I am looking for a few people who are interested in participating in a private beta of an application I am going to be releasing an initial version of over the course of the next two or three weeks.

I am not going to give too many details here for now but if you are interested in Wikipedia and like listening to podcasts then you will probably be interested.

If you would like to participate please leave a comment below with your name and e-mail address (your e-mail will not be displayed on the site but I will be able to see it). Please also list the basic system specs of any machines you would be able to test the application on. I am especially interested in people able to test on PowerPC Mac’s as I have no PPC hardware to test on myself.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention, Leopard is needed! No support for Tiger or below unfortunately.

I hope this does not mean we can not download the SDK here in the UK/Europe because that would suck. I can understand if they want to bring people on board with the app store slowly but please don’t give people a head start on actually developing apps based solely on geography.

“Cocoa Touch”, full Xcode support, full Interface Builder support, full Instruments support (on and off the phone) and best of all a full iPhone simulator. The development process looks to be very tidy and complete and I am not sure even the most cynical of Mac developers could be disappointed with it.

Support for MacBook Pro and Air multi-touch track pads is very cool but from what I can see there is no way to simulate that on a desktop mac or older MacBooks. Sync’ing the app to the phone for testing looks to be trivial though so this is not a major issue.

Support was obviously strong from the gaming publishers, a smartphone with a touch screen, accelerometer, core animation and 600Mhz chip was always going to make the game publishers go a little weak at the knees and they did not disappoint here with EA & SEGA both on board demoing several apps including Super Monkey Ball (obvious, given the accelerometer) and Spore (braver! and more interesting). Is this the start of a real mobile gaming platform that is able to tackle more than puzzle games and side scrollers? I hope so. One question that comes to my mind though is that with such strong support from the major games publishers, will this stifle independent developers from entering the games market? I hope not.

The iTunes application store looks, amazing, simple as that.

It is everything we could have hoped for and more with on-phone wireless browsing and download, automatic updates, simple payment process with a (reasonably expensive, but) simple pricing structure for developers. I have installed apps on my “smart” phones in the past but I am a geek and normal people just didn’t do it, until now. I do not feel I am making a huge statement when I say this will revolutionise mobile application use.

The iFund is interesting and shows that people think that there is real money to be made here, I completely agree.

All in all, a very solid set of announcements which I have not covered in detail here and I would suggest going to one of the main apple blogs for something more in-depth.

What was surprising was some of the reactions about the SDK and devlopment process being Mac only.

“I agree. I don’t think developers should be limited to which machines they have access to. This is pretty much bullshit. Pretty much. Xcode nor the simulator run on a PC. So, what, they’re going to cut Windows users out of the application lineup? I, for one, don’t feel like paying $1000 for a MacBook just so I can fuck around with some code.”

Was there ever an expectation that this SDK would be anything other than Mac only? I should be shot for including that quote here though, if it had been Windows compatible then people would still not have been happy and would instead have been asking for .NET support and other such ridiculousness!

I did not notice any mention of SDK restrictions regarding access to the EDGE network or the phone capabilities. EDGE I can understand as there is only so much damage an app can cause with an unlimited data plan but I am surprised it has full access to the phone. Correct me if I am wrong on this!

Anyway, I think Apple just hit this one out of the park, the reaction in #macsb was overwhelmingly positive. This post may be a little rough and ready as it was written while the announcement was happening so please forgive any mistakes or omissions and hey, at least I am topical once again! :)

Oh and I loved this comment from #macsb about the hello world app. Made me laugh!

The widget shows a selection of popular images from flickr on a daily basis, it is called Flickr Interestingness and it takes images from the interestingness feed on flickr.

So, given that there are apparently still a people willing to read this this blog I figure I might as well post a link to the widget. I wrote it initially as an experiment in writing dashboard widgets but as time goes on I do actually find myself using it almost every day as you generally get a good selection of quality photography appearing every day.

I must add a “Set as wallpaper” option to it as that is usually what I end up using it for. Anyway, please leave any feedback below if you have suggestions or thoughts on it.

Please excuse the rest of the web site, the products and information there are terribly out of date and no longer active however the site is getting ready for a much more mac focused relaunch over the next few weeks so watch this space.

The widget requires Mac OS X 10.4 but also works fine on 10.5, hopefully someone will find it useful.

What is ridiculous about the situation is that we are in the same position today as we were two years ago so I thought I would post a summary on where things are right now from the comments on that post and my experiences with my Mac’s.

