Mac Me Up

NetNewsWire: the last straw

2011-08-22T22:34:00.001+09:30

I've used NetNewsWire as an RSS reader for years. Personally, I don't think it's brilliant, but it's serviceable. A feature I quite like is its ability to sort subscriptions by the "attention" you pay them—the more articles in the feed that you read and open in a browser tab, the higher that subscription drifts over time. After a few weeks, the feeds you pay the most attention to are at the top of the list.

Tonight, my Mac Pro wedged itself somehow and needed a reboot. NetNewsWire was running at the time. I've just fired it up again, and everything has been reset: the historical attention data has been dropped on the floor, and the feeds are now in roughly alphabetical order. It's 2011. How can that kind of user data be so volatile?

So, anyway—NetNewsWire, it's not me, it's you. I'm off to download Reeder.

Lion vs Snow Leopard in daily use

2011-08-04T12:31:00.001+09:30

Despite resolving to be more cautious, I usually end up buying and installing new versions of OS X in the week of their release. Since it was distributed on the Mac App Store, I bought Lion on the day of its release. I installed it on my (ageing 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo) MacBook Pro immediately, but for a chain of reasons I've held off installing it on the Mac Pro. (Specifically, my wife needs to run a pre-historic version of some Windows application, so I have Parallels Desktop on that machine. I haven't purchased the last couple of upgrades to Parallels (they're too frequent and too pricey). Parallels Desktop 4 apparently won't run on Lion. So I need to either find an OS X equivalent of the application, or upgrade Parallels before I install Lion.)

Consequently, I'm running Snow Leopard and Lion on two different machines, and swapping between the two on a daily basis. Some observations:

I don't have a strong opinion on the change to scrolling behaviour. If anything, the new behaviour seems more "natural" in some sense—I think it had always struck me as slightly wrong that the metaphor was moving the scrollbar rather than moving the content of the viewport. Having said that, swapping between them regularly is utterly infuriating.
There are some even smaller changes that, while far from important or even interesting, serve only to annoy:
- Mail's Activity window shortcut has changed from Cmd-0 to Opt-Cmd-0. Pointless.
- There are apparently folders which Finder now doesn't display by default, such as ~/Library. Why?
- When I take my laptop away from the WiFi LAN at home, it continues to try and connect to the Time Capsule. Ad nauseam. I've dismissed the "unable to connect" dialog five times already this morning.
Skeumorphism is out of control. Changing the iCal and Address Book applications to closely resemble their iPad counterparts seems inexplicable to me. Two perfectly decent applications now look like toys.

Obviously Lion has upsides, and you can read about those anywhere. Using Lion and Snow Leopard in parallel has been interesting, though I would argue that the difference is more of a modest jump than a quantum leap.

Final Cut Pro X pricing

2011-06-22T18:40:00.001+09:30

I saw the news that Final Cut Pro X had hit the Mac App Store earlier today. I've got to say, from where I'm sitting (in the enthusiastic amateur corner), it looks like an awesome product. I bought Final Cut Studio 2 (including Final Cut Pro 6) a couple of years ago, and struggled slowly up the learning curve. FCP 6 is obviously outstanding software, but, from the previews and initial impressions written up today, FCP X looks revolutionary. (It will be interesting to read the reviews from the professional angle over the next few months.)

In Australia, Final Cut Pro X is priced at $A 349, compared to $US 299 in the US. Currently, the Australian dollar buys about $US 1.05—so I can buy $US 299 for just under $A 285. It's really not clear to me where my extra $A 64 is going. I've read justifications for differential pricing on, say, iTunes that involve regional record company deals. I don't see an analogous explanation for the pricing of Apple's own software. I'm pretty sure I'll end up buying Final Cut Pro X, but I'd much rather being doing so for $A 285.

AirPrint doesn't like my printer

2010-11-23T21:11:00.001+10:30

After hitting the "Check for Update" button, let's say "several" times this month, I finally upgraded iPhone and iPad to iOS 4.2.1. One of the first features I was keen to check out was AirPrint. I don't regularly find myself wanting to print from either device, but when I do, I really do.

