiliate links, but I’m not sure this will be enough to cover bandwidth costs if it ever becomes successful.

In any case, kudos to Sylvain Demongeot. Tunatic is a cool idea that has been brilliantly executed.

Via Torsten.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane… It’s a MacBook!

Published by ugo on January 11, 2006 in apple. 3 Comments

Anyone wants to buy a 1.25GHz 15″ PowerBook for cheap? I’m really thinking of putting my hands on one of the new Intel MacBooks. I was prepared to be disappointed by this year’s Macworld keynote, as I didn’t expect much more than an Intel Mac Mini or iBook, but Jobs surprised all of us with the new products. Hereby some impressions on the announcements.

Sporting a brand new Intel Core Duo (Yonah) in a laptop, Apple is once again at the head of the pack, even in the hardware arena. And to think that it’s been barely seven months since the Intel move has been announced. Many observers predicted that it would have taken much longer for Cupertino to deliver its first significant Intel models, and that the wait would have cost them a significant drop in market share in the meantime. Nothing of this has happened and we can expect to see more and more Apple laptops around. With the new MacBook, there is no compelling reason (apart from the price maybe) for geeks and even most ordinary people to use a Wintel machine.

The price difference between the 1.67GHz and the 1.83GHz models is huge, even after upgrading memory and disk on the slower one. I’m not sure I’d take the latter.

The absence of an internal modem and a FireWire 800 port is mildly annoying. But I used the former only occasionally and never the latter, so I can live with that.

The new iMac and the software: nothing interesting to me here. My recently bought iMac G5 20″ is still a great machine and the software is nothing more than updates, apart from iWeb for which I have no use, personally.

For Gianugo: to me the MacBook looks the same color as the PowerBook, that is aluminum (not titanium). The darker color in some photos looks like an artifact of lighting.

Adium is the Future

Published by ugo on December 17, 2005 in apple and opensource. 0 Comments

Tim Bray: “Software of the future will be Open Source, will have a sophisticated and smart user interface, will take responsibility for making sure it’s up to date, and will meet essential human needs. Like Adium.”

And maybe it’s not entirely coincidental that software exhibiting these kind of characteristics, more often than not, was made for the Mac.

Google Earth for the Mac

Published by ugo on December 12, 2005 in apple and google. 0 Comments

Some time ago, I prayed for an OS X version of Google Earth. Looks like my prayer was answered. There isn’t an official version yet, but I tested the one that has leaked (link below) and it works fine. Yay!

Nathan Weinberg: “Gary Price writes that it appears a Mac OS version of Google Earth has leaked ahead of its release. That is a surprising development, Google releasing anything for the Mac. A Mac-head friend of Gary’s says it works just fine, but download at your own risk. AppleInsider has some info and screenshots, which look identical to the Windows version.
(via Steve Rubel)”

Periodic OS X maintenance

Published by ugo on November 30, 2005 in apple. 3 Comments

If, after many months of usage, your Mac starts feeling more and more sluggish, and the disk is continuously thrashing at the minimum hint of activity on your part, like mine did, you should remember to perform a little maintenance.

Start with performing the periodic maintenance tasks that were never executed because you keep it stopped or off at night, when cron should execute them:

sudo periodic daily
sudo periodic weekly
sudo periodic monthly

In my case, the weekly periodic script took almost one hour to complete. I guess it had never been executed in a little less than the two years I have been using this Powerbook.

Then, update the prebindings:

sudo update_prebinding -root / -force

Finally, fix the permissions using the Disk Utility (from Applications/Utility) program.

I did all of this today, after my Powerbook had become almost unusable. After having applied the latest security update, it even refused to come up again, showing the grey screen for an hour or so before I decided to power cycle it. Now it feels much snappier.

No DVD drive for Intel iMacs?

