Category: Mac stuff

Apple had a non-MacWorld event yesterday. First, new iMacs. They look pretty cool, but I’m not really in the market for an iMac, so I’m going to ignore those. Bummer about the small bump to the Minis, because I did just buy one of those for my wife. Oops.

New iLife. The iLife app I used most is iPhoto, and I’m happy to see any kind of streamlining of the publishing photos to the Web. iPhoto 5 had a nice interface for publishing photos to the Web, but the iPhoto 6 process, going through iWeb, is less direct and kind of annoying. Hopefully the new Web Galleries in iPhoto 7 will be better. I don’t use iMovie much (partly because I’ve never liked it much), but the new “view anywhere” features do have some appeal. I just don’t take many movies. Overall, though, seems like reasonable incremental improvement.

No, the real bombshell for me is the new iWork. I’ve been waiting for a reasonable alternative to Excel for ages and ages. (Mariner Calc just doesn’t cut it, see my recent blog post on that.) So now there’s Numbers, an Apple spreadsheet which reads and writes Excel files. I just hope that it has some reasonable statistical functions and it’d really really nice if it did a good job of line and bar graphs with error bars. I can’t wait to try Numbers out and see what it can really do. Of course, the bar’s not really high.

The other thing I’m excited about is the new version of Pages. Pages has some good features, but has had the worst formatting UI for things like fonts. And, of course, I work with people who use Word and really need the “track changes” capability. The new Pages appears to now have addressed both of those issues. Excellent! (Of course, in the last couple weeks I was pretty happy to see the new Nisus Writer Pro, too, so we’ll see which way I ultimately go.)

None of the new stuff in Keynote looks especially compelling to me, but I liked Keynote already (it already blew away PowerPoint even without the new stuff).

So, the winner today, for me, is the new iWork—I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on it.

So, I’ve finally taken the plunge and gotten an Intel Mac. I know I’m late to the game (I also only just now got a video-capable iPod and no, I don’t have an iPhone). I’ve been late to the Intel party for two reasons: one, I just got new Macs a few months before the Intel boxes came out, so my machines weren’t really out of date, and two, not all the software I use on a regular basis has been ported to Intel. Not that all software has to be Intel-native, the Rosetta environment seems to work really well. No, two of my mission-critical applications don’t run at all on Intel machines; those would be SPSS and Macintosh Common Lisp (MCL).

SPSS not running is just annoying. I’m also less than thrilled with SPSS’s response on this. Intel stuff was announced and available to developers years ago. SPSS is really expensive software developed by a good-sized company so any excuse in the “we don’t have the resources” is utter crap. SPSS originally said they’d have a Mac version available (version 15, skipping version 14) during “summer 2007.” What they’re saying here is that SPSS 16 for Mac will come out in the second half of 2007, which probably means April 2008 (if we’re lucky). Feh. I’d sort of like to take this as motivation to switch to R, but I just have too much legacy SPSS to make this easy.

The other major problem is MCL, which also doesn’t even launch under Rosetta. I know, Lisp isn’t the mainstream computer language even in AI anymore, but I’m dependent on it. Porting all my legacy MCL code to any other Lisp will be a royal pain, because lots and lots of it is GUI code for running experiments. Allegro is radically to expensive and free Lisps like OpenMCL and SBCL don’t have straightforward GUI support. That leaves LispWorks. LispWorks isn’t bad, and generates really fast code, but is clunky to work with compared to MCL. Actually it’s not even that clunky, but it’s different enough that porting lots of GUI code is a substantial amount of work.

The other thing I’m going to really, really miss when I move my main desktop machines to Intel Macs is Rogue Amoeba’s Detour. I love Detour, because I like channeling iTunes to a good stereo system and all other sounds to cheaper computer speakers. Detour makes that possible. I’m not sure how I’ll work around that. Anybody have any ideas?

Other things are way cool. Routine things are blazing fast (especially Quicksilver), booting Windows on a Mac via Boot Camp is a creepy experience, though not quite as creepy as running Parallels Desktop in “coherence” mode.

More notes as other things come up in the migration. Man, do I already miss MCL…

It’s generally a fun site, but this one is just so timely I had to post it.

(Courtesy Daring Fireball.)

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this is definitive, but this piece has a really interesting analysis of the price of a top-tier system. Of course, how many people really need such a system? But interesting nonetheless.

Being both a Mac guy and a human factors/user interface guy, I’ve had a lot of people ask me about my reactions to MacWorld. Actually, this happens with almost every MacWorld but this time I thought I’d actually blog some of my thoughts on this.

Obviously, the big announcement was the iPhone. This is an interesting device to be sure, with a high “wow” factor. A big touchscreen with softkeys and multi-finger gesture recognition certainly seems like a better idea than the dumb little keyboards on most “smart” phones today. And the thing is clearly loaded in terms of cool tech like the accelerometer and the skin sensor and such. And the form factor seems about right, too; with all that stuff, I was worried that it would be too thick to really be a good pocket-dweller. With all that, one of the first questions one of my colleagues asked me was “So, how long after the first ship date will we see you with one of those?”

