Category: Mac stuff

Macintosh and other Apple stuff

Catchup…

The problem with Twitter is that I post stuff there that should also be blogged… So, a bunch of quick hits:

• I’ve been thinking about getting a netbook. Based on specs, since the Dell Mini 10 supports a hi-res (720p) display and a six-cell battery, it looks perfect—except for one extremely major detail: it can’t be hackintosh’d. Total bummer. So, I either need to settle for a Mini 9, which seems too small, go for an MSI Wind, or wait for whatever thing Apple has up its sleeve. We’ll see how long it takes Apple to pull the trigger on whatever that is…

• I’ve almost completely given up on Facebook because of Twitter. Why? Because Twitter is lightweight and the mobile clients are just as good, if not better than, the Web client. (I use twitterfon on my phone and Canary on the desktop, both are free.) FB seems like work every time I log on, but Twitter is so lightweight that it’s just easy.

• I’m finally going blu-ray with the Oppo BDP-83. No, it’s not for sale publicly yet, but I tried to get on the beta program and wasn’t selected, so my consolation prize is getting to order it prior to its public release. This will be my first foray into blu-ray, but I’m a long-time Oppo fan, as the home DVD player is has been an Oppo DV-981HD for quite some time. I’ll post a review on it after I’ve gotten to play with it for a while. It should come in time for next weekend, so don’t expect to hear much of anything from me for a while once it gets here. The TV might now be the weak link in the chain…

AppleTV thoughts

I know I’m behind the curve, but oh well. A while ago Apple asked for feedback about the AppleTV and what Apple could do to make it better. Having owned a AppleTV for a while, I have some thoughts on this as well. I want to divide this into a few different categories:

[1] Things that don’t require changes to the hardware (I think), and therefore should be easy:

• Greater control over sync order. Apple allows users to say they want photos sync’d first, but there’s no way to specify the priority for other media. I’d like to be able to prioritize photos, then music, then TV shows, then movies. This should not be hard.

• Re-organize menus. In particular, it’s very annoying that “My Music” and “My Movies” are the last menu items in their respective categories, since I want those items over 90% of the time. This is obviously a lame UI stunt to have users rent/buy more stuff from the iTunes store whenever they use their AppleTV. It doesn’t work; in fact, it makes me less likely to buy because I’m annoyed by the transparent motive of this asinine choice. This kind of “annoy the user into buying more stuff” approach is very Microsoft—Apple, it’s not your style, cut it out.

• Better remote support. The Apple remote is cute and all, but the small number of buttons makes it really limited. Some of us have universal remotes with many buttons and it would be nice to be able to take advantage of those buttons. Yes, I know, the “Remote” program on my iPhone solves this problem, but sometimes I’m not home and I’m not buying an iPod Touch just to be a decent remote for the AppleTV when I’m not home. In particular, if people could use the number pad on the remote to enter text, that would be about a million times better than the current horrible text entry setup.

[2] Things that maybe require hardware changes:

• Support 720p HD at 30 fps. I know this may seem esoteric, but it’s really not. New solid state mini camcorders (e.g., the Flip HD and the Kodak Zi6) shoot 720p at 30 fps. This means one cannot view the raw video off of one of these devices on the AppleTV, even though it has the right codecs. One either has to drop the framerate down to 24fps or re-size the video to something smaller so that it’ll play on the AppleTV. This is just plain annoying.

• Enable the USB port for attaching an external hard drive. Yes, I know, Apple’s has a great scam going by charging like $100 for a mere 120 GB. But right now $100 buys you about 1 TB of storage; Apple is now off by about an order of magnitude. Apple, just suck up the loss of income from the few people willing to pay for the upgrade. You will get a lot more interest in the AppleTV if it can act as a home media server—that would be a brilliant product—and to do that, it needs to have a lot of storage at its disposal. Let us attach external hard disks!