My setup couldn't be more Apple: I have a HP Color LaserJet CP2025 connected to a Time Capsule which does the WiFi for the house. Both the iOS devices use the WiFi network when they're at home. I fired up Mail on the iPhone, selected an email, hit Print and tried to select a printer. All I got was a depressing "No printers found." It seems I don't have the right HP printer.

If the facts in that PC Mag article are to be believed, I'm astounded. AirPrint supports ten printers at launch? Not ten brands but ten printers. Clearly over-the-air printing from wireless devices is harder to implement than it would seem. All I want is text most of the time, nothing fancy: an email, a list, some directions. Evidently it's not just a matter of wrapping some boilerplate PostScript or PCL around that and throwing it at the printer. But seriously, Apple, ten printers?

MacBook Pro 17-inch Rechargeable Battery Review

2010-08-09T12:27:00.001+09:30

The battery in my MacBook Pro was on its way out. (It had developed two interesting (and by "interesting", I mean "highly annoying") behaviours. Firstly, it could barely hold a charge, even when the machine was asleep—it would drop from 100% to 50% in three days of sleep mode. Secondly, it no longer allowed the machine to shut down gracefully. Instead of the orderly warning icon and dialog at low charge, the machine would just spontaneously shut down. And not just at 20% or 10% charge, but at some random point which could be as high as 50%.) So I ordered a new one.

Shipping took longer than I had hoped. I've become accustomed to pretty rapid order fulfilment with Apple, but this took five business days to arrive. The packaging is nice. The battery arrived showing two (of five) LEDs on the bottom surface, and claiming 50% charge once I booted the machine. It seems to be charging. Overall, seems like a great battery. Of course, it's also the only battery available for this machine. And it wasn't cheap at $A 199.

iPad

2010-06-22T19:18:00.001+09:30

Not too surprisingly, I bought an iPad. If I recall correctly, the Australian online Apple Store started taking pre-orders on Monday 10 May 2010. I don't know what time on that day orders opened, but I was online at 9.00am, and ordered the 64G version with WiFi + 3G. It was all very smooth. Ordering online has become by far my preferred purchase method for Apple products. The delivery date was listed as 28 May (the first day of retail sales in Australia) from the moment the pre-order was lodged, and this never changed. (There was rumour of TNT Express possibly pushing out deliveries to the following week, but as far as I know this amounted to nothing.) I tracked my order with Delivery Status Touch. My iPad was delivered early on 28 May, as advertised. People queued outside Adelaide's poor excuse for an Apple Store, Next Byte, who apparently had no stock. Outstanding, Next Byte.

I forgot to uncheck music syncing for the first sync, and consequently iTunes started transferring more than 30G of music over USB, so I used the opportunity to head out in search of a pre-paid SIM card. Figuring I may as well stick with the devil I know, I headed to a Telstra Shop. (And, to be fair, their prices are, while perhaps not reasonable, about a tenth of what they ream iPhone users for. A tenth. I momentarily thought about the feasibility of tethering my phone to my iPad...) Naturally, the first store I went to had no stock. That's right: a retail store of Australia's largest carrier had no stock of micro-SIM cards on the iPad's retail launch day. Outstanding, Telstra. Apparently they were expecting some later in the day, but I was on a mission. The next store had some.

Setting up the 3G connection was reasonably painless. I made a redundant phone call to the service number, as it turned out the card had been activated in the store. And then that was it. 3G was on. Data usage has been slim. Telstra throws on 3G for the price of the card for the first month. That is, until June 30, at least, the card itself costs $A 30, for which you get 1G included, and they throw in a "bonus" 2G for the first month. I have in not restricted my data usage in any way: I've downloaded apps, streamed video and audio, browsed the web, read email, you name it, non-stop over 3G all month. With a few days to go until the end of the month, I'm heading up to 250M of usage. I guess I'm just not trying very hard.

Every hyperbole written about the device itself is true. The hardware is beautiful. The screen is large, clear and bright. It's really not "just a larger iPhone"—apps designed specifically for the iPad are an order of magnitude better than anything on the iPhone. I went a little crazy in the first few days, buying a load of apps just to have something to do. Current essentials include Reeder (if you read RSS feeds on the iPad and you're not using Reeder, you're doing it wrong), and Instapaper. I'm using Twittelator, which is serviceable, but frankly I hope there's a version of Twitter's app (or, the app previously known as Tweetie) in the pipeline. Every other Twitter app I've tested has sucked. I bought Apple's Pages just to try it out. It's nice, but I haven't used it extensively.

iPads are not cheap, and maybe there's not a use case for everyone just yet. But if you have an iPhone and you like it, get one. If you even think you might like an iPad, chances are you will. Get one.

