Point: Counterpoint

Posted on January 16, 2008

Wil Shipley, developer of the fine Delicious Library has a counter-argument to all of those who bitched about the MacBook Air (yes, I’m in that group too), in his delightfully titled MacBook Air Haters: Suck My Dick.

I’ve read journalists complain that you can’t get at the hard drive in the MacBook Air. What? I have no fucking idea where the hard drive is in my MacBook Pro, and even if you drew me a damn diagram with labels and numbers and gave me a replacement drive I wouldn’t open my machine even in exchange for a year with Zooey Deschanel. Ok, yes I would, but you get my point. I’m sorry, Zooey, I didn’t mean it, baby.

Some journalists get so close to the truth it hurts, yet miss the large print. “OMG! The unit is all sealed and self-contained like the iPod!”

Yes… the iPod. That huge failure. Also, the iPhone. Stunning disappointment that it was. I mean, jeebus, why would Apple make ANOTHER device incredibly simple? Clearly the market has spoken, and it wants tons of ports and screws and geegaws and flippers… no, wait, no it doesn’t.

He does make some points, and has fine taste in saucy hollywood actresses. (Hey… Zooey Deschanel is only two years older than me. That puts her in the “attainable” age range…) However, I’m still gonna go out and say that the MBa is too underpowered and too damn expensive. Those so-called “normal people” who are in the computer-as-an-appliance market and don’t care if the computer isn’t user-serviceable, also generally don’t want to spend nearly two grand on a laptop.

But still, that thing does look damn nice, and is a step towards the future of Mac portables.

Macworld Keynote

Posted on January 15, 2008

Welp, another Steve Jobs Macworld address has come and gone. Naturally, every boy and his blog is going to have a post up on their thoughts; I may as well throw my share in. This may have been the fastest they’ve gotten the video online yet, I’m watching it now.

Time Capsule

Time Capsule, the new backup solution to be paired with Time Machine, is intriguing. I’ve been sorely tempted to get an Airport base station, but had a hard time justifying spending $179 on a router, even if it is pre-N. But the 500 Gb Time Capsule is awful tempting. If I can use the drive as a shared network drive for files instead of for backup, I may just get this. Heck, even if I can’t and I have to plug in a MyBook for file serving, I may just get one. I got drives lying around. My only complaint? USB-only for plugging in ext. HDs. Really? In this day and age when we’ve got superior technologies like FireWire and eSATA, I have to use a USB cord? Hecka lame. But still, one of these might be in my future.

iPhone 1.1.3

I’m actually installing this as I type this. I love that whenever Steve mentions web clips, people in the audience laugh. Webclips was a pretty jokey update in Safari 3. The new Maps is an awesome update to the app, and I know there have been a few occasions where I could have used GPS’s half-retarded little cellular-triangulation brother. I’m pretty excited about it.

SMS-ing to different people is neat, although really only useful every now and then. But this gives me a chance to vent my biggest gripe about the SMS feature. Is it Copy and Paste? No. Lack of MMS? Meh who cares. It’s the interface. “But Joshua, the interface is just like iChat, who wouldn’t love that?” That’s the problem. I start to think of text messages as iChat messages, which don’t cost me any money on the computer, instead of text messages, that do cost me money on the phone. It used to be that I’d never get anywhere near my 200-a-month allotment, but with the iPhone I’ve done it twice. Ack. Gotta reign that in, or pay the extra 5 bucks for more messages. But I digress.

Interface customization will hopefully be as good as I’m expecting. I honestly don’t need Stocks on my phone’s main screen, or YouTube for that matter. Watching the keynote, it looks like I can’t remove them completely, relegating them to a menu, but if I can push them off to a second screen where I never have to see them, I’ll be content.

