Mac.LTL

I just want to rant a bit about my iPhone 3G. I bought it the day it came out. It’s been quite a headache. I’ve already returned it for a new one, hoping that would solve my problems. I’ve been updating the firmware and iTunes as soon as they’re available. I’m experiencing dropped calls. My iPhone’s screen will turn black as I’m using it. It had a problem with frequently restarting, but that doesn’t seem to be happening anymore. I’ve experienced a problem where none of the apps I’ve installed will open, even after turning the phone on and off. I’ll just have to do a restore. I think this has happened three times. On the note of restores, I’ve done that about a half dozen times so far. For me, backing up the iPhone takes hours and I have no idea why. I’ve done the restore, I’ve removed apps, I’ve deleted and reinstalled iTunes. Much of the troubleshooting I’ve done was from the instruction of Apple’s tech support.

And of course, there’s the recent discovery that you can get by the locked phone screen by making an emergency call and double pressing the home button.

I’ve been showing the iPhone to people and suggesting they also get one because it’s such a great phone. The hardware is great. Perfect size. Lots of features. Great applications. But at this point, it’s just not stable enough for me to recommend to people. In fact, I realized that when I’ve been showing the phone to people, I’ve been trying to avoid indicating to them that it has problems. It will shut down as I’m showing it to them and I’ll just keep talking and describing the features as I turn it back on. At this point, I’m just not recommending people get it. I tell them it’s not very stable right now and there’s been a lot of problems and they may wish to wait for future updates and revisions.

In all honesty, I feel like I’m back working on the Windows platform. I have a Windows laptop from work and I hate it. Although I’m venting about my iPhone experience, while I’m at it, I might as well also note that 10.5 hasn’t been the most stable experience for me, either. And I understand Mobile Me has been a problem for people.

Oh, and on top of all that, when I returned my iPhone at the Apple Store, they had me scheduled for 6:00, but I ended up having to wait 45 minutes longer because they were backed up.

I was much happier with my Mac experience two years ago.

MacMage has released a great little app called Cents, which provides a super convenient and quick way to keep track of how much money one is spending.

From the Cents website: “We never realize how much we spend on the little things in life… but it all adds up. This pocket app will help you keep track of your little spendings and show you how much you’ve spent.”

Check it out!  Requires Leopard, $4.99.

I installed the latest version of ZiPhone to jail break my iPhone. I installed several apps and everything was working pretty well. I was enjoying Tap Tap Revolution. After installing a terminal application, my iPhone ran into a slight problem…

(Sorry the video stalls a bit.)

So, you have an Intel Mac and want the best of both worlds.
Sure, you can use Boot Camp, if you don’t mind restarting your computer when
you need Windows. Now for myself, I did try Boot Camp with Windows XP,
but then it also wanted updates, and I was not able to go online via
Windows, so that is where my experiment stopped. Then I had heard of
trying a demo copy of Parallels from their website, so I gave that a
try. Parallels did the trick! I was able to get online, I did not have
to do anything. Plug and Play, that’s for me. This is why I own a Mac,
right? So, if you have a need to run Windows along side the Apple OS,
this could do the trick. Be aware that this will also be sucking up
your RAM, and Windows may also want updates, so no bootlegs kiddies!
So, you are looking at the cost of Parallels along with the cost of a Windows disk.
I only tried out XP, so I can not say what fun Vista may bring.
I did also use the Windows version of Yahoo messenger while trying out Parallels, and that was much more fun then the Mac version. I then tried a web cam, but did not get too far on that. So, if you need two worlds in one computer, this can be a solution.

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.

This is a quick video tutorial I put together for creating a light sabre using Inkscape 0.46.

I wanted to test the screen capture software I’d just downloaded. And I must admit, I’ve never uploaded a video to YouTube or Google Video or any other sites. So I wanted to give that a try and see what the process was like and what options each site had. So I uploaded this video to Google Video. I’m not too happy with the quality of it. If I make another video like this, I’ll try another video hosting service just so I can compare.

The video is probably going to be more useful for people that are already a little familiar with Inkscape. The video demonstrates how to create a glowing effect and how to use a gradient to create the appearance of depth. Hopefully, some people may find it useful.

And of course, let me know what you think.

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.

Further playing and familiarizing myself with Dashcode, I quickly made a Dashboard widget for Mac.LTL using a template. Between Dashcode and the Open in Dashboard feature in Safari, it’s really quick and easy to create and deploy a widget.

Well, I am officially starting a trend, every month, I will put out a new edition of “My Top 10 ‘Hard to live without’ apps”. These will be apps for the Mac I cannot ever live without. Let’s see… 

1.) Safari (OSX 10.2+)-I could not live without this app, I do all of my web browsing in it! And, it’s easy to use, fast, and for the most part, supports many standards.

2.) Adium (OSX 10.4; older versions for 10.2-10.3)-I do all of my instant messaging through this app, and it can be configured easily and without hassles.

3.) Word 5.1 (System 6+; runs in Classic)-Yes, I do use this app for all of my word processing demands 99.999% of the time, for the .001%, I use NeoOffice for compatibility.

4.) Colloquy (OSX 10.3.9+; older versions for 10.2)-I do all of my IRC in this app, not much more to say.

5.) Apple Mail (OSX 10.4; also bundled with 10.0-10.3, albeit older versions)-I do all of my email in this app, so yeah.

6.)  iTunes (OSX 10.3.9+; older versions for 8.6/9-10.2)-Music/iPod, not much to say.

7.) QuickTime (OSX 10.3.9+; older versions for 6.0.0-10.2)-I do my TV show watching here.

8.) Perian 1.0 (OSX 10.4+; older betas for 10.3)-Without this, I’d shoot myself, literally, Perian is so useful.

9.) AppTrap (OSX xyz; I don’t know what version is needed, sorry)-Say you want to uninstall an app, with AppTrap, just drag the .app to the trash and pops up a screen asking if you want to delete the support files. Very useful app!

10.) Finder (System 1-10.4)-There’s always that one app that you take for granted, the Finder is one of them. I’d be so lost without it.

Anyway, there’s my list, stay tuned for next month’s!

Also, feel free to comment! 

Well, I had sort of forgotten about Windows 2000, but it is official, Apple has dropped Windows 2000 support in iTunes 7.4.x. iTunes 7.4.x requires Windows XP SP2 or Vista. iTunes was Windows 2000’s last breath from Apple, as QuickTime recently dropped Windows 2000 support in July, with the release of 7.2. Just an FYI, the last releases for Windows 2000 are iTunes 7.3.2 and QuickTime 7.1.6.