Category: Mac stuff

So, AT&T just announced the iPhone 3G pricing plans. The individual plans are basically what was expected: $30/month above the regular wireless plan for unlimited visual voicemail and 3G data, plus additional charges for SMS messaging. Yes, it’s more expensive than the original iPhone plan but the the phone is cheaper and you get faster data plus GPS, so that’s all fine by me.

But then look at the family plans. The entry level family plan (700 minutes) is $130/month. How much is a non-iPhone 700 minute per month family plan? $70/month. That’s double the $30 upcharge for an individual plan—why? And do note that’s not for two lines of 3G data, since additional iPhone lines are $40; non-iPhone family plans have additional lines at $10/month, so there’s the extra $30 for 3G data. So what’s the extra $30/month for? It makes no sense. But wait, it gets worse: there’s only one option for SMS for family plans, which is $30/month for unlimited SMS. What if someone only wants a few hundred messages to share among the family members? Nope, gotta pay an outrageous 20 cents per SMS there; no $5/month for 200 messages like with the individual plans.

So, if I want to get an iPhone and my wife wants to have the same service provider as me so we only have one monthly bill and get free calls to each other, but she doesn’t want an iPhone, it’s actually cheaper for us to get entirely separate plans, as an iPhone individual plan with 200 SMS is $75/month and the basic AT&T non-iPhone individual plan is $40/month which comes to a total bill of $115/month. The entry level family plan is, as noted, $130/month and includes no SMS. Is that completely moronic or have I missed something? By making family plans more expensive (not less, which is the usual model), AT&T appears to be actively trying to discourage people from switching their family on to AT&T if only one family member wants an iPhone. Brilliant business strategy

Ugh. I think maybe my wife will just keep T-Mobile, since they have a $30/month individual plan.

There are no shortage of iPhone naysayers out there, and one of the criticisms has been the service provider. That appears to be a pretty valid point.

So, what marketing genius wants to take credit for the family pricing plans?

I guess it could be worse, I could be in Canada.

So, the big event finally arrived, the new iPhone is out there, or at least the specs are. And, of course, several people have asked me for my thoughts, so I thought I’d blog it so I only have to answer once.

First and foremost, way cool. 3G speed is awesome and full GPS is a really nice bonus. I don’t have a strong reaction either way to the plastic (as opposed to the old aluminum). It would be great if the whole thing could have been thinner, but the total size is about the same and that’s OK. With 3G and better battery life (well, more or less), I wasn’t really expecting them to be able to make it smaller.

What I am bummed about is the later release date; I was hoping for the June 18th date that was a popular number on the blogosphere. It’s not so much the waiting I mind as the timing—I’m going off on a family camping trip with all my zillion in-laws starting on July 13; not exactly the prime environment to tinker with a new techie toy, you know? And this looks to be a good toy.

The fact that you can’t buy them on-line, and the perception that you have to have it activated right there in either the Apple Store or an AT&T store is kind of a drag. (Though there’s a hint that such activation won’t actually be required; this will need to be sorted out.) If I do decide to try to get one right on the 11th, I’ll have to try to decide where to make the attempt. There’‘s an iPhone-supporting AT&T store right around the corner from my house but I’d kind of rather get one at an Apple store, especially if there’s going to be a long wait while they activate everybody. Then I have to guess which Apple store (there are three within reasonable distance of me) to head over to at 5am. Yes, I’ll probably get up really early to try to get one on the 11th. Well, probably, anyway.

The piles of new software for this thing (actually, for any iPhone) look to be amazing. I was completely blown away by the game demos. I’m not really all that much of a gamer, but just the fact you could even run something like Kroll on an iPhone is impressive. I thought the AP application was also pretty cool; for free, too, which is excellent.

There are some other topics to be attacked yet, though, which even deserve their own headings:

Price
Hooray for the price drop; one has to think at $200 they’ll sell these as fast as they can make them.

However, as some people have noted, AT&T’s price for unlimited data will be $10/month more with the 3G data plan, meaning that in a 2-year contract you ultimately pay $240 more in fees to AT&T. This, some are saying, means the iPhone 3G is actually more expensive. Nonsense, it’s still cheaper. I mean, yes, the total number of dollars you’ll shell out over two years will be higher, but the value of money isn’t constant over time. Besides inflation, there’s inherent value in deferring payment. Let’s say you’re buying something non-techie—a couch. There are two choices: pay $600 now, or pay $300 now and $300 in one year. Which do you think most consumers would choose? It’s the same amount of money but people will not be indifferent to the choice.