MacBook Pro (Manufactured Feb 2006)
This is my original machine that the post was made about and so naturally it has the same old problems as before and nothing really works for off-region discs. The region is set to R2 and that is all it will play, R1 discs will not play in DVD player or VLC and Handbrake can not rip them.

Mac Mini (Manufactured Jan 2008)
This is pretty much a brand new machine and it has exactly the same problem as the MacBook Pro from 2 years ago. I set the firmware region to R2 when I bought it and that is all it will deal with. No exceptions.

Aluminium iMac (Manufactured Mid 2007)
This is where the story gets a little more positive! I have the firmware region set to R2 and so obviously it plays R2 discs through DVD player without any issues. R1 discs fail in DVD player but play just fine in VLC. I am also able to rip any region of DVD using the latest handbrake. I am going to put this down to the iMac using an “OPTIARC DVD RW AD-5630A” drive over the “MATSHITACD-RW CW-8124” in the Mac Mini and MacBook Pro.

There is talk in the comments of the previous post of a solution to this being to never set the region code of the drive, apparently this allows VLC to play off-region discs. Unfortunately as all of my drives have a region set in firmware I am unable to test this. However it is unclear from the comments if this actually applies to the Mac Mini and MacBook machines as the only confirmation of it working comes from an iMac which as we can see from my tests above is not plagued by these problems due to the Optiarc drive.

If anyone can confirm that this method works on the Matshita drives in the MacBook or Mac Mini, please let us know in the comments.

The first post on this blog was on the 18th March 2006 which makes it almost two years since I became a switcher, so why did I stop posting? I guess I finished that first phase of switching to the mac and I took a break from blogging for a while. I now consider myself a fully fledged member of the mac community though being the proud owner of four mac’s and zero PC’s, you can really see that the switch stuck and it pains me now to have to use Windows (which I do have to, for work, occasionally).

Although the blog still gets a decent amount of traffic coming in every day, 99% of it is from search engines and I am quite sure that there are absolutely no remaining feed subscribers but if you want to prove me wrong about that, please leave a comment! Maybe this feed is lying dormant and forgotten in the depths of someones feed reader :)

Who knows where this will go this time but I am going to start making some posts again and find out.

So, I just launched up TextMate tonight to fix a late night bug in the application I am writing and and it offered me an update with a new version to download, I downloaded and re-launched and was presented with this:

Thats a spider’s web if its not clear on the pic :)

This is just one of many of the reasons TextMate is amongst the finest pieces software I have ever owned :)

Happy Halloween.

I just did a search on Google and got a new type of advert, seems like Google have added call-back advertising to the sponsored ad’s on the right hand side of a google search page.

See the little phone icon?

Clicking that gives a little animation hiding the text advert and replacing it with this:

Finally, click connect and the phone rings.

I bet they get a lot of calls today from people like me who don’t need any kind of insurance but are curious :)

The good news? This is no more obtrusive than a google text advert (well, after the first time you see it obviously) but it’s an interesting development, especially that some JavaScript effects/AJAX are now being used in quite a natural and unobtrusive way. The bad news? I tried it with JavaScript off and it degraded pretty poorly, only giving me the phone number of the company so that I could call them instead. There is no reason it couldn’t have just started with the “enter your phone number” prompt.

Interesting though… At least I thought so, I wonder if they will tie it in with some sort of VoIP in the future? Google Talk maybe?

Technorati Tags: google, advertising, adwords, phone

The first thing I did was to enable debug messages with the -v parameter.

dave$ ssh -v dave@192.168.0.200

When I ran that, the long pause came just before this error message:

debug1: An invalid name was supplied
Cannot determine realm for numeric host address

A few quick googles and I had the solution, add a DNS lookup for the IP address and the speed issue goes away leaving you with a fast and responsive SSH connection process!

To add the DNS lookup, simply edit the /etc/hosts file (you will need to sudo this or type your password when it is saved) and add a line something like this to the bottom:

192.168.0.200 myunixserver

Then you should be able to connect quickly using either the IP address or the new host name you assigned.

You know it’s not good when you get to that many unread posts :) Anyway, hang tight… There is a (short) post coming in about 5 minutes.

I had an e-mail from Darren Waters from the BBC this morning who had seen the photos on Flickr and asked if he could interview me about the faulty battery and my experience with getting it repaired, three hours later and its up on the BBC news site. Who said traditional journalism can’t keep up with the pace of blogs?

My original post about the bulging battery is here.