Magic Mouse: 7 week review

2010-04-14T21:40:00.001+09:30

I bought a Magic Mouse a couple of months ago. I'm still a fan of the size, weight and design. Again, the standard Apple wired mouse always seemed a little light to me. The Magic Mouse seems about twice its weight.

As predicted, I got used to the touch-sensitive scrolling pretty quickly. The (optional) momentum behind the scroll (whereby, if you flick the surface of the mouse, the scroll continues well past the end of your actual gesture) is awesome. Flick it hard enough, and dozens of pages of text will scroll by at a time. I still really miss the side buttons which I had hooked up to expose the Desktop.

Battery life is good: I'm still on the original pair of AA cells at seven weeks, and the mouse tells me there's just over 50% remaining.

Migration Assistant: complete fail

2010-04-13T22:31:00.001+09:30

My wife just purchased a new MacBook Air. I've been looking forward to firing it up to check out the solid state disk. I figured I would do this the Apple Way: use Migration Assistant to move her files and applications from the outgoing MacBook to the new machine. I started over seven hours ago. This is how it went.

Over WiFi. The machines connected, and got to the stage where the Air was "Preparing information...". I think I gave it about 20 minutes, and with no progress I figured it was going to be slow over WiFi. I quit the process.
Over Ethernet using the Time Capsule as a switch. I moved both machines to the office and wired them up. I gave it a short while, but the MacBook claimed it lost the connection. On a wired LAN. Incredible.
I fired it up again in the same configuration, watched the "Processing information..." pinwheel spin for a while, and then quit.
I had read that a direct Ethernet connection could be made between the two machines: apparently a standard cable would be sufficient, a crossover cable would not be required. This time, I let the process go. And go. But after 5.5 hours "Processing information...", I'd had enough. Frankly, there was no indication that it was proceeding normally, and for all I knew one or both sides had crashed or was sitting in an infinite loop.

Rebooting the new Air yet again, I have just started off a restore from the MacBook's latest Time Capsule backup. This seems to be proceeding, and the estimate is a mere two hours. I assume this will work, though to be honest I'm a little nervous about restoring the backup made from a completely different machine.

In any case, the bottom line here is that the Migration Assistant user experience is absolutely rock bottom. To sit for 5.5 hours in a single state with nothing more than a pinwheel to suggest anything was proceeding as designed is not just poor, it's completely broken.

Magic Mouse: 24 hour review

2010-02-25T16:11:00.001+10:30

Until yesterday, I had been using the standard Apple wired mouse (with scroll ball and side buttons) that shipped with my Mac Pro. That was a decent mouse, but, frankly, I got tired of trying (usually with not a lot of success) to clean the scroll ball. (As an aside, the scroll ball has a pretty terrible failure mode: almost random scrolling. Sometimes a page would scroll up as I moved the ball down.)

I had been meaning to buy a Magic Mouse for a month or more. (In fact, I tried to buy one twice, most recently this week, but as usual, Next Byte has nothing useful in stock. Ever.) Yesterday, I picked one up at the Mac Centre at Norwood. So after 24 hours:

Installing it was easy, though not as easy as I had expected. Initially, I unplugged my wired mouse, turned the wireless mouse on, and waited, figuring some magic would happen. It didn't. In the end, I had to plug the wired mouse back in so I could launch System Preferences, and select the Mouse preference pane. It all came online pretty quickly after that.

As written everywhere, it's a pretty nice design. It sure looks good. Apple seems to be almost synonymous with outstanding industrial design these days, but only just over 10 years ago, they were shipping pretty much the most woeful mice ever made.

The Magic Mouse is a good weight. I always felt my wired mouse was a bit light, and had a tendency to slip all over the place. I got used to it, but I really like the extra weight in the Magic Mouse.