See, this is a nice, short, modest list. There are lots of people clamoring for things which require completely re-engineering the hardware (e.g., make it a blu-ray player, make it a DVR), but I’m trying to stay away from those. That’s a total overhaul and I think would make it a fundamentally different product. I also suspect Apple doesn’t want to enter those markets (yet).

The other big thing I’ve read people on the Web asking for is support for other networked services like Netflix/Amazon/Hulu. Frankly, I don’t think Apple has any inclination to do anything that will so obviously cut into the AppleTV as a sales vehicle for the iTunes store. I would personally love Netflix integration, sure, but I won’t hold my breath on that one. That’d be like asking Microsoft to make iPod accessories—it just isn’t going to happen.

I think the changes I’m asking for are much milder but would still dramatically improve the user experience.

New Toy: Nanovision Mimo

So, I just picked up a USB-driven mini-monitor, which can be had direct from Mimo Monitors or from The Gadgeteers. It’s a little 7“ monitor which does 800 x 480, and the cool thing about it is that you don’t need a video card to drive it—it gets both power and video direct over USB, using DisplayLink technology. And, of course, it’s small enough to be portable, so it can be thrown in a suitcase easily and then hooked up to a laptop with no trouble, which is the main thing I bought it for. I really like having a lot of display space and working on a laptop always feels like looking through a keyhole; this should help with that.

So far, it’s very cool. The monitor can be used in either portrait or landscape, and it’s a great compact size for little windows that you need, but don’t really need, and that you don’t want to have covering or underneath a bunch of other things. Chat client windows, browser download windows, tool palettes, etc. The Mac driver installed without a hitch and everything just worked. Even the USB cable is cool; it’s a pass-through cable which will take another USB device so it effectively doesn’t take up a port when plugged in.

So far the only drawback is that 800×480 on a 7” screen means really high pixel density, which means tiny, tiny text. But since I don’t really intend to do any serious reading on it, I’m not too worried.

Not super-cheap, no—the entry-level UM-710 is $130—and of course for that kind of money you can buy a 19“ real monitor. But I can’t put that in my suitcase, and when I’m at home I’d need an additional video card to run it with my already two-monitor desktop (which doesn’t have space for another 22” monitor anyway). So now I’m running three monitors at home, and I’ll be able to run two when I’m on the road.

Definitely a cool new toy.

Kodak Zi6 and Apple TV

So, for xmas this year I acquired a Kodak Zi6, which is a pocket-sized HD camcorder. It seems pretty good overall—certainly more portable and easier to deal with than the old tape-based miniDV camcorder—and it’s trivially easy to get the content off, as it supports a direct USB connection.

The minor complication is that I want to play back the video on my Apple TV. Now, it’s trivial to copy a movie from the Zi6 into iTunes, but these movies don’t show up on the Apple TV. I was puzzled at first, but then I looked carefully at the Apple TV specs: “maximum resolution: 1280 by 720 pixels at 24 fps, 960 by 540 pixels at 30 fps.” Oh. The Zi6 shoots at 1280 x 720, 30 fps. And, the specs say a maximum of 5 Mbps for video, and the Zi6 shoots somewhat higher than that.

What really surprised me is that almost nobody else seems to have this issue, or rather, I’ve seen very little mention of it anywhere and Googling it has turned up nothing. (The only thing I could find was this thread on the Apple forum, and it’s pretty light.)

So, I have two options: scale down to 960 x 540 or drop down to 24 fps. One of the posters in the aforementioned thread says that changing the frame rate is worse; this seems somewhat reasonable. So, the question is, what to use to convert? I can think of a few options:

• iTunes. There’s a “convert to Apple TV” option that can be selected, but this is opaque; I’m not really sure what exactly it does to make it acceptable. Drop frames? Resize? Both? Ugh.

• QuickTime Pro. This can rescale and has the nice option of doing pass-through on the audio. But the video settings are a bit arcane, and this is slow.

• iMovie. This seems a lot like iTunes—maybe even identical. iMovie can slurp in a movie and export to AppleTV, but there’s a lot of compression there, I think. This might be worthwhile with iMovie ‘09 since that can do image stabilization, which is definitely an issue with these teensy camcorders, but I don’t know how good iMovie ‘09 is because it isn’t out yet.