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, apple, applecare, bbc

There’s a shortcut in Safari and the Finder that allows you to navigate quickly up a directory or website hierarchy. Command+click on the folder name at the top of the Finder window or in the web page’s name at the top of a Safari window and you’re shown the path of the file / web page you’re at and can quickly navigate back upwards. If you’ve got a three button mouse plugged in then a middle click will have the same effect.

It makes me wonder what else I’ve still not found out about OS X.

By Eifion

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, apple, guest author

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, apple, guest author

I bought iWork fairly quickly after buying my Mac because I had to give a presentation on short notice, the iWork trial that came with the mac had expired and the price is right, being just under that invisible price limit that makes you think twice so I just plugged the credit card in and off I went.

I am glad I did as well, I think Keynote is a fabulous presentation app and Pages is perfectly adequate for writing small documents and to be honest I have been holding off buying Microsoft Office for my new business until I have to because I would rather not spend that money on software I will rarely use.

What it does desperately need though is a simple spreadsheet application much like ThinkSecret is describing:

[Charts is] a more consumer-friendly spreadsheet application that can handle the needs of home users and small businesses but not pretend to execute any of the more advanced functions of Excel.

I have my fingers crossed that it is true!

(… and I know, I could try Open Office or Neo Office, I just haven’t absolutely had to yet but I will before shelling out for MS Office :)

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, apple, iWork, charts, keynote, pages

I was trying to get my external microphone working with my MacBook Pro and failing miserably, I googled and found some articles about setting it up in System Preferences and also in the Audio MIDI Setup but nothing I did seemed to work so I figured I would use the AppleCare plan that I paid so much money for and ask a genius!

I got through to a guy on the phone and he didn’t have the slightest clue what he was doing, I had to tell him about the System Preferences with the audio input panel and suggested it might be something to do with that, at which point started to leaf through the manual in front of him, let out a big sigh and said…

“You wouldn’t have this problem if you had a Windows PC, everything would just work”

Err… … …

I couldn’t stop myself laughing :) He obviously hasn’t been drinking the Kool-Aid about “Everything just working with a Mac”.

Now this guy obviously didn’t care about what he was doing in the slightest and just kept trying to get me off the phone, at one point I asked if there was anyone else I could speak to who knew slightly more about audio on the Mac and his best suggestion was to put the phone down and keep calling until I got through to someone who knew something.

Fabulous customer support, I only wish I had been taping it (I might have been if my microphone had worked!!! :) anyway I didn’t get it fixed and gave up in the end but the phone call wasn’t wasted because it did make me chuckle a lot ;) Sort it out Apple.

Update 1: Some comments are suggesting that I made this story up, I can not prove it of course but I assure you that it is true and not exaggerated. I have nothing to gain from making Apple look bad and I do not mention that they are worse than any of their competitors.

The thing with this is its a funny story and I wanted to share it! ALL call centers have pissed off people working for them and I certainly got on the phone with one of them tonight, I may have been unlucky but it is true…

P.S. I don’t actually think it was Bill who answered the phone tonight, unless he was putting on the accent of a bored british teenager ;)

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, applecare, sucky customer service

Viruses on the platform or not, there are some things you should NEVER click “Accept” to!

The point of this post though? I have become quite annoyed with Colloquy recently because of this bug which means I need to spend time every time I connect to IRC manually joining channels and the fact that I can not just turn DCC file transfers off altogether means I am on the look out for a new IRC client. I don’t want anything too fancy or overly techy, Colloquy was about the right tech level for me (meaning I want to talk on IRC rather than write scripts that slap people with assorted seafood :)

Any suggestions?

PS. For those who think the post title is a bit random, it is a reference to this and lets face it, when am I going to get an opportunity (however thinly veiled) to have a post title like that again!

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, apple, colloquy, irc

This past week I have noticed that when when I have been using my MacBook on battery it would get to about 30% charge and then the machine would just completely die! Power off, no warning messages or anything.

So yesterday it happened again and as I picked the machine up, I noticed this:

and on closer inspection:

The battery is making a break for freedom! Not good!

I did a quick google for similar problems and sure enough, it seems like a problem found with early MacBook Pro’s (Mine is a “W8609” serial number which I am led to believe is one made in week 9 of manufacture).

So I decided to take an afternoon trip to the Apple Store in Manchester (at the Trafford Centre), I booked an appointment with the Genius Bar on the web site which was an entirely painless experience and sure enough when I turned up at the store my name was up in lights above the genius bar, this is an extremely slick process and the only flaw seems to be that not many of the people who were coming for help actually knew they had to book an appointment. Anyway the guys at the Genius Bar couldn’t actually help because apparently they don’t stock batteries for MacBook Pro’s they sent me away with instructions to visit http://depot.info.apple.com and order a battery replacement. Unfortunately you can only order battery replacements for PowerBooks and iPods there rather than a MacBook Pro so I ended up calling AppleCare phone support this morning where someone helped me through the process of ordering a replacement battery, so I could have saved myself a trip to Manchester but I am glad I didn’t (more about why I thought it was worthwhile later!).