So, overall, I’d say the price situation has improved, but of course it’s not effectively half the price, as the Apple Web site is claiming. Frankly, for 3G and GPS, I would have been willing to pay more, so I still think this is a win.

I will admit that I wonder how the new iPhone pricing by AT&T will fit in with all their other stuff. When I switch to AT&T my wilfe will almost certainly want to switch as well. And, since I have AT&T for my home landline and DSL, how does this fit in with AT&T’s package deals? If I could get the package deal AT&T just offered me ($99/month for landline, DSL, and family wireless plan) and just add the $30/month for unlimited iPhone data on top of that, I’d be on that like white on rice.

Bummer Missing Features
Some things about the 3G/2.0 situation aren’t entirely clear. You’d kind of think that the lack of copy-paste would be fixed in software; is this part of the 2.0 software? I would hope so, but if not, well, shame on you, Apple. That’s just dumb.

I am very surprised that it doesn’t have voice dialing on it. However, since the address book is part of the core API, I’d be even more surprised if some third-party developer doesn’t release a voice dialer almost right away. So maybe this will be OK. Still a bit odd.

The other feature I’m even more bummed not to see is support for using the iPhone as a modem. At 3G speed, this would actually be worthwhile. If the phone supports 3G and Bluetooth, why shouldn’t I be able to use it to connect my laptop at 3G speeds? I’m not going to pay an additional $60/month or whatever to buy a 3G laptop access card when I’m already paying for unlimited 3G data. I think Apple really missed the boat on this one, though I wonder how much pressure they got from AT&T about this.

Expected Missing Features
As in, I didn’t expect Apple to do these anyway, though it would be nice if they did. Expandable storage via MicroSD or some such would be a bonus, but it’s not that big a deal. When the original iPhone was released I said I was hoping for more like 12GB for $500 and now it’s 16GB for $300, so I think the storage situation is at least OK.

I guess I was a little surprised that they didn’t include some kind of flash for the camera, but this isn’t really a deal-breaker for me as I don’t take a lot of cell phone pics now (my current phone doesn’t have a flash either), and it just isn’t that big a thing for me.

Irrelevant Missing Features
Of course, here I mean “irrelevant to me.” I don’t care about video recording (I don’t know if anyone else has bothered to point this out, but videos recorded on cell phones universally suck). My current phone has video recording and I never, ever use it. Since the iPhone has a full email client, the lack of MMS isn’t that big a deal; I’ll just email photos or put them up in an on-line gallery anyway. (MobileMe actually looks pretty good, by the way; this looks to be a real improvement9 over .Mac. assuming it actually works as advertised.) Lack of stereo Bluetooth is also radically overblown; the sound quality of your typical BT headset is so low that this hardly matters; I’ll use wired buds or cans when I care about audio quality, A2DP or not. I also don’t really care about the lack of Adobe Flash support, either—Flash also pretty much sucks, and I try to avoid Flash-based sites on my desktop as it is. If anything, the lack of Flash on the iPhone and the market share Apple will command might actually encourage Web developers to stop using Flash, which IMO is actually a win.

I’m having this very weird confluence-of-thought thing going with John Gruber right now. My last post was about keyboards and my old Apple Extended Keyboard II, and then a few days later Gruber devoted an entire episode of his podcast The Talk Show to it.

It’s odd because after my last blog post, I thought about why I had given up on what was once my favorite keyboard. It was a combination of no media keys and flaky compatibility problems I always had with the old drivers for the iMate, Griffin’s ADB-to-USB adapter. But then I realized those were all problems in OS 9, which was prone to flakiness whenever it came to third-party devices. Under OS X, I discovered, there’s no software required at all to use the iMate; it just works.

The other issue is the media keys, in particular, I really like having volume and iTunes control at my fingertips without mousing. Then the solution came to me: the PowerMate, also from Griffin. I bought one of these years ago but I never really used it because my Logitech Elite keyboard had all those iTunes controls and a volume wheel, so I never used it. I dug that out, installed the drivers, and discovered that it does exactly what I missed.

So I un-mothballed my old (I mean that, it’s from 1990) AEK II. Keyboards actually get pretty nasty so I spent like 45 minutes cleaning it. And it’s wonderful! I had forgotten what a terrific piece of hardware it is. The only really annoying thing about it is the lack of a wrist rest; I haven’t used a keyboard without an integrated wrist rest in ages. So after a trip to Office Depot for a wrist rest, I’m back in business.