Touch sensitive scrolling works well. It's different to a scroll ball, but that's hardly surprising. I'll get used to it.

I really miss the side buttons on the wired mouse. I had them hooked up to expose the Desktop, and now I'm fumbling around with F11 again.

Summary: very cool mouse.

Aperture 3: Purchase and installation

2010-02-14T12:14:00.001+10:30

I've been an Aperture fan since version 1. Yesterday I decided to download the trial version of Aperture 3. The confirmation email that Apple sends with the trial activation key says this about already owning Aperture 2 (or 1):

1. If you already have a licensed copy of Aperture in your Applications folder, you need to move or rename it before installing the Aperture 3 trial.

Fine. I renamed it ‘Aperture 2’.

2. To open an Aperture library with an older version of Aperture (1.x or 2) after you use the Aperture 3 trial, drag the library onto the application icon of the older version.

OK, now I'm slightly confused. After using the Aperture 3 trial, which I'm about to learn won't allow you to upgrade an existing library anyway, I don't just go and open the newly renamed ‘Aperture 2’ application, I have to drag and drop my existing library? Aperture 2 will mysteriously forget where my library is? Although I back it up (using Aperture's in-app ‘vault’ system), I get pretty nervous about my Aperture library, particularly as it's a ‘managed’ library—there's not a lot of transparency about where my photographs are.

3. The trial version of Aperture 3 cannot upgrade a library created by an older version of Aperture. This is only supported in licensed versions of Aperture 3 since it permanently upgrades the library.

That's fine, and not unexpected, but by this point I was still trying to decode what was going to happen to my existing library in the unlikely event that I didn't buy an upgrade license and wanted to revert to Aperture 2.

I considered not installing the trial version at all, but I was very keen to see it. The Apple Store seemed to suggest that I could just purchase an activation key online, and that I wouldn't have to wait for a box to be shipped, but last time I tried that (with iWork '08, if I recall correctly), the claim was just flat out wrong—the Australian store simply wouldn't sell me an activation key online. Anyway, I downloaded and installed the trial. At the opening dialog, I was offered the chance to purchase the activation key, so I tried it. Safari fired up the Australian Apple Store, and I could, indeed, purchase a key on the spot. So I did. Apart from the slightly confusing email regarding the trial, everything was particularly smooth. I've just fired up Aperture 3 to check out the new features. This could take a while.

Apple Mail, Courier-IMAP and "Message no longer available"

2010-01-11T10:20:00.001+10:30

This post is going to contain some fairly obscure information. One for Google, really.

I moved the Logic Squad mail server to a new host, and everything went remarkably smoothly. The only weirdness was that Apple Mail would display, along with the other contents of my inbox, two messages entitled "message unavailable" from "System Administrator", one of them marked read, the other unread. I could delete them, but they would eventually come back. The problem was not Mail's, but the IMAP server's. It turns out that there's a file, courierimapuiddb in every Maildir that can get out of sync with the actual contents of a Maildir. The file can be safely deleted, and will be re-created by the IMAP server.

So, just for completeness, here are some keywords for Google: Apple Mail, IMAP, Courier-IMAP, FreeBSD, Maildir, "Message no longer available", courierimapuiddb.

New Viewer Window

2009-12-10T13:42:00.001+10:30

I've often sat reading mail in, say, a sub-folder for a mailing list, and, on noticing the red badge indicator for a new message in my inbox, have flipped back to the inbox to see what it was. Pretty much every time I did this, I thought, ‘Wouldn't it be great if Mail supported multiple views on your whole account so that I could, say, just Alt-` to another viewer window that I leave looking at my inbox?’

Today I discovered File > New Viewer Window.

iPhone (and iPod touch) feature request

2009-12-06T11:42:00.001+10:30

I really would have thought this would just work. I have my music collection in iTunes on my Mac Pro. I can use my MacBook Pro, for example, to stream that music over WiFi and play it somewhere else in the house, albeit over laptop speakers. I just plugged my iPhone into the (ageing and apparently incompatible) Bose SoundDock in the kitchen, and, unless I'm mistaken, there's no analogous option for streaming over WiFi to the iPhone. I don't see how there could be a technical or licensing impediment to implementing this for the iPhone and iPod touch—is there?