Published by ugo on November 22, 2005 in apple. 3 Comments

Apple Matters | The Intel iMacs Won’t Have A Disk Drive: “When Apple finally releases the new, Intel iMac it won’t have a disk drive in it. No CD drive, no DVD drive and no HD/Blu-Ray drive. Those technologies will be obsolete. What it will have is the next generation of Bluetooth and wireless technology. It will have plenty of ports to dock an iPod, flash drive or other portable media drive. And it, along with the rest of Apple’s lineup, will get a redesign. “

I find it difficult to believe this, even though Jobs pulled out a similar stunt when he released the first iMacs with no floppy drive. We already have recordable and rewritable CDs then, and USB keys. How are we expected to rip music, watch movies and backup our data now?

There’s just one technology that could replace disk drives: Ubiquitous, always-on, very-high-bandwidth connectivity. And even then you’ll always want a drive to watch a rented movie in those few places where the net doesn’t reach you.

(Via Jon.)

“File -> Save” sucks

Published by ugo on October 27, 2005 in apple. 1 Comment

Adrian Sutton: “Expect to see a lot more of that as applications take better advantage of CoreData and/or provide built-in versioning systems for their files. When you think about it, why should you have to remember to save instead of just having the ability to undo as far back as you like?”

It’s not the first time I hear this. I can’t remember who already wrote very convincingly about this subject, but the basic idea is that the traditional “File Save” operation of GUI applications is terribly botched. Users should never be forced to remember to save new and modified documents. Also, having to put the file in a specific directory inside a hierarchical filesystem is something that most users would like to be spared of. Applications should provide automatic save and versioning. Documents should be retrieved by search and not by looking at long lists of file names.

I can see this very clearly now that my daughter (7 years old) is starting to use TextEdit on my Powerbook to write little stories or poems. Opening the program or existing documents is very intuitive: you just click (or double-click, harder) on them. But I had to teach her to always save her documents before quitting and still I find myself remembering it to her once in a while.

I’m glad to see that Apple, with CoreData and Spotlight, seems to be ahead of the curve on this issue.

Most useful Dashboard widget ever

Published by ugo on October 20, 2005 in apple. 0 Comments

Tranquillus: “All this widget does is kill the Dock process (which Dashboard is a part of). MacOSX will automatically restart the Dock but without Dashboard in memory. Press F12 to start it up again.”

I like this. Now I can be sure that stupid, useless Dashboard is not using any memory. Konfabulator is so much better.

(Via TUAW.)

Google Earth for Linux

Published by ugo on October 18, 2005 in apple. 10 Comments

Computerworld: “A number of people are now working on a Linux port of Google Earth, but Rasmussen did not offer a release date.”

How about a Mac port instead?

Steve’s brown trousers

Published by ugo on October 13, 2005 in apple and fun. 0 Comments

We all know Apple products have the best design in all of the consumer electronics and computer industry. But yesterday’s event introducing the video iPod and the new iMacs left us shocked and very disappointed.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW): “Look at the picture to the right. Steve is not wearing blue jeans! Those are pants, for the love of Pete…and they’re brown!”

You mean: Brown pants with a black turtleneck? Did Steve wake up yesterday morning and, without even opening his eyes, put on the first two things that he could find in his drawers? What will be next? A pink iPod with a red clickwheel? Someone please give the the guy a lesson on dress color matching.

Gobby

Published by ugo on October 3, 2005 in apple. 0 Comments

Gobby is a free, multi-platform text editor that, like SubEthaEdit, allows for collaborative document editing (as well as multi-user chat):

Sadly, it requires X11 to run on the Mac (since it uses GTK+), but seems to work in Gnome (Linux and BSD) and Windows environments.

As someone said, if it used the same protocol as SubEthaEdit (is it freely available?), we wouldn’t need a Mac version. At the moment, I’d rather use JotSpot Live.

(Via The Tao of Mac.)

Why I won’t switch back

Published by ugo on September 25, 2005 in apple. 1 Comment

I know this is something that is apt to quickly turn into a religious argument. I’m also probably the last to comment on this, as everybody and his sister already did. But this is a slow day, so bear with me.

Russell: “I’ve been using Macs almost exclusively now for about 7 months - since just after I joined Yahoo! and got my PowerBook to go with my mini at home. Now that I’ve been using Macs for a while, I’m wondering if they’re all that special. The hardware is nice, but OS X can be as slow, buggy, non-standard, frustrating and annoying as any other operating system. Also, I don’t really use most of the included apps, so most of what makes OSX so special doesn’t really apply to me.”