And then today the esteemed Mr. Gruber posted pictures of his old AEK II. See the divot he’d worn into his space bar after years of use? Well, guess what? Mine has the same divot.

Interesting how similarly they’ve worn. (John’s a much better photographer than me; IRL mine looks even more like his pictures.) This makes me worry that this one isn’t long for this world. It is, after all, almost 18 years old (though it got the last roughly seven years off, or partially off, for good behavior).

So, if anyone has one of these bad boys still new in the original box—or John, if you get any extras in response to your podcast plea—let me know. I’ll be happy to buy it!

So, does anybody make a decent Mac keyboard anymore?

I haven’t liked any Apple-branded keyboard since the venerable Apple Extended Keyboard II. (Yes, I actually still have one, but it lacks modern keys for things like iTunes control and CD eject. That, and I’ve found ADB to USB drivers to be a bit flaky in the past, though that was under OS 9.)

For a long time I used a (now-obsolete) Logitech Elite keyboard. The feel is OK (not great, but OK), the number of extra buttons is about right, and the zero-tilt hand positioning is good. The only problem these days is that the driver software—termed “Logitech Control Center,” or LCC—is simply awful from a compatibility standpoint. If they fixed the software I’d just keep using this. Failing this, right now I’m using a Logitech S530 which is natively a Mac keyboard so can be run without LCC. It qualifies as “barely passable.” Am I stuck with this or is there really something better out there?

So what’s the alternative? I won’t go with anything from Matias, since years ago I tried their “Tactile Pro” keyboard (same switches as the old Apple Extended II) but several of the keys failed, and they never answered any of my calls or emails about it. Even if that was a one-in-a-million lemon, I won’t buy things from a company with customer service which is that bad.

So what’s the answer? A Kensington keyboard? The reviews on Amazon of their driver software are also less than stellar. God forbid, a Microsoft keyboard? That’s a scary thought, but maybe that’s the answer.

I’m open to suggestions.

Not that anyone else will care, but Monday I did something I’ve been both dreading and looking forward to for a while: I changed email clients. Why is this a big deal? Well, I probably spend as much time in my email client as in any other application, so my mail client impacts my day like few other changes in my electronic world.

I just switched from BareBones’s Mailsmith to Apple’s Mail (I’ll go into the reasons for this later). Making a change like this will always include transitional pain. What surprises me is that I can’t find any site with stuff to ease the change. Keyboard shortcuts are all different, but those can be re-assigned pretty easily. But some of the other stuff is harder. In just two days, I already have some strong impressions.

Stuff I already like better about Mail:
• I’m running Leopard, and Mail can use QuickLook on attachments. I like QuickLook in the Finder, and I didn’t think of this before I saw it, but email is the ultimate place for it. It might have been worth it for this feature alone. Mail seems to handle attachments better in other ways as well.
• IMAP support. Someday in the not too distant future, I’ll be getting an iPhone, and that means I’ll really need IMAP.
• Speed. Mailsmith had become such a dog, especially on Intel hardware. I love being able to click a column header to sort by that and have a mailbox with thousands of messages sorted immediately, or mark 50 messages as read and not have to wait for the spinning beach ball for 20 seconds.
• Better integration with other apps. For example, I use OmniFocus, and it plays very well with Mail. And SpamSieve now seems to play as well with Mail as with Mailsmith. (Actually, better, since the spam mailbox can now be sorted by spam probability, which is great.)
• Dynamic spell checking.

Stuff I already miss:
• Mailsmith’s text editing environment. Obviously, the Mailsmith editor is based on BBEdit, which means it rocks. What I miss most of all is the “Rewrap” command, which re-wraps the selected bit of text and maintains the quote level. Years ago—before Mailsmith existed—I used Eudora, and had an Applescript which copied the current text, opened it in BBEdit, and then I used another script to bring it back to Eudora. I would just do that again, except for:
• Applescript support. Mail has some, but not nearly as much as Mailsmith, which is the king of scriptability. Some of the things that are gone don’t surprise me, but others boggle my mind. In particular, Mail does not provide Applescript access to the contents (the text) of an email message that is being composed, nor access to the message associated with a window. This is totally indefensible—hey, Mail team, what gives? How could you not want this property?
• Annotation. Mailsmith supports things like notes on emails and coloration under script control, which allows all kinds of tagging that is hard to do in Mail.