ClickToFlash

2009-10-31T11:38:00.001+10:30

Tired of Flash making Safari a resource hog? Install ClickToFlash. Do it now.

Saturday morning reboots

2009-10-31T09:48:00.001+10:30

I woke up to find the power out to the outlets in my office. Noting briefly that I still haven't looked into getting an uninterruptible power supply to allow for graceful shutdowns, I set about booting some machines back up. Hitting power on the Mac Pro brought up what I like to call the Grey Screen Of Death: the familiar Mac booting grey, with nothing else on the screen. No Apple logo, no progress spinner, just grey. (Completing the awesomeness of this was that it was Saturday morning. No chance to even get repairs started for another 48 hours.) I power-cycled again—same result. I don't know what made me think of it, but I disconnected a couple of powered USB disks from their ports. Win: the machine booted. Maybe just a coincidence, but the result was right.

Later, I pulled out my iPhone and hit the power button to wake it up. Nothing happened. I held it down. Nothing happened. I pressed every button in random combinations, and eventually the device woke. The UI was barely responsive: gestures wouldn't register, it would take seconds to return to the home screen, and so on. GeekStat (one-time shameless plug) told me the phone had been up for 21 days. I would have thought it could sustain longer uptimes, but a reboot worked (when I could finally get the UI let me perform one).

Now, on with the weekend.

iPhone 3GS + E92 BMW 335i via Bluetooth

2009-09-11T11:14:00.001+09:30

I had been trying to pair my iPhone 3GS to my car for about 24 hours now. Having navigated my way through the menu systems on both the phone and the car, I figured it should be easy: just pick a PIN and enter it on both devices. And yet I failed. Many, many times. I rebooted the phone. I rebooted the car. I Googled. They were obviously talking to each other, since the phone could see the car, and the car knew when the phone wanted me to confirm the PIN. But pairing failed over and over again.

It turns out, not surprisingly, that reading the instructions would have been sufficient. There were two points I missed in the instructions for the car:

I didn't have the ignition on to the second stage. This may not have been critical, since, as noted above, there was clearly some communication going on, but I did it anyway. Specifically: ‘Switch on the ignition, and, in addition, press the start/stop button without operating the brake or clutch pedal.’ To be honest, I had never done that before, and didn't even realise it was a feature.
This is the critical bit. When entering the PIN using iDrive, it is not sufficient to enter the PIN and just wait, which I had been doing. About a dozen times. The label ‘Confirm passkey’ that appears on the screen during PIN entry isn't just a label, it's a menu choice. So the sequence is: enter the PIN, select down on the controller to highlight ‘Confirm passkey’, and then select that with the controller.

What I had been doing was getting to the final step, and then letting the whole process time out. Repeatedly.

iPhone: I bit the bullet

2009-09-10T11:19:00.001+09:30

A year ago I decided to see whether I could get by with an iPod touch as a PDA . On the whole, that worked out pretty well. An additional benefit was that it let me stall for a while on my inevitable iPhone purchase. The lack of 3G network connectivity has hurt (it turns out I was quite over-optimistic about how easy it would be to get by with WiFi alone), and many times I've thought how cool geo-location would be (or, at least, reliable geo-location—sometimes the iPod knows roughly where it is), but on the upside I feel pretty good about denying Telstra 12 months of utterly obscene data charges.

About two months ago, I snapped and went on an expedition to buy an iPhone. It proved challenging. At last count, I think I had my name down on waiting lists at no fewer than five Telstra retail stores. On Monday, I, uh, snapped again—logged on to the online Apple Store, ordered a phone, and it was delivered the next day. (Of course, it wasn't really delivered the next day, so much as a courier dropped by my house when I wasn't at home, and I picked it up from the depot myself the day after that. But that's another rant.) I don't know what kind of supplier-retail dynamic is really going on there, but clearly there is stock, though apparently Telstra stores can't get any of it. (As an inevitable post-script, I got a call from a Telstra store the day my iPhone was delivered to tell me they had one for me. You couldn't make this up.)

It turns out that, despite my skepticism, changing over from an older GSM phone to a 3G phone really is a simple matter of turning up at a Telstra shop and getting a new SIM card. I also signed up for some data, though I literally can't bring myself to admit how much, nor how much I paid for it. Needless to say, it hurt.