• Handbrake. Handbrake 0.9.3 will take the raw Zi6 file as input, and then one can fold/spindle/mutilate as much as desired. But it doesn’t offer pass-through on the AAC audio, and it doesn’t seem to want to produce 960 x 540, it seems to want 960 x 528 only, which seems a little odd.

So, anyone else out there with an Apple TV and a Zi6 or one of the other pocket-sized HD camcorders, like the Flip Mino HD or the VadoHD or similar? If so, what do you use to convert to Apple TV?

@Gruber: You have an Apple TV and a Zi6, right? What do you use?

AppleTV 2.3 and Handbrake 0.9.3 Notes

OK, so I upgraded my AppleTV to firmware version 2.3 and… now most of my movies don’t have any audio. Yikes! What happened there?

Well, to save space, I had encoded all my movies with just the AC3 track (that is, the raw Dolby Digital) and no AAC track. Apple says that’s a no-no, and I guess with firmware 2.3 they finally actually mean it. Bummer. To solve this problem, there are two choices:

Option One
Manually add an AAC audio track. This actually isn’t that hard. Generate an AAC .mov file with about one tenth of a second of empty audio in it. Open it in QuickTime Pro, copy. Open the offending movie file, make sure the marker is at the beginning, paste in the moment of silence at the beginning, and save it. This may take a while if the file is large, because it has to re-write the entire file. This is a minor pain in the ass, but it’s doable.

Option Two
Re-rip the movie. This is obviously a more time-consuming option, but since Handbrake 0.9.3 just came out, it’s not totally unreasonable to consider re-ripping anyway. And the new version is supposedly much better. The big win is that HB now handles input sources other than the DVD, which is really nice if you have video in some other format already, but most of what I have is on DVD anyway.

So, what does HB offer for that? Well, new H.264 encoding which is supposedly much better. The default “AppleTV” setting used to work with an average target bitrate of 2500kbps, but now it’s set for a constant quality encode of 59% quality. This is an improvement on two fronts: first, it produces much smaller files, and second, it takes much less time to encode because this is a constant, single-pass process.

The problem is that the results aren’t quite as good. I spent a day playing around with this—actually, I just re-encoded the same movie over and over again at different settings while I was doing other things—to figure out what I liked. 59% constant quality (the default) produces noticeably more compression artifacts, particularly banding in gradients. I found a really hard frame in The Fifth Element to use as a test case: scene six where the general steps into the blacklight. Half the scene is white and half of it is a purple color, and the wall to the right of the general is a purple gradient which is hard to get right. I tried 70% constant quality and the still frames right around there still showed banding, which my 0.9.2 rip did not. So I tried ripping with 2500kbps and I still got a little banding in the stills. This was a little disconcerting, since that’s more or less the old setting. Then my brother reminded me to watch the moving video, and sure enough, the banding shows up at 59% but not at the other settings. Classic reminder that moving video and still frames are not equivalent.

However, 70% doesn’t save file space and the old 2500kbps doesn’t save time. So I backed down to 65% constant quality. This produces files that are 10-20% smaller than the old 0.9.2 rips, but of course much faster since this is constant single-pass. And, the banding is gone at this level, so the video quality is acceptable.

So, for most of my movies I’m going with option one because it’s still faster than re-ripping. However, I am planning on re-ripping all my longer movies with the 65% constant quality setting to save a little space, since my half-T drive is almost full.

Reactions to Today’s Apple Annoucements

So, today Apple announced new MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and a new 24“ cinema display. I have a MacBook Pro that I bought in June of 2007 so I’m not really in the market for a new one, but one of the things that kind of surprised me about the new MacBook Pros is the lack of a speed bump. I’m typing this on a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, and the default configuration for a new MacBook Pro? 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo. If you get the first level of upgrade, you go to a whopping 2.53 GHz. Yes, all the new gizmos on it are cool (I admit I’d like the multitouch trackpad), but I don’t see much of a gain in terms of performance—certainly not enough to justify blowing more than two grand on one of these.