Personally, I haven’t had a Windows machine on my desktop for the last six years. So, should I decide to switch back, it would be to Linux. The only thing that really makes Linux a better desktop system when compared to either OSX or Windows, apart from price, is stability. Linux is really solid, OSX is respectable and I can’t really say much about Windows, except that from my occasional usage of it, it still doesn’t seem to be on a par.

It’s true: OSX isn’t perfect, but what is? To me, it’s the best compromise between a nice, usable and intuitive GUI and a solid UNIX foundation. I can have my bash shell, GNU utilities and desktop candy. Well, the Finder sucks, but who cares when you have cp, mv, find, less and the full power of bash scripting at your fingertips? The real killer app of OSX, for us longtime UNIX geeks is the Terminal!

Moreover, I can use OSX for all my software development tasks, mainly using Java (even Java 5 on Tiger) and Eclipse, so it’s not that I’m missing something. I have all the usual collaboration tools (CVS, Subversion, IM, email) at my disposal and most of them are on the web anyway.

I just want to address one specific point made by Russ:

17. What is the friggin’ deal with the .dmg files? The install process is so broken. Unzip .dmg.gz, mount .dmg, copy to Applications, unmount .dmg, delete .dmg, delete dmg.gz. Bleh.

The install process is anything but broken! Double-click on the compressed image (assuming it is compressed: it would be better if compression was applied at the HTTP level and you got an uncompressed file to begin with), double-click on the .dmg file, drop the bundle in the Applications folder and you’re set. What’s the alternative? A GUI installer with a wizard interface that asks you lots of irrelevant questions like where should I install the damned app, which components should be installed and whether it should keep the original version of WMFC32.DLL or overwrite it? Come on!

My first smartphone

Published by ugo on August 20, 2005 in apple and mobile. 0 Comments

I’ve never been fond of gadgets, but this it seems like this is starting to change. Must be a side-effect of having switched to the Mac. First a new digital camera, then an iPod and now a smartphone.

I’ve always used cellphones for … well, placing and receiving phone calls, and nothing else. But now, with Bluetooth-enabled laptop and desktop computers, plus iSync, I figured I could do more.

The occasion presented itself when it dawned on me that, as we’re leaving for Mexico next week, we need a tri-band cellphone if we want to be able to call from there without being forced to use the hotel’s lines (and be screwed by them) or public phones.

So, I went shopping for a tri-band phone and after asking a couple of friends for advice, I bought a Nokia 6630. Now I’m the proud owner of a phone that has more connectivity options (SM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/WCDMA/BT/USB) than a laptop of not many years ago, which is fine as I plan to travel significantly more than I did in the past.

Maybe I’ll become a true mobile geek like Russell and start blogging about all the cool stuff that you can do with a Symbian phone. I’ve already got it to sync with my iMac, but not with the Powerbook. Apparently, the version of iSync that is in Panther does not support this phone, whereas the latest update for Tiger work fine. Time to upgrade the Powerbook, I guess.

I also did some web surfing. I had imagined that UMTS would be much much faster, but it’s actually pretty slow, at least in this area.

On a closing note, I put Nokia Smartphone Hacks on my Amazon.com wishlist. I guess that if you hold in your hand a machine with the power of a supercomputer, you’d better get the most out of it.

The Apple Mighty Mouse: I Want It!

Published by ugo on August 2, 2005 in apple. 1 Comment

If there’s one thing that bothers me about my new iMac is the mouse. Not because it has just one button, but because it has no scrollwheel. Even the trackpad of my PowerBook can scroll, thanks to SideTracker, but not my iMac. So, I was considering getting myself a Logitech mouse…

… until this:

“In the beginning, there was one button. Then there were two. Then there were clickable scroll wheels and programmable toggles and solid-state slides. But nobody made a mouse as easy to use as your Mac. Until now. Mighty Mouse combines the capability of a multibutton mouse with Apple’s signature top-shell design for the best of both form and function. Use it any way you work: Stick with single-button simplicity or click with multibutton efficiency.”

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