I don’t use my phone for watching movies outside of the occasional Diggnation, so I’m not fussed over the new video features. Oh, and the $20 upgrade cost for the iPod Touch is definitely lame, but I don’t own one so I don’t care. I’ll ask Tyler, who has a Touch, if he plans on upgrading. I’m wondering though, if one chooses not to upgrade, will they be excluded from future point-release software updates, or will there be two versions of the Touch’s updates, one for paid-upgraders and one for the old school Touches.

iTunes and TV

Movie Rentals? Not the most exciting thing in the world, as I’m a Netflix subscriber. But I can see myself being in a situation where I just feel like watching a movie right now, so I may be renting. If anything, now I’ll finally get around to seeing the Simpsons movie and Ratatouille. Funny that Blockbuster’s stock dropped %15 today though.

TV’s update and price drop are pretty meh to me. I still can’t watch my .avi movies on the device without hacking it, so I don’t care. It seems like the price drop is proof that they’re disappointed in the lagging sales of the TV. I wonder if there will be a big outcry the way there was with the iPhone

The MacBook Air

I’m not gonna lie. I’m impressed they got it so thin, and if I’m honest, a little jealous. The 3/4″ thick chassis makes my 1″ thick MacBook Pro look like a fatty. And It is a sexy machine, pushing us even closer to devices that look like something on Star Trek. I’ll cop to saying that it was too soon, they wouldn’t ditch optical drives right away. But I think they’ve managed to do it right. I think. If you have another Mac, the remote optical drive sharing is brilliant. But if you don’t have another computer, you’re kind of left high and dry. It really seems like they’re pushing for buying from iTMS instead of buying physical discs with this. The gestures feature is great too, and something I wish I had on my MBP.

All the sexiness and awesomeness aside though, spec-wise The MBa is incredibly disappointing. For $1800, what I paid for my MacBook Pro, you get a laptop that is spec’d slightly more less on par with a regular $1,100 MacBook. The 1.6 GHz proc is a paltry speed, considering the MB ships with a 2.0 GHz chip in the base model. Once again, they’re using the crappy integrated graphics chip. You get one USB port. Which means you’ll need a hub. No FireWire (once again, why oh why are they abandoning FireWire so?), no ethernet (there’s a USB adapter available for those who need to plug in, but that’ll take up your one USB port…) Nothing is user-servicable. The 2 gigs of memory is onboard memory, meaning you can’t change or upgrade it. I’m assuming the HD isn’t replaceable. Even the battery isn’t user-replaceable.

Oh, and if you want that sweet 64Gb solid state drive? $3,100. That’s fucking expensive for such a low-spec machine, it’s ridiculous. That’s more than I paid for the first three cars I owned. And really, I was surprised they couldn’t squeeze more than five hours of battery life out of the thing. But still, it is a step towards the future, and in a few years, this will be the next generation MacBook. But for now, I’m not buying it. I’m saving my pennies for a Time Capsule instead.

How do You Use Spaces?

Posted on January 6, 2008

And more importantly, I suppose, are you using Spaces? Even before Leopard, there were a number of virtual desktop managers for the Mac, but to be honest, I never really gave them a try for more than a day or two before Spaces. And now, I love it. This is how my MacBook Pro is set up:

The center screen is primarily for Safari. I use it to surf the web, and occasionally, for FTP or TextEdit. This keeps me somewhat focused on whatever I’m reading/writing with minimal screen clutter. The right screen is reserved for iChat, Adium, and Twitteriffic. It’s a sort of communications center. That way, if I want not to be distracted by IMs I can just ignore that screen, and i can keep all the clutter of multiple chats on one screen. Finally, the left screen I use for actual productivity. Photoshop, InDesign, Pages, Illustrator, etc. all go here. This one is for apps that require just one window, that I want to concentrate fully on working on.

Making sure that windows stay organized and where they’re supposed to be in Spaces is simple thanks to the anchoring system in System Preferences -> Exposé/Spaces.

Just add a new assignment, pick an app and pick the window you want it to go in and it’ll generally stay there, except for the occasional fuckery (like when you drag an assigned window to another space, it sometimes does goofy things. iChat is often guilty of this.)

That’s the system I’ve got worked out, anybody have a layout they’d like to share?

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