Parallels Desktop 4

2009-09-03T22:01:00.001+09:30

Here's a neat way to force an upgrade path on your users: don't just freeze development on old versions, ensure that they don't even run after an operating system upgrade. I had been putting off upgrading to Parallels Desktop 4 for a while now. As I use it so infrequently, it seemed hard to justify the price. I upgraded to Snow Leopard this week, and, as it turned out, needed to run Parallels Desktop this evening. Version 3 won't even launch under Snow Leopard. Fair enough, maybe there's a genuine technical explanation. So I investigate upgrade pricing (which isn't too bad, to be honest), and download version 4. Then the fun starts.

I launch the installer. After a couple of clicks, it informs me that one of my virtual machines is suspended (as opposed to shut down). Apparently the installation can't proceed, but it's prepared to wait for me to shut it down. Of course, we've already established that I can't even launch Parallels Desktop 3. Catch 22. I can't launch the old version to shut down the virtual machine, and I can't install the new version until the virtual machine is shut down. (For the record, Google did manage to find me a Parallels knowledge base article on how to solve this.)
Now the installer is happy to proceed. It gets to a dialog where it tells me it's "Preparing Parallels Desktop 4 for Mac". It sits there for about 20 minutes, using about 0.5% CPU. I force quit the installer.
I run the installer again, this time racing through the dialogs as all my virtual machines are apparently in a satisfactory state. It gets to a dialog where it tells me it's "Preparing Parallels Desktop 4 for Mac". It sits there for about 20 minutes, using about 0.5% CPU. I force quit the installer.
Figuring that installing Parallels Desktop to run Windows XP, I should maybe just try to be more like a Windows user, I reboot the machine. I run the installer again, and this time it installs the application in a few minutes.

Ah, Parallels. Still comedy gold.

Time Capsule, AppleCare and Priority "Tools Down" Service Fee: Worth every cent

2009-09-02T18:57:00.001+09:30

I installed Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro two nights ago. In fact, I left it installing and went to bed. The next day, I finished off the installation and left the machine running on my desk for a few hours. Later, I tried to grab a document from it over the network, but couldn't connect to it. Figuring it might just need a reboot, I went to shut it down. After a minute, I got a screen that you really don't want to see: the grey shutdown colour, with a darker grey circle and bar through it in the middle. Not comforting. I forced the power off, and went to reboot: same screen. Ugly stuff.

Presumably the recent Snow Leopard installation was a coincidence, and I just had a dead disk. Browsing to the Time Capsule from a different machine showed that the most recent backup was mid-morning, so there would be zero data loss. It turns out I didn't skimp, and paid for the extended AppleCare Protection Plan at purchase time, so the machine still has over a year of warranty remaining. All that remained was avoiding the multi-week diagnosis–waiting for parts–repair timeline that usually ensues. Next Byte offer a priority "tools down" service, where (for $A 175) your machine goes to the front of the queue. I figured since the parts and labour would be covered by Apple that I would fork out for it. I did, and I had my laptop back within 24 hours. It's currently restoring from the last Time Machine backup, which (even though I've jacked it into a spare Ethernet port) I presume will take overnight.

Hewlett-Packard: crap installers since 1939

2009-08-13T20:01:00.001+09:30

I think this says it all:

That's the printer driver installer Hewlett-Packard sent out with my $A 1200 Color LaserJet CP2025. Naturally, it does none of the following:

Tells me what it's going to install.
Tells me where it's going to install it.
Gives me the option of paring down the install.
Provides any useful feedback about what it's doing as it proceeds.

Oh, and it wanted my password before it even brought up a window or dialog. Outstanding, HP. Truly outstanding.

And, as if all that is not awesome enough, there's this:

Wait for it...

Every drop-down menu in the driver dialog's custom tabs are like that. Maybe it's a code. It also assumes I am tri-lingual:

You just can't make this stuff up. Fortunately, these panels are for somewhat esoteric functions I will probably never use. (Well, I literally can't use them with this driver.) In any case, this is just woeful for a product costing $A 1200. I went to HP's website, and my installed version of the driver is still the current version available for download. That's as good as it gets.