I am guessing that this problem is limited to US MacBooks (I bought mine in California, nothing like going right to the source, eh? :) because everyone who looked at it had never seen anything like it before and the guy from AppleCare UK support was so interested in what was happening he has created an case for the engineering department to look into and wanted me to send these photos to them so they could investigate. I did mention that he should do a quick google as it was very easy to find other people with the same issue.

So what is my impression of AppleCare after all this? I have mixed feelings at the moment but generally positive. On the plus side in today’s culture of having to argue tooth and nail to get manufacturers to admit fault and provide hardware replacements it is a huge benefit to be able to easily book an appointment with a real person and to be able to go along and be able to show someone and say “Look, there, its broken!” rather than having to try and explain it to someone over the phone so I liked that a lot. On the other hand, if you are going to offer technical support at your retail stores then why would you not stock basic removable parts like batteries?

As for the phone support, well it was generally good and the guy I spoke to was nothing but polite and showed a genuine interest in escalating this problem to the engineering team. My only issue with it was the amount of time that it took to get this done, I was on the phone for 54 minutes (at my expense, of course) to arrange a battery replacement!

I will update this when the new battery arrives to finish the tale properly, in the mean time I am glad that I can still use the machine without the battery installed :)

Update 1: There is a wiki for Apple defects, see this battery article on it.

via Advocrazy

Update 2: The battery finally arrived today, 4 full days after reporting the problem. For a simple battery replacement this is not good enough. Lets hope that this one is better behaved at least :)

Technorati Tags: mac, macbook pro, apple, battery, applecare, battery bulge

I will blog about the business at some point soon (as soon as I have a proper web site up, for example :) but as a result of the new company, I have started using Mail.app for my business e-mail and tonight I just came up against my first little ??? moment when this dialog appeared:

Now I would expect that it just strips out the .DS_Store files and other Mac guff but I am really not sure what it is doing and while I will tick it for now, I would like to know for sure so I know what I am doing by ticking it!

I have a load of stuff I need to blog about and I hope to find the time this week to get back into it!

Sorry I abandoned you all (if there is anyone left now :)

Technorati Tags: mac, mail.app

The good news is that there is massive potential here and even with the current beta release of the software I was able to upload 1,000 or so small files from my Mac and then download them onto my Windows PC without any major issues. So that is cross platform, encrypted, fully redundant file storage backed by a financially stable company for $0.15 per Gb per month. A cheap, cross platform iDisk? Good stuff.

There are plenty of rough edges in both stability and usability here (it crashed both on the Mac and on the PC) but it is beta software and so I am not going criticise that. No the main issue I have is that of the sign up process, and this could be as much Amazon’s fault as Jungle Disk’s. To use the application you have to have an account with the Amazon S3 service and it sends you over to this page on the Amazon site to register. Unfortunately the sign up pages are targeted completely at developers aiming to develop against the web service rather than consumers. After signing up, you get shown how to download the WSDL (and no consumer should ever need to see those letters next to each other) and the sign up e-mail starts with:

Greetings from Amazon Web Services,

Thank you for signing up for Amazon S3. You can now build innovative and entrepreneurial applications using this and other AWS web services.

(snip)

Who else can picture the confusion of someone attempting to replace iDisk with this? :)

This disconnect comes because I am fairly sure that Jungle Disk are not utilising S3 in the way that Amazon originally intended. Doing a little research in the S3 developer guide I am pretty sure that the boys and girls in Seattle intended Jungle Disk to own and operate one single S3 account as a file store for all of the files used by any of their users rather than have everyone sign up for an original account. That will work very well for some applications but isn’t what Jungle are trying to do just as valid? I like the idea of having my data protected by a different security key than my virtual neighbours. So, the solution? Either provide a consumer friendly sign up or provide an API to your account creation process so that I can still have my own account but it looks like a Jungle Disk account.

However this is going to be a cracking little utility that needs some work but shows a lot of promise. Am I going to use it now? No, but I will be keeping an eye on it.