I hate rich text/HTML email and thought I would miss Mailsmith’s auto conversion into plain text, but Mail actually handles this pretty well.

The other thing that surprises me is that I can’t find any sites devoted to making this transition. Surely I can’t be the only one who has dumped Mailsmith for Mail? I know at least John Gruber did it—anyone else?

Postscript
Why the change? I’ve been using Mailsmith since before version 1.0 (I was a beta tester for it), which works out to something on the order of a decade. I’ve always really liked the way the BareBones folks have conceptualized the task of dealing with email. But in the last year or so, I’ve developed more of a love/hate relationship with it. It hasn’t been updated in years (May 2005) and isn’t Intel-native. It’s dog slow, and the lack of updates means that it’s fallen behind the technology curve pretty badly. I didn’t dump it last summer because last April BareBones started a public beta test, but the betas have been, well, betas. I tried several iterations, and I was never able to successfully migrate to it, and of course it has stability issues, and I hate losing email. Also, there’s the IMAP thing. But it’s definitely weird to make the switch.

Now there’s a headline that I never thought I’d write. Generally speaking, I have a pretty active dislike for Windows, mostly because the UI & QC are so poor. Don’t even get me started on things like adding a printer under Windows… Anyway, the idea here is not to try to ignite a Mac vs. PC hubub, because those generally end up being pretty stupid religious wars.

But, there is something that Windows does much better than a Mac. That thing is this: backward compatibility.

I have a new Intel Mac. It’s very nice, and it’s very fast, and Leopard is pretty cool, but I’m not running Leopard full-time because there’s software I need that isn’t Leopard-happy (SPSS, I’m looking mostly at you). Heck, I’m still struggling with the transition to Intel, which has orphaned other software I use regularly (that’d be MCL).

The real thing moving to an Intel Mac seriously orphaned, though, is Classic. Why? Well, I’m not much of a gamer, but there is one game which I enjoy and was really my only reason to run Classic: Civilization II. (Really, I’ll stop when I finish this next turn.) With the Intel Mac, no more Classic, so no more Civ2. Now, Civ4 runs really nicely in Mac OS X, and it’s a fine game–but I still miss Civ2. I had started looking into SheepShaver, but that was clearly going to require work and I hadn’t gotten to it.

Then, I was in a half-price bookstore, and on a software shelf, for a whole $3.98, was Civilization II for the PC. And then it hit me: I could play Civ by running Windows! Oh, but the game is dated 1996… would 11-year old software for Win95 really still run on XP. Answer: yes, perfectly, without a hitch. I just works. Heck, I don’t even need to boot Windows, it runs in emulation on VMWare just great. Runs faster than the Classic version did on my dual-2.7GHz G5, too.

Apple has done a great job transitioning across two OSs and three hardware architectures in the time I’ve been a Mac user (that’s 20 years now!)—I doubt Microsoft could have pulled it off nearly as well—but there’s a cost. There’s a lot of software that’s three or four years old that I can’t run on a new Mac. But 11 year old Windows software? No problem.

There’s some irony in there somewhere.

Sorry, got to go, the Sioux are attacking St. Louis again…

As noted, I use AppleScript here and there. One of the annoying things about AppleScript is that you can’t natively just ask “how big is the main monitor?” There are workarounds, such as this, but as noted, it doesn’t necessarily handle multiple monitors properly. Since I almost always run with multiple monitors, that’s not a good solution for me.

Well, turns out someone solved this a long time ago, but that solution is well-hidden, and it relies on calling a shell script:

on screenHeight()
        (word 3 of (do shell script ¬
        “defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver | grep -w Height“)) ¬
        as number
end screenHeight

Hunh?

It’s not that bad. The ‘defaults read’ part of that just reads from the preferences file. What makes this work is that the “com.apple.windowserver” prefs file is created and updated by the system, and the first entry in this file is the main monitor! Thus, when the output of that command (you can see the record by just running “defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver” in the Terminal) is piped into grep, the item found is the height of the main monitor. Cool.

If you want the width of the main monitor, just substitute “Width” for “Height” in the above mini-script.

Incidentally, the way I used to solve this (rather than relying on reading the size of the desktop) relied on the Jon’s Commands set of osaxen, but those break on Intel machines. Bummer, as they’re amazingly useful…

Consumer choice made simple.

Linked from Fake Steve.