The new MacBooks are very cool indeed, but I can’t really even consider one because of the lack of FireWire 800. I live on a FireWire 800 drive that I sync between home, work, and laptop. FW400 is even too slow to make this convenient, and USB simply will not cut it. However, if I weren’t already wedded to this system that’s a nice package for $1300.

The new monitor is actually more interesting. I spend enough time at my computers that I think it’s worth the money to buy really good monitors. Right now my desktop configuration is a 23” Cinema display along with a 20“ Cinema display. The 23” monitor (which I use as the main) is fantastic but it lacks an iSight camera, which I’ve always wanted to have on it. I would also like the lower LED power and the idea of having a MagSafe on it to charge the laptop is a stroke of brilliance, no doubt about it. (However, I don’t see how to make this work smoothly with the USB and display connection coming from a MacPro under my desk. Hmm.) And adding an extra USB port is also very nice. What I want to know is what happened to the FireWire? The last generation of Cinema displays have two FireWire 400 ports on them, which was terrific. Where’s the FireWire? Irritating. Nonetheless, I’ll certainly consider ordering one of these.

InCase Protective Cover vs. HHI Looper Cover

When I first got my iPhone I was leaving town the next day and so I needed a case right away. I wanted something grippy but which was small enough so that I could still keep the phone in my pocket, and to provide a little protection if (OK, when) I drop the phone. There were few choices in the Apple Store, so I left with an InCase Protective Cover, which set me back a cool $30. That seemed steep to me but I didn’t have time to order something on line or to go to another store, so I forked it over.

However, after returning from the first of my many trips, I discovered the HandHelditems Looper case, which comes in more (and better) colors, comes with a screen protector, and is one-third the price. Because I wanted the blue, I went ahead and bought one.

It’s almost exactly the same thickness as the InCase one and has nearly the same pattern on the back. The silicone is a slightly different composition but it’s just as grippy. The hole cut for the “ringer off” switch is better cut on the InCase but the strip across the bottom for access to the dock connector is better on the HHI case. These are highly comparable products—except of course on price.

Unless you really love the pink you can get with the InCase (but can’t for HHI), don’t make the mistake I did; go and get the HHI, not the InCase.

One Week with the iPhone 3G

I did not have a first-generation iPhone so many of my comments and impressions will not be specific to the 3G iPhone, but rather be impressions of just having an iPhone in general, though of course some will be 3G-specific.

Anyway, one week ago today I stood in line at the Baybrook Mall Apple Store to get an iPhone. I got there a little after 7:30 in the morning and I walked out with with my black 16G iPhone 3G at around 1:30 in the afternoon, so it took me about five hours. It wasn’t so bad as I spent the bulk of the time finishing a very nice novel, The Name of the Wind. My observation was that the reason the line took so long was because a lot of customers weren’t actually ready. The Apple Store employees handed out a little list of what you needed, but once I was in the store it was possible to see how much variance there was in how long it took to process each customer. It took about five minutes for them to process me, but some people were sitting there with Apple Store employees for upwards of 45 minutes, much of it with the customer on their (previous) cell phone. I think a lot of people just didn’t bother to prepare in advance, and that’s what cost everybody so much time.

The reason I bothered to wait in the line the first day was not because of some desire to have it immediately, but because I was leaving the next day to do a month of traveling and traveling is when I most wish I had an iPhone, and I knew the first trip of the four I was taking would really push the iPhone, so I was determined to get one early on.

Activation
I didn’t have even the slightest bit of trouble with activation. I guess by the time I got home from the mall that all those problems had been sorted out, but there was no glitch for me. I’ll count myself as one of the lucky ones.

