Just one more little thing - iTV debuts. PVR functionality (50%) - syncs directly to iPod (30%) - can record TV (30%) or shift real DVDs to an personally-encrypted, trackable form and stores in iTunes (20%, but we can dream, huh?) - Streams movies from your iTunes-equipped Mac or PC (80%)

So - off I go to a pub quiz instead; mostly because I can’t stand to wait but also because I’m single and thar-be women. Thar. Remember - there’s more to living than MacWorld!

(UPDATED - wrong, wrong, wrong. It was the iPhone show, completely off the usual MacWorld script. Can I get a pass until the next real MacWorld?)

Monday, July 11, 2005

Podcasting - calming down now…

Well, I still think the workflow could be better, but perhaps “sucks” was a strong word…luckily there’s a way around.

Drag and drop - is it so hard? Adding Drag and drop to allow populating the Podcast playlist seems to me a no-brainer. Pick out a few podcasts, drag it over and drop. Everything else works that way, why not Podcasts?

Well, it could, but for reasons unknown to me, it doesn’t. Probably has something to do with commerce.

But there’s a way around that! Instead of just digging through the Podcast directory in iTunes, use Safari. If you see a RSS link, drag it into the Podcast playlist and automagically downloads based on your preferences…schweet!

Monday, February 14, 2005

Parts is Parts

You might remember this from an old commercial for chicken. I thought of it alot this weekend, sorting out a color problem with my new Powerbook - perhaps you’ve been bitten too?

Like all good bloggers I’ll write little tomes of nothingness about my daily experience, but last thursday I happily had something decent to set to page: The new Powerbook arrived and there was much celibration (yay).

If you’ve experienced upgrading machines in the past, get ready for some new goodness - the Apple Upgrader. I had mirrored my system to a 60Gb portable drive, so I could work off of my girlfriends’ laptop by booting off of the portable. When the new PowerBook came, the 3rd screen in asked if I had an older system to get data off of. All you’d need would be the computer, placed in Target-Disk mode. For the uninformed, Target-Disk boots your computer up as a FireWire hard disk - your computer’s pretty much asleep while it’s disk controller does all the work.

Not having the old iBook anymore, I just plugged the firewire drive and off it went. The proceedure is simple - it asks which profile to import, if you want the applications, document and all preferences and then one click and it does its magic. It took about 20 minutes for the data to be copied over. Once finished it asked that the firewire drive be unplugged, which was odd, and then went on through the registration steps. You’ll see your familiar login and then, voila - it’s like you’ve never changed machines! Everything carried over perfectly except for Flash MX, which is failing on start-up (probably a font problem, I guessing). But this new Apple tool is fabulous.

One small side problem which I attribute to the process - the internal DVD didn’t work. It wasn’t seen on the bus and didn’t respond when a cd was carefull pushed into the slot. Ultimately I rebooted the machine and heard a “klick-klunk” as the dvd head reset itself and voila! It was seen by the system and burned 1 cd and 2 DVDs like a true pro. I believe the plugging-unplugging of the FireWire drive might have hung the bus, and since I never, ever have to reboot the Mac, I just forgot to give a reset a try. When was the last time a Windows user said that?

But it’s not been a perfectly wonderful experience so far. While the machine is wicked-fast, expecially compared to my iBook and G4 tower at work, the screen color is waaay off. There’s very poor contrast on the screen compared to the 6-month old 15” PowerBook of my girlfriend, and most annoyingly a smudgy magenta cast over the entire display. The poor color immediately caught my eye on poweup and no amount of calibration would solve it. I asked 2 other designers to try and that didn’t work. I borrowed a Spyder 2 screen calibrator and even it couldn’t improve the visual appearance! I was bummed beyond bummed.

So now I have a problem - how do you design on a screen whose color is just terrible? After a frustrating weekend reading about a spattering of similar complaints from other 12” users, I was about to launch into a fight with the Mother Ship on what I should expect. I called Apple and…“Sorry ot hear that, but hey - no problem. We’ll send you a new one. If you don’t like it, you’ve got 10 days from THAT one to call us and we’ll refund your money.” I’m paraphrasing of course, but it was a pleasant and supportive experience. Damn Apple - I so *wanted* to get a good fight in.

So the new one will arrive and the old one gets used for the time being, as per Apple. In a week I hope I can end writing in my lonely blog about aluminum dreams lost, But on the whole you can still count me in as an Apple fan.

