Mac.LTL

I came across this posting today: Apple just gave out my Apple ID password because somone asked. So with all the hype about how OS X is so great and secure, what happens when the problem is with Apple corporate itself?

Here’s an excerpt from the post:

I tried to log in to Apple Developer Connection this morning to find out that my password had been changed and the email associated with my account was now a yahoo.com address that wasn’t mine. Luckily, my “security question” was still the same, so I was able to reset the password and email address back.

Based on the emails that have appeared in my .Mac mailbox, this was accomplished by sending this classy one-liner to Apple:

am forget my password of mac,did you give me password on new email marko.[redacted]@yahoo.com

So a little crude social engineering to compromise your data. I’ve had and heard issues about Apple’s lack of a privacy policy, data destruction, and how they will handle repairs of their computers. But this is pretty bad.

I was a bit leary when I had to drop of my MacBook for repair and the guy asked me for my password that he proceeded to type into his “genius” computer. I was also concerned about what they would do with the backup they made of my hard drive. While I had no problems, it is apparent that the system is not setup to protect you. I remember dealing with Dell and Gateway, they’d ask you to remove your hard disk before sending in a laptop for repair.

Does anyone else have any Apple stories like this?

So, I purchased a wireless Apple Mighty Mouse last week and was severely disappointed. I purchased an external mouse for my MacBook because I’ve started writing software again and the trackpad is usable but too slow. Performance is my main driver and I was not prepared to be so underwhelmed (i.e. pissed off).

The mouse response felt sluggish and unnatural. When trying to be precise it felt sticky and jerky. I first thought the bluetooth was a lame interface and the source of my issues, but that was not the case. It was my second suspicion that was confirmed… the problem lies with the mouse acceleration curve (it’s software, it’s in an OS X driver setting, and it can be easily fixed by Apple). But, alas, OS X has no setting for acceleration and apparently has not had one for a long time. The cause and some solutions to the problems of the “feel” of the mouse in OS X has been well described. Read the article, it’s a great overview.

So how do we fix this feeling like our mousepad is a piece of fly paper? Well, my suggestion is to download MouseFix 1.2, a free program by Richard Bently. Why do you want this solution? First, because it’s free. Second, because in version 1.2 someone copied the acceleration parameters from Windows! Get it, run it, it’s great. I suggest setting the acceleration factor command line parameter to 1.8 (the default is 2)… so run it like:

./MouseFix 1.8

After that, play with your tracking speed for your mouse to dial in what feels good. If you are on a laptop, you’ll probably also need to decrease the tracking speed of your trackpad to dial it in. At first you may not like the new feel because you have spent years and years as an unsatisfied user who has eventually gotten used to crap. But after a short period you’ll find it’s much better, even the trackpad is much nicer to use after the fix.

Have fun actually being able to click on things now!

Oh, and as a final rant, why is this issue so infuriating. Because I spent $70 for a mouse… just because it matches my laptop! For double to triple what a good mouse should cost I expect perfection, or at least something pleasurable and effective to use. Yes, this was not a hardware problem, but since Apple controls the whole ecosystem the software that integrates the hardware should be perfect. And anyway, the hardware isn’t even that nice… the “squeeze” feature requires a hard squeeze that is uncomfortable, I sometimes miss-click the left vs right buttons, the ergonomics aren’t that great, and the features that work well are no better than any other $15 mouse. I hate that I am now bought into Apple and form comes before function… except for my iPhone, few complaints over that!

Alright, here’s something kind of nice about Windows XP. I’m sure it’s happened to every Mac user at least once. You mistakenly open several documents launching twenty different applications. Although Vista is plagued with annoying alerts and irrelevant messages, this is one of the few that should be in Mac OS X.

This is another episode of How To Make the Mac Not Suck for Power Users. In this episode I’ll show you how to make a great looking “Windows Start Button” on the Dock with hi-resolution icons and seamless integration with OS X through VMWare Fusion in Unity Mode.

Here’s the button on the dock…

Here’s what it looks like when you click on the button!

I’ve provided a high resolution icon pack for everyone. Download the high resolution Windows Icons here. These icons are from http://www.wincustomize.com so go there to check out more icons.

And finally, here is the video tutorial…

When I switched to OS X I missed not having the full path displayed to me in the Explorer, er… Finder, window as I browsed my drive. All is not lost, there is a simple option to enable a full path listing in finder. Adam also enlightened me that on any finder window you could ⌘+Click on the title bar to see the folder listing as well.

Here’s a quickie on the problem and how to fix it.

I now present to you the first in an infinite part series of How to make the Mac not suck for power users. This episode is on enabling tab keyboard navigation throughout the system. It’s also my first video posting ever, so give me some slack.

Moving to the Mac (about a month ago when I purchased a new MacBook) has been kinda lame because of the lack of power features and UI elements I’m accustomed to on Windows. I’ve since found ways to overcome a lot of these limitations. Among other things I’ll eschew blog about, I’ll be generating some posts and some videos on How to make the Mac not suck for power users.

So I recently installed Bootcamp for the first time, and I must say: Wow.  The install went really smoothly, and my Windows XP SP2 install works incredibly well (or rather, as well as a Windows install can possibly work).  Despite the overwhelming awesomeness, there was just a few things that bothered me.  So I got to googling and was pleased at what I found.  At this point, I would never think of telling someone to use Bootcamp without also recommending these three apps.  Enjoy!