Well, despite all the coolness—and there’s one heck of a lot of that—there are some issues. I will qualify this with two things: I didn’t watch the keynote very carefully, and I’ve only had a somewhat cursory run over the iPhone web site.

Now, to the issues: first, Cingular is not presently my provider, I have T-Mobile. T-Mobile’s plans are much better deals than Cingular’s, and I know virtually nobody who’s happy with Cingular’s customer service. I really don’t think it’s worth breaking my contract over it.

Beyond that, I don’t recall any discussion of battery life. (Am I wrong? Was this mentioned?) Seems like an awful lot of bright, high-rez display… won’t this thing need a recharge every day, maybe twice a day? That might be a limitation.

Speaking of that bright, high-rez display (160 ppi sounds very slick), I also wonder about keeping it clean and scratch-free. If your fingers will be on it all the time, how do you keep it clean? Some displays are a lot easier to keep skin oil off of than others. And how easily will it scratch? I have a little case for my Nano so I don’t worry to much about that, but this thing is all about the display and I’m not sure whether a case would interfere with the whole multi-tap stuff, and if that sexy display gets scratched easily, that’ll be bad.

It also wasn’t mentioned (I think) but there’d better be an “airplane mode” where the antenna can be turned off so you can use it as an iPod alone. It would be Very Bad™ if they screwed that up.

Another concern I have (again, maybe I just missed it) is that I don’t recall any mention of a dock connector. That seems like an oversight. First, I have a hard time believing that syncing over wireless is as fast and reliable as a physically-wired connection. Second, and much more of an obscure concern is the lack of a proper line out. I know, most people won’t care, but for audio geeks like me, that’s a bummer.

The last thing is that these things are a bit dear for the storage capacity. I’m not really objecting to the price—yes, it’s expensive, but I’d use it a lot, so I would be OK with that—but for $500 I want more than 8Gb. If I want to throw more than one movie on there along with a pile of music, space will be pretty tight. I’d like more like 12Gb for $500. Yeah, I’m a greedy little bastard.

So,. yeah, when my current T-Mobile contract is up (in 16 months), I’ll probably get one, but I’m not in a big rush. Between now and then they’ll get some of the kinks worked out, probably offer more storage, and if they offered an unlocked one, that’d be even better. I’ll have to see how the early adopters actually like the thing after a few months before I get TOO excited.

Other reactions… well, AppleTV looks nice. I’m not sure, I don’t have a strong urge to rush out and buy one of those, either, because right now I have a computer hooked up to the HDTV in my living room. Why do I need to shell out another $300 to do what I can already do from that machine, exactly? Of course, for lots of other people—those who don’t want a computer in their living room but do have an HDTV—it seems like a cool toy.

My other reaction was, to be frank, “that’s it?” I know the iPhone is a big deal and all, but I was really expecting more. iLife ‘07 at the very least, and I will admit I was really hoping for iWork ‘07 to be released with a spreadsheet, as I’m not especially thrilled with my current spreadsheet options. Excel has a crummy UI in some respects and crashes a lot, Mariner Calc is nice in some ways but has it’s share of issues as well, such as lack of many statistical functions, some bad UI choices of its own—for Alan Kay’s sake, why don’t the row and column of the currently-selected cell highlight so you know where you are?—and I’ve found calculation bugs in it, so I’m not sure I trust it. Am I missing some other great choice here? Anyway, I guess I wasn’t surprised at the lack of Leopard stuff or new quad-core machines or a subnotebook, but the lack of new iLife really surprised me.

Kudos to BareBones for the 1.4 version of Yojimbo. I’ve wanted to be able to launch the location associated with a password via a single keystroke for some time, and now I have it, yay!

Actually, this will work for not just passwords, but bookmarks and web items as well, check it out.

on run
        tell application “Yojimbo”
                set tSel to the selection
                if tSel is {} or class of tSel is not list then
                        display dialog “This script only works on selected items.” buttons {“OK“} default button 1
                else
                        set foundSomething to false
                        repeat with tItem in tSel
                                set tLoc to “”
                                if class of tItem is password item or class of tItem is bookmark item then
                                        set tLoc to location of tItem
                                else if class of tItem is web archive item then
                                        set tLoc to source URL of tItem
                                end if
                                if tLoc is not “” then
                                        tell application “Finder”
                                                open location tLoc
                                        end tell
                                        set foundSomething to true
                                end if
                        end repeat
                        if not foundSomething then
                                display dialog “Could not find any locations to launch.” buttons {“OK“} default button 1
                        end if
                end if
        end tell
end run

Just testing the latest version of MacJournal, which is what I use on the client side for blog entries. Supposedly, the new version will make things like this:

(that’s an image, or not if it’s not working right!)

a little bit easier to handle. We’ll see how it goes.