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Mac Mini & iBook VRAM - is 32MB enough for Tiger? Maybe…(updated)

Occasionally I touch base with Ric Ford at Macintouch (a great Mac resource) and he popped my question on the iBook VRAM and Tiger up on his site.

Since it’s my letter anyway, lemme repost my question here.

Some pre-history: I bought my old iBook (8MB VRAM) slightly more than 6 months before the release of Jaguar, and sure enough the Mac OS wanted at least 16MBs of VRAM. You could turn down the colors and suffer with sluggishness, but it was clear I bought it too early.

Now I want to buy a new iBook and I had hoped for a slight bump in the Video RAM to 64MB since both the Mac Mini and iBook only have 32MB VRAM and Tiger’s due in 6 months. In last year’s Apple Tech conference, Apple claimed Tiger effects like the liquid ripple in Dashboard required a 64MB video card. While it’s eye candy on the OS, I plan on buying Keynote 2 where some of these transitions may well come in quite handy.

To make things interesting, Apple once had a list of compatible video cards on their Core Image page, but now those listed cards have been replaced with a marketing laundry list of Core Image features and only the vague promise of “hardware scalability”.

This is the list from the cached copy on Google. Apple’s supported graphics cards were:

ATI Radeon 9800 XT
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
ATI Radeon 9600 XT
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra
NVIDIA GeForceFX Go 5200
NVIDIA GeForceFX 5200 Ultra

Please note no mention of the ATI Radeon 9200 (with 32MB dedicated DDR SDRAM over an AGP 4x bus) which is in the iBook, eMac and Mac Mini. Some would say that it’s enough. Most would say it’s a $40 video card and a 64MB version might cost $10 more.

Can anyone comment on this scalability issue? Would Tiger produce chunkier effects or remove some effects entirely? Is the processor going to be taxed to support Tiger’s cool graphics, when it could have just been offloaded to a graphics card with the appropriate amount of VRAM?

Ultimately - Is any computer purchase with 32MB VRAM purchase now going to be a mistake? I think this is an essential issue for any current Mac buyer.

UPDATE:

Here’s the deal - VRAM is more an issue for performance, and Tiger will be more aggressive in balancing graphic power between the video card and the system CPU. There’s an off-chance that some visual effects that are not available in Panther would be available in Tiger. Tiger should better use the AltiVec unit in older systems, and it’s quite possible that graphic performance would improve.

For now, the biggest issue with the existing ATI Radion 9200 in the Mac Mini and iBook is that it can’t support the Pixel Shader 2.0 libraries. These are essential for the translucent effects that we’re seeing more and more of, in software like Keynote 2, Tiger on the Mac and Windows Media Center and “Longhorn” for the “other guys”. The 9200 *could* do it, I hear - if the driver libraries were re-written, but ATI probably won’t do such a thing. It’s an old card and we all know how that game is played.

I’m already seeing many things I was afraid for: In Keynote 2, quite a few effects aren’t available to older hardware. On the Mini/iBook front, 3 current transitional effects you can’t use are burn, flash and droplet.  I have no idea what these effects look like - they may be crap for all I know, unlikely, but possible. Still, maybe with tiger..maybe with Tiger…

That said, I went out and bought a new Powerbook 12”. I’d certainly wait a while for a video card update before buying a Mini.

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Memo: Keep my day job…

Seems any job I could have based on prognostication should include where my next meal would come from.

Man - I got alot of that wrong. Apple came out with the mini, the shuffle and the office suite (and since when is 2 applications a “suite”?). I got the shuffle right, but let’s face it - I’d have to be deaf, dumb and perhaps dead to have missed that one.

The Mac Mini surprises me, not just at the price, but at the form factor. It makes a Shuttle PC look huge. Add the video adaptor and wireless networking and you’ve got an interesting box there in the living room. I see a port of Myth TV coming down the pike VERY quickly…

The office suite. Hmm. “So how many pages in that Pages document?” Could have been worse - they could have called it Document. I guess they’re going to hold back from attacking MS Office for a while more, which makes sense since buying an office system without MS Word, as the boss’s secretary would say, “ain’t gonna happen”.

All-in-all, fun while it lasted. Will I buy a Mini? Nope - no need. I’ll hold out a little while longer for a proper PVR.