VMware Fusion ($79.99) - The hefty price-tag is definitely worth it!  Fusion basically allows you to boot your Windows partition in another window from inside OS X.  This is incredibly useful when you want to do something non-cpu intensive in Windows, without having to reboot.  I personally use it quite a bit when doing web design, for testing in the Windows browsers.  One of the coolest programs ever made.

MacDrive ($49.95) - This is a completely indispensable utility for any Boocamp user.  It allows you to access your HFS/HFS+ formatted drives from within Windows by supplying the needed drivers.  It also handles external drives just fine.  This is especially useful if you want to install programs onto a Mac-formatted drive without having to make a partition that can be understood by Windows.

NTFS-3G  (Free!) - This is great, it allows you to browse your Windows files from OS X (it’s pretty much the mirror of what MacDrive provides).  Some of you may be thinking “but can’t OS X already do that?”, and the answer is: sorta kinda not really.  OS X can read/write FAT partitions, but has issues with read/write on NTFS partitions.  This driver fixes that in the most elegant possible way, and hey, it’s free!  Note: NTFS-3G requires MacFuse 1.3 or higher be installed prior to installation.

Let me first state that professionals do, in fact, use Windows. That’s just a catchy title. Or rather, a controversial, flame inducing title. But people that use their computers at home and techs that repair PCs with Windows will tell you that everyone uses Windows. Very not true. Home users needing something for internet and E-mail and word processing use Windows. And sure, maybe it’s 90% of the market. But we professionals are a little different. We need something more. We have specialized tasks that Windows may not be best suited for.

My inspiration for writing this was an experience I had at Best Buy. I was looking to purchase a USB wireless network adapter for an older Macintosh still running 10.2.  The gentleman helping me proceeded to tell me that everyone hates Macs and nothing is compatible with them. I laughed and shrugged and said I liked them. As we spoke more, he asked me why I liked Macs. I shrugged again and said modestly, “Well, I’m an IT guy so I use it for a lot of things and so it’s kind of technical…” He said, “Oh no, go ahead…” I explained to him all the rich features of OS X and told him some of the applications I run and how much better it is on the Mac. He wasn’t all too familiar with what I was talking about, but nodded and conceded his unfamiliarity with that stuff. Later that day, I thought more about it and I speculated what he was probably using his computer for. And of course, I came up with gaming, internet, E-mail, word processing, and some media apps.

Now you take a look at the workstations from IBM, Sun, Novell, and Apple and none of them run Windows. But let’s also take HP as an example. They sell Windows PCs from HP at Best Buy. What they don’t sell at Best Buy from HP is their workstations running Tru64, HP-UX, OpenVMS, and Linux.

Scientists, graphic designers, architects… are they committed Windows users? A lot of them are needing some serious workstations that are good for people doing CAD/CAM, GIS, high performance technical visualization and defense application.

And this isn’t just the case for workstations. In the world of servers, super computers, and mainframes Windows is not king. When people need to do serious work, they do not necessarily rely on Windows.

I’ve found the only people telling me how Windows is better are PC technicians. Ones that spend most of their time piecing together PCs and formatting them to reinstall Windows in their professional life, and most of their time gaming and downloading pirated software from torrents in their personal life. Now, once again, professionals do use Windows. But professionals disproportionately use other operating systems.

Let’s look at some numbers. I’ll start with financial figures I grabbed from Wikipedia. Microsoft’s revenue from 2007 was $51.12 billion. Let’s compare that with Sun, Apple, Novell, and IBM. Sun had revenue of $13.873 billion in fiscal year of 2007. Apple was $24.01 billion. Novell was $1.2 billion from 2005. And IBM is listed as having revenue of $98.8 billion during the 2007 to 2008 fiscal year. Now of course, this doesn’t say much about Windows verses other operating systems. These companies sell a lot more than operating systems. But I think it’s food for thought, taken with a grain of salt, when considering these competitors sell operating systems other than Windows, and they’re doing quite well.

So let’s now look at some figures for Windows usage.

How about servers? Let’s look at web servers. (I’m going to make an assumption here and not bother doing the research. I’m going to assume that most computers running Apache are not running Windows. After all, why spend all that money on Windows with IIS, just to install Apache?) Currently, about 60% of the internet is Apache and only about 30% is IIS. Well below the oft quoted 90% of average users that use Windows.

Of the top 500 super computers as of November of 2007, only 6 were running Windows. (Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003.) Linux is at the top of the list with 381 super computers using it. Redhat beats out Windows with 13. Mac OS X is even being run on 2 super computers. IBM’s AIX is running on 26 of them.

Ultimately, what I think I’m trying to get at is Microsoft with Windows does not control the world.

This is a quick little video demonstrating how to use the dictionary built into every Mac. It’s not a commonly known feature, so if you didn’t already know about it, I’m happy to introduce you to it.

I wrote a quick little AppleScript and made three new colors for the dock: Ruby, Emerald, and Sapphire.  I’m calling it version 0.1 Beta, because I was having a lot of fun tinkering around and so I thought I might make additional versions of it that might be more useful.  (We’ll see how that goes…)  It’s only for 10.5.  So go ahead and give oDOCKe v0.1 Beta a try.