So i caved and bought a Magic Mouse. I’ve been using it for about a week now and surprisingly don’t hate it. In fact i actually kind of like it. My only complaint is that Apple didn’t do more with multi-touch. Currently you can right-click, scroll, and navigate back/forward in certain apps.
Maybe i’m just spoiled by the MacBook Pro’s touchpad but i really miss being able to 4-finger swipe to open Exposé. Granted fitting four fingers on a Magic Mouse would be a bit of a pain but i still feel like more could have been done with the mouse.
On the plus side the right-click functionality doesn’t feel as awkward to me as the Mighty Mouse did, however i find myself trying to two-finger click for right-click sometimes as thought it were a touchpad. An option for middle-click would be really nice (three-finger click?) as i’m getting tired of seeing the “open in new tab” context menu in Safari.
All-in-all a decent product and so far i’m not writhing in pain from RSI as i expected i would be with all the gesturing.
I’ve been using colloquy on my Mac and iPhone for a while now but the simple fact is getting constantly disconnected because of calls, following links, or what-have-you really gets old (and annoys everyone else in the channel). When i saw that the new iPhone app supported push notifications i was excited but a little hesitant – after all i don’t exactly want to route the entirety of my IRC traffic through someone else’s server. Thankfully the guys have been working on a rather interesting approach to push notifications – you host the server yourself. With an upgrade to the colloquy client i run on my Mac at home i can how log in to one persistent connection while on the road. Pretty handy if you ask me.
A while back i decided to setup a 3-drive ZFS pool in the MacPro. The only complaint so far is that OS X gets a little eager with putting the drives to sleep for my taste. In more recent versions of OS X the only option for putting the drives to sleep is a checkbox that, when on, will attempt to put the drives to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity.
In the early days of OS X the Energy Saver preferences looked a little different – users could set a time to wait before putting drives to sleep.
Thankfully after some digging i realized it could all be set through the pmset command. The man page has everything you need but for the lazy here’s the gist for disk sleep timing. pmset takes a flag to determine which power profile you’re changing: wall-charger (-a), battery (-b), UPS (-u) or all profiles (-a). Next simply pass it the disksleep argument and a number in minutes.
Set all power profiles to sleep the disks after 15 minutes instead of the typical 10:
sudo pmset -a disksleep 15
Setting the time to 0 will disable disk sleep altogether for that power profile.
One interesting thing to note is i originally stumbled onto this on a rather old article that suggested using the spindown argument instead of disksleep as the man page now suggests (as of 10.4). Using spindown does not cause pmset to complain though it appears to disable disk sleep altogether.
iTunes 8 has a new feature i’d been wanting for a while – grid view. Giving you the ability to view your music in a simple grid, much like iPhoto, grouped by album, artist, or genre. Normally you’ll see album artwork in this view; switching to genre view, however, shows some campy artwork for certain popular genres (pop, rock, hip-hop, etc) but is missing artwork for more specific / niche genres. A post on the iLounge forum details how to create custom genre artwork but it’s a little more verbose than need be and geared at the Windows audience. So here’s the briefer version for OS X.
- Close iTunes if it is running.
- Open your Applications folder (⌘⇧A).
- Control- / Right- Click on the iTunes icon.
- Select “Show Package Contents” – this will open a new Finder window.
- Open the “Contents” directory. Here you will find JPG images that begin with “genre-”, these are the files iTunes uses for its genre artwork. Those ending in ‘M’ are for movies.
- Copy one of these files to your Desktop by dragging it and holding Option (⌥).
- Edit this file to your liking and rename it to the genre of your choice, for example “genre-metal.jpg” for metal.
- Move it back into the Contents folder.
- Now open “genres.plist” in your favourite text editor (TextEdit will work).
- Copy one of the
<dict> entries and paste it into the list (making sure to do this between other entries, that is after a closing tag: </dict>).
<dict>
<key>matchString</key><string>rock</string>
<key>resourceFile</key><string>genre-rock.jpg</string>
</dict> |
- Now edit the entry you just pasted to match the genre you are replacing. The
matchString (in this case “rock”) becomes the word or phrase you want itunes to search for1 and the resourceFile (in this case “genre-rock.jpg”) becomes the name of the image you just copied into the Contents directory.
- Save the file and launch iTunes. You should see your new genre art in the grid view now.
1: The matchString appears to match around special characters. For instance the entry for R&B is “r b” but still matches the string “R&B” in iTunes. Also note that this string does not need to be a perfect match. A matchString of “metal” would also match the string “Epic Metal” or “Power Metal”.
About 4 years ago i made the switch. You know, the one they used to talk about in all those ads. I bought a little 12″ Powerbook and loved it. OS X – Panther (10.3) at the time – was infinitely more stable, attractive, and functional that Windows which i’d given up a few years before and didn’t require as much work as my Gentoo/Fluxbox setup i ran at the time. The laptop itself was just as portable as and much more powerful than the Gateway (remember them?) Solo i was replacing.
I wouldn’t call myself a fanboy – really who would wantonly label themselves as such – but i’d been fairly loyal for the most part since that powerbook. But lately things have just felt off with AAPL. Specifically with their mega product launch recently of the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 2.0 firmware, and MobileMe. All of which have been getting less than stellar reviews.
Updating to the iPhone 2.0 firmware was a rather painful experience for most on release day. I for one was left with the dreaded Error -9838 as were many others. The firmware itself is getting bad press over slow downs, problems answering calls, battery life, and unresponsiveness as well.
MobileMe has been down for ages and Apple has at least had the sense to extend the trial twice. I was personally able to access the syncing features and email of MobileMe fairly early on but wasn’t able to log in to the website. I sent in a support ticket and was eventually responded to with how to reset my password which i’d already done. I replied as such and got no response. Shortly thereafter i was unable to log in to any of the MobileMe services. No phone service is available for MobileMe and the website simply greets you with this gem:
I’m sorry but insanely large amounts of support requests are not exactly the same as “overwhelming interest”…
I know i’m being a little bias right now as i’ve had a slew of issues with Apple’s latest release bonanza but i just worry that maybe they’re spreading themselves a bit too thin at present and should dial back a bit. I will likely continue to support them in hopes that this is a mid-life crisis of sorts and that things will settle down soon.
Update: Just ran across an article on the 37 Signals blog on iPhone 2.0 that i felt appropriate to link: iPhone 2.0: The glory wore off in wash.