Update: Installing the driver on a second machine, while still VISEtastic, showed no evidence of the user interface bugs captured above. On the first machine, I just re-started Safari (I was using a web page as a test document to print), and the print dialog righted itself. It is entirely possible, then, that the problem had nothing to do with HP. That doesn't make it right to bundle a VISE installer with a $A 1200 LaserJet, though.

Printer for Mac OS X

2009-08-07T21:55:00.001+09:30

Dear Lazyweb,

My HP LaserJet 2200D seems to have died. (It was a great printer. I suspect getting it repaired would cost more than buying something new, though.) Here are my requirements for a new printer:

I am a big fan of HP. (I had a DeskJet 500 for years prior to the 2200D.) I probably want a LaserJet or Color LaserJet, though I would be prepared to look at other brands. I'm kind of equivocal about colour.
I assume all printers talk USB these days. (I've been out of the market for some time—the 2200D has a parallel port. Remember those?) Built-in Ethernet would be nice, though I can presumably plug it into the USB port on my Time Machine.
I want automatic duplexing. This is a hard requirement, and unfortunately I think it puts me out of the ‘home’ category. (What is it with those arbitrary categories?)

I think that covers it. So, what should I buy?

(Oh, why am I asking in a blog post when I know my requirements? Because HP's website, much like every other corporate website these days, is essentially impenetrable. I don't want to have to decide whether I'm ‘personal’, ‘SOHO’ or ‘SMB’—I just want to see your printers. I clicked around for half an hour, came out knowing less than when I went in.)

Time to dump NetNewsWire?

2009-07-31T14:46:00.001+09:30

I've been using NetNewsWire as a feed reader for some time now. I just got the following email in my inbox. In case you literally don't have the strength to scroll past it, let me tell you my response: Huh? The mail is long and impenetrable. I just want to keep using NetNewsWire—I have no idea whether that's even possible. I really don't have time to decode two pages of corporate wankspeak. I am now on the lookout for a new feed reader. Suggestions welcome.

You spoke and we listened: in response to customer demand, NewsGator's best-of-breed consumer RSS applications now work with Google Reader. Google Reader will become the online companion to and the synchronization platform for our award-winning RSS reader applications – FeedDemon and NetNewsWire.

In conjunction with this announcement, NewsGator is making changes to several of its consumer RSS Readers. NewsGator will continue to support all its individual end-user applications for enterprise customers. However, NewsGator will continue to develop and support only a sub-set of these applications for free consumer use. FeedDemon and NetNewsWire have new versions for consumers that we encourage you to download as soon as possible. NewsGator’s other individual end-user applications will not continue to be supported for free consumer users after August 31, 2009. Again, all of NewsGator’s individual end-user applications will continue to be supported for paying Enterprise customers.

As part of this transition, NewsGator Online users will need to migrate to Google Reader by August 31, 2009. In addition, NewsGator will no longer support the free versions of NewsGator Inbox, NewsGator Go!, and NewsGator’s RSS features (Shared Clipping Feed, Blogroll, Ratings, Headlines, Browser Toolbar, and Desktop Notifier). NewsGator will also continue to support FeedDemon (for Windows) and NetNewsWire (for Mac and iPhone) for all customers – free or paid. If you have questions as to whether or not you qualify as a paying enterprise customer, please contact your account manager.