App Store
Of course, one of the first things I went to do once my iPhone was up and running was head on over to the App Store. I think Apple did a good job with this, as it’s both easy to find and install apps. There are many great free apps, my personal favorite so far is NetNewsWire (I realize it could be better, of course, but for free it’s nice). Having your RSS reader which syncs perfectly with my desktop news reader is fantastic. I also like VoiceNotes as a free voice recorder and I think PhoneSaber is hilarious. PocketPedia is also wonderful, as are the free news apps Mobile News (from the AP) and NYTimes. And I have an AppleTV at home, so Apple’s Remote is also excellent. Overall the App Store appears to be a huge win, and serves as a reminder that the iPhone is really a mobile computer with a phone on it, not just a fancy phone. Oh, and can’t forget PCalc.

As an iPod
Hardly novel, I know, since there are two ways to get the iPod features like this, both the iPod Touch and the original iPhone have this functionality. However, I have to say I really like the iPhone as a video iPod. I like to watch movies when I’m on an airplane, and my 5g video iPod screen is just barely tolerable for this. The iPhone is much better as a movie watching device. Oh, here’s how this is 3G-relevant: 16G means there’s actually enough space for movies; a 4G iPhone would be useless here.

GPS
I’ve never owned any kind of GPS device before and I thought that having GPS on the iPhone would be neat, but I didn’t know how really useful it would be. Turns out it’s fantastic, at least when traveling. Normally I’m very good with directions and navigation, but sometimes when reality doesn’t line up with my mental model (in particular, a highway in Rochester, NY stops being a highway and I became unsure I’d still be able to use that road to get where I was going). GPS let me know all would be well. However, the really killer use was with location-aware applications; I wanted to stop at a drugstore in Erie, PA (a place I don’t know at all) and found the nearest drugstore with the “iWant” application, which I downloaded right when I realized I might want it. iWant was right on the money. I will never go back to not having this. I expect someone will come up with a nice dash-mount kit for the iPhone soon, and when TomTom or whoever else comes up with a nice audio turn-by-turn bit of software for it, I’ll be all over that as well.

Battery Life and 3G vs. EDGE
I knew the 3G battery life wouldn’t be fantastic, but I didn’t realize how not-fantastic it would be. I’m going to have to keep chargers everywhere—home, office, car, at least—because I’m clearly going to have days where the thing won’t make it the full day on one charge. That’s kind of a drag. In some sense, that’s not really a surprise, though, as the original reason cited for not including 3G in the original iPhone is power requirements for 3G. And, apparently, the iPhone 3G does OK on battery life for a 3G device (apparently they all suck). I found that switching to EDGE-only makes the battery last for ages, but of course EDGE is a lot slower; why get a 3G device just to use EDGE? Good question, though I find that EDGE is tolerable for text-only newsfeed reading, but horrible for things like Web pages and app downloading. (This is the same for email, by the way: for text-only email EDGE is OK, but for attachments one needs 3G.) And 3G is definitely good enough to be acceptable for Web browsing and the like.

Gestalt
The whole is much greater than the sum of all the parts. I love having all of these functions in my pocket. While of course better battery life would be great, I think the current state is tolerable. In fact, I’d have to say this is a huge leap forward; this is a reasonable chunk of having a real computer which is always available. Frankly, this is a fantastic device. It is immediately clear to me that it will be worth putting up with AT&T’s crappy plans and all the rest. There was a time in my life—very brief, I’ll admit—where I carried a cell phone, an iPod (3rd gen), and a Palm V with me, and I still didn’t feel like any of these quite had it right. Well, now I have better than all three of them in a single package, only the iPhone absolutely crushes the Palm as a mobile computing platform. I’m much more of a techie than a phone user, but I have to have a phone. This fits what I want incredibly well.

Competitors
Now, I admit that I haven’t owned any of the more recent competitors to the iPhone 3G, though I have played with a few of them at least a little. Having now seen what really makes the iPhone work for me I can’t see how most of them would stand up to it, at least for me. YMMV, of course; just because the alternatives aren’t better for me doesn’t mean I believe that’s true for everyone else. (You listening, BlackBerry fanboys?)