One final thing, I don’t really understand how Jungle Disk are making any money on this. The software is free, the data storage and transfers are paid directly to Amazon with no cut taken by Jungle Disk. It looks like a referrer ID is getting passed to Amazon if you sign up with S3 from the Jungle Disk web site but that is a very sparse revenue generation model. I hope they have a plan :)

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, apple, amazon, jungle disk, backup, amazon s3

It is apparently open 24×365 as well, not that I have ever felt the desire to buy an iPod at 3am on Christmas day!

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, I am having a busy week but normal service will be resumed soon :)

Technorati Tags: apple, store, new york

The Wikipedia article about WebKit states that it includes WebCore (HTML/CSS rendering engine) and JavaScriptCore (JavaScript engine) and that it is used in Safari amongst other apps. That sounds logical so I went to the WebKit Project page and downloaded a nightly of it (I did have a reason for doing this but it can wait for a future post :).

The confusion came when I launched WebKit in how similar it is to Safari! I expected a reference implementation of the basic browser but it is a full featured web browser that apart from the different colour surround to the compass in the icon is indistinguishable from Safari. It uses my Safari bookmarks, the menu items are identical, the annoying beach ball is there when loading large web pages, even the application name in the menu bar shows as “Safari”.

So, does this mean that other software that wants to use WebKit has to either include all of the additional Safari functionality or strip it out manually? This seems to me like a rather backwards way to do things, shouldn’t WebKit be an absolute bare bones implementation which applications can easily integrate and then Safari be a project based upon that (they could open source Safari itself if they want to give a more comprehensive example of WebKit being used).

Just seems a little strange to me, am I missing something?

Oh and I am going for “WebKit” rather than “Web Kit”, if it is good enough for their home page it is good enough for me.

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, apple, safari, webkit, webcore, javascriptcore

It is going to be easier to watch the tiny screencast than have me try to explain what is happening (and convince you that I am not making it up :)

The menu sometimes flickers in and out two or three times before finally becoming available. It doesn’t matter what app I am using or where I right click, it just randomly happens.

I haven’t noticed this happening until recently but this could be because it has only started happening recently or it could be that it has only been annoying me recently :)

Any ideas on what is causing this?

Update: I have tried several things now but no joy…

I have used AppZapper to delete everything in InputManagers in both ~/Library and /Library (mainly browser plugins for Camino and Safari) and all related files. Rebooted, still happens.

I have done a safe boot (holding shift down) and when it eventually booted I loaded up finder (no other apps whatsoever were loaded) and it immediately happened and can be reproduced easily.

Update 2: Looks like it could be the mouse as suggested by a couple of people in the comments. It never happens with Ctrl+Click. What a pain in the backside because I love this mouse and it has served me well for many years!

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, apple, screencast, bug

I don’t have a Vista installation handy at home right now for screen captures so we will have to make do with Paul Thurrott’s atrocious taste in music! (Sorry Paul, but you have to get called out for having Def Leppard, Phil Collins and Enrique Iglesias all showing on one screenshot).

Anyway, if you take a quick look at the screenshots you can see that WMP11 shows stacks of album art when browsing by genre, year and artist and a very nice album view showing album art and track listings side by side. Now, all of this is not as flashy as CoverFlow with its 3D loveliness but it is solving this problem in a slightly more real world way and it makes a very nice addition to Windows Media Player (which I do still prefer to iTunes, even iTunes on OS X).

My question for Microsoft though is this. Where is the 3D CoverFlow style album art browser integrated into WMP? You have built a fantastic new presentation layer which could implement something like that with no problems at all, why are you not exploiting it more in the apps you are intending to ship with Windows Vista?

Note: Apparently, Windows XP Media Center Edition also uses album art for navigation and has done since it’s first version but I don’t have an installation of that handy to test it either.

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, apple, itunes, coverflow, microsoft, vista, wmp11, windows media player

Definitely worth a read, but really the post can be summed up in one paragraph from his list of ten things that annoy him about the mac:

You know what? I can’t find ten things that annoy me about the Mac. I’ve been racking my brains and there’s no more. In fact, I’m writing this within a web browser and I’ve just realised that there is a spellcheck built into Safari. How cool is that? Not only is it cool, it’s the same spellcheck that works in Textedit and Pages so any words I add to the dictionary are available in all aps. God damn it, I love my Mac. It’s giving me the horn.

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, apple, switching

So far I have around 30 albums (~2Gb) imported but I am really going to need an external HDD to get my library properly imported into iTunes. The problem here is that when I do that, I won’t be able to listen to any music at all when I am not sitting at my desk here at home which will make hotel rooms suck again! Are there clever solutions to this problem? (apart from buying an iPod!)

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, apple, iTunes