With these product changes, we recommend that you take the following actions (to assist you, we have a list of recommendations, step-by-step transition instructions, and informative FAQs on our website):
FeedDemon – you may continue to use your current version (synchronization won’t be supported after August 31, 2009). However, we recommend that you download the latest version of FeedDemon and sign-up for a Google Reader account for synchronization. Please refer to our transition instructions for assistance.
NetNewsWire for Mac – you may continue to use your current version (synchronization won’t be supported after August 31, 2009). However, we recommend that you download the latest version of NetNewsWire and sign-up for a Google Reader account for synchronization. Please refer to our transition instructions for assistance.
NetNewsWire for iPhone Customers – a mobile RSS Reader requires synchronization and a new version of NetNewsWire for iPhone that supports synchronization with Google Reader will be available soon. We will notify you when it is available so that you can download the latest version of NetNewsWire and sign-up for a Google Reader account prior to August 31, 2009.
NewsGator Inbox – we will no longer support NewsGator Inbox nor release new versions of the product. You may, however, continue to use your current version (synchronization won’t be supported after August 31, 2009). Please refer to our transition instructions for assistance.
NewsGator Online – NewsGator Online will not be available after August 31, 2009. Please transition to Google Reader by August 31, 2009. Please refer to our transition instructions for assistance.
NewsGator Go! – NewsGator Go! will not be available after August 31, 2009. Please transition to a new mobile RSS Reader by August 31, 2009. We have included alternate RSS Reader recommendations in the transition instructions on our website.
NewsGator’s Shared Clipping Feed – this feature will not be available after August 31, 2009. Google Reader will now provide you with this capability. Please see our FAQs for more information.
Blogroll, Ratings and/or Headlines – these services will not be available after August 31, 2009. Please remove these components from any blog or web site. Please see our FAQs for more information.
Browser Toolbar or the Desktop Notifier – these features will not work after August 31, 2009, nor will we offer new versions of these features. Please see our FAQs for more information.
Bottom line for you: We keep improving our FeedDemon and NetNewsWire applications, and you now can sync with and use the web based RSS reader you've been asking for. We've been working with the Google team to make these changes as smooth as possible, and they are thrilled to welcome all NewsGator users to the Reader family.

For more information, check out our blog or Google’s blog.

Sincerely,

Greg Reinacker
CTO & Founder
NewsGator Technologies

Thanks, Greg. Goodbye NetNewsWire.

iPhone exhaustion

2009-07-22T20:10:00.001+09:30

I've spent two weeks trying to buy an iPhone. I've now been to four Telstra Shops, and one Telstra dealer. I've left my name on waiting lists at two of them. Depending on the excitability of the salesdroid, there's either an ‘Australia-wide shortage’ or a ‘worldwide shortage’. In any case, I have no iPhone.

I am seriously considering buying one outright from the online Apple Store. Apparently¹, I can do that, upgrade my current GSM SIM², stay on my current plan, and just pay up-front for some monthly data.³

Notes:

Of course, I simply cannot reliably find this out. Surely the following is a FAQ: ‘I currently have a Motorola V3. It's post-contract, and while I suspect I am being reamed by my monthly plan, I am mostly satisfied. I would rather gnaw off a limb than try to decipher the quagmire of plans that you offer, so I will probably buy an iPhone outright from Apple. Is it then just a matter of fronting up to a Telstra Shop and asking for a new SIM?’
Again, apparently it's literally a matter of asking for a new 3G SIM to replace my current SIM. I am sceptical.
By which I mean partake in the Festival of Ream.

iPod touch as PDA: milestone

2009-06-28T19:53:00.001+09:30

This will be of little interest to anyone, other than as a signal that my iPod touch-as-PDA experiment is really working out: I've actually deleted almost all of the music I had been carrying on my iPod touch because I was running out of space for more important things. That is, I no longer really consider it an iPod, or, at least, I don't consider music storage to be its primary function. My entire music collection has nudged over 22G, and with a mere 32G available on the iPod touch, I had been finding it a squeeze to allocate the remaining 10G as I wanted. I have almost 50 applications installed now (many of which are frivolous, but some of which are essential). Between those and my new-found addiction to downloading television episodes from the iTunes Store (just finished season two of The Wire), something had to give. It was the music. The iPod touch is less like a music player and more like a hand-held computer for me.

We have the technology

2009-06-09T10:05:00.001+09:30

Just scrolling the Snow Leopard Enhancements and Refinements page, and I'm stopped in my tracks by the first section on Finder:

[When attempting to eject an external disk,] improved dialogs tell you which applications are using the drive so you know what to close in order to safely disconnect your drive.

Wow—you mean we have the technology for that now? Outstanding.

Now, without the sarcasm, I can't believe this qualifies for front page news on Snow Leopard. Mac OS X's error dialogs are regularly woeful, and this kind of sloppy user interface design (telling the user that something is preventing a disk from being removed, but not telling them what) should have been corrected years ago. It's neither an "enhancement", nor a "refinement", it's an "embarrassingly basic user interface deficiency that should have been fixed by now".