One of the things competitors like the Instinct advertise is that they also have a touch screen. Ugh, talk about missing the point. Yeah, the touch screen is great, but what kind of software do you have behind it? Is it a real Web browser or the typical mobile piece of crap? Can you just touch to select, or can you use gestures meaningfully like on the iPhone? What about third-party applications which integrate with other features like the GPS? Got any of that? No? Then I don’t care if you sell for $70 less than an iPhone; you’re not really on the same playing field, at least for me.

The obvious real competitor is BlackBerry. The only ‘Berry I’ve played with much is the Pearl, which is a pretty stripped-down model. I’m sure the Bold is (err, will be) much better overall—but will the Web browser still suck? Regardless, the Bold will have a lot of stuff on it that the iPhone lacks and only a complete idiot wouldn’t acknowledge that it’s a legitimate competitor. For me, the physical keyboard is one of the major drawbacks of the Bold. Most of the time I’m using the iPhone, I’m not typing. Reading news feeds, surfing the Web, playing games, looking at the GPS, etc.: for those things I don’t need a keyboard and, more importantly, I don’t want to give up the screen space to have it. When I need it, it’s there. Now, if my primary use was email, that might be different. I have read and composed email on my iPhone and it works fine, but that’s only one of many uses. So, for me, the Bold would not be better, but I can see how it would be for some people. BlackBerry seems to be getting that and we’ll see what the Thunder actually brings to the table (it’d better be more than 1G of on-board storage, that’s for sure). Personally I’m hoping the Thunder is awesome so that Apple will be forced to respond, ultimately raising the bar for all phones.

Still, having said all these wonderful things about the iPhone, I’d have to be a fool to miss the fact that it’s not perfect. Some of this stuff I mentioned before I even had one, and having one has demonstrated that these things do indeed bug me, plus some more that I hadn’t thought of at the time:

Desiderata
• MMS. OK, I didn’t think I’d really care about the lack of MMS, but it turns out that I was wrong (that happens a lot). Frankly, I’d much rather send and receive images and such in email, particularly since the iPhone handles email so well. However, other people have MMS, and can send me an MMS, and I can’t read one easily. What happens when someone sends one to my iPhone is AT&T sends me SMS with a URL and login/password to a web site where I can view the original message—as an SWF. Ugh. I’d MUCH rather just see everyone switch to email, but that probably won’t happen soon. I’d much prefer AT&T take the incoming MMS and turn it into an email rather than deliver it as a crappy Web page. I know, hoping for something from AT&T is like hoping for a no-mudslinging political campaign. Oh well. It’s still not a big deal but it’d be nice if this were fixed.
• Modem. I’d still like to use my iPhone as a modem for my laptop, either tethered or via Bluetooth.
• Keyboard. No, I don’t want a physical keyboard built into the phone—screen real estate is still the limiting factor for many things, as I said—but if I have a Bluetooth keyboard handy, I’d like to be able to use it, to continue to preserve that precious screen space.
• Copy and paste. I haven’t wanted it nearly as often as I’d have thought, but when I have, I’ve been annoyed to not have it. In particular, when replying to an email, I want to quote only a part of it, not the whole thing, and there’s no easy way to make this happen on the iPhone.
• Voice dialing is coming from a third party, or so I’ve been led to believe. Sooner would be better.

I still can’t believe all the hate out there leveled at the camera and lack of video recording. Look, I’ve seen pictures taken with 4 and 5 MP cell phone cameras, and you know what? They aren’t much better than the 2 MP pictures from iPhones. Why? Because there is a lot more to picture quality than megapixels. In particular, there’s the issue of a decent lens/optics, and virtually none of those are going to be solved dramatically better on a cell phone platform; throwing more pixels at the problem means virtually nothing. If you want good pictures/video, buy a dedicated camera; you can get a really nice 7-8 MP pocket-size job from Canon or Sony or whoever for like $150. If pictures are that important to you, it should be well worth it. Cell phone cameras are for quick-and-dirty snapshots, and that’s it, no matter how many MPs are stamped on the thing.