Macintouch review: audio noise in the new MacBook Pro

Thankfully we have Macintouch to warn us about these product design defects...

Macintouch Review: MacBook Pro (15" LED)

... Noise from the headphone port (first identified by a MacInTouch reader) is a real problem, which has three components, as we confirmed with sound-isolating headphones:

First, a very quiet hiss is present whenever the laptop is awake with headphones plugged in. It's on the same scale as the hiss we noted in the aluminum iPod Shuffle, so many people will never notice it.

A greater problem is a quiet but ubiquitous static. It is present only when the audio circuitry is working, and ceases within a second of pausing iTunes or QuickTime player. It is easily masked by music but shows itself during quiet passages.

The last component is an intermittent high-pitched noise. We've heard four distinct pitches, but never more than one at a time; it varies from a high tone to a faint whine. It goes away within five or six seconds of pausing iTunes; we believe this is when the audio circuitry turns off to save power. We cannot consistently cause the high pitched noise to happen, nor affect the pitch. We cannot trigger it with hard drive activity, spin-up or spin-down, display or keyboard brightness, or display activity. We assume it is caused by interference from other components within the machine.

These audio problems probably can't be solved without a hardware redesign, which is disappointing, given Apple's previous audio quality. If audio playback (or recording) is critical to your work, you'll need something like an external USB or FireWire audio interface...

A significant step backwards! The complexity of these RF environments must be daunting. I wonder if we'll eventually need to move the (power-demanding!) D/A converters to the headphones or stereo systems, so there's no analog output from the complex RF environment of the laptop ...

TidBITS reviews OS X remote control software

One of the things that keeps me from being a complete Mac head is Microsoft's remote desktop protocol vs. OS X's ... ummm... uhhhh.

It's pathetic. OS X does have some hooks for a raster based unix remote screen control application, but it's stone age compared to Microsoft's iron age RDP. My best explanation for the absence of useful remote desktop control is that OS X users simply aren't interested. Once again I am reminded that a Vulcan's life is a lonely one...

Supposedly 10.5 includes some iChat remote control for remote maintenance. In the meantime we have CoPilot (works, but very slow -- useful only for remote support) and a variety of costly products that may or may not work. Now TidBITS reports one more option: LogMeIn for OS X is in beta. This product works quite well for Windows, so if the beta news isn't too bad I might give it a try.

Google public calendars: inline skating in the Twin Cities

Google has expanded their public calendar offerings with new search facilities and better support for adding public events to personal calendars.

I decided to give it a whirl by creating a public calendar for Minneapolis and Saint Paul Inline Skating (Minnesota). Currently it holds only events from the Minnesota Inline Skate Club and for the Twin Cities Friday Night Skate.

I was motivated to give it a whirl after a memorable skate through Minneapolis last night. I don't get out very often (yearly, basically) and I barely recognized the den of debauchery across the river. (My home town of Saint Paul is more sedate.) The Guthrie seems to have been transported from Manhattan, and the skate into the city across the Stone Arch bridge is now a first rate experience. I particularly enjoyed skating the spiral hill by the Guthrie, and I am oddly fond of skating around the dealers of Hennepin. They mostly seem to find us an amusing distraction. Slaloming through Loring Park in the moonlight is not to be missed, and we end with a skate along the Nicollet mall, waving to the diners.

Alas, the group has shrunk over the years and we're mostly, to put it delicately, beyond the carding range. (That may explain why the dealers find us amusing.) I'll give some of the free "meet-up" type sites, and Google's public calendar, a try and see if we can get some new folks. Unfortunately the Friday night skates are every 2nd and 4th Friday, which has always struck me as odd. It's too weird a schedule for most folks to be able to track, I'd prefer the group try every Friday but I'm strictly a passenger.

Update: Just for the heck of it, I added an entry on eventful.com. So now a search on inline skating in the twin cities lists this event. The odd schedule is again an awkward fit.

Google's blogger widget

Google has an OS X widget for creating blogger posts. I'm using it to create this post.

It's cute. It's also worthless.

That's why you've never heard of it.

Google Reader goes offline with Google Gears

I've been a longtime Bloglines user, but if I were starting over I'd probably be using Google Reader. It's just that Bloglines was good before GR was. Recently, however, I've been annoyed by feeds being "silent" for days, then appearing with 100 posts. That's rude.

Now I've got one more reason to consider the big switch:

Official Google Blog: Feeds on a plane!

With last week's launch of Google Gears, we're happy to let you know that Google Reader is the first Google web application made for online and offline viewing...

... Once you've installed Google Gears, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they're available even when you don't have an Internet connection.

To get started, simply click the "Offline" link in the top right of Google Reader.

What I really want is an offline drastically improved version of Google's "BlogThis!" bookmarklet.

In the meantime, everyone's been commenting on Google Gears, but there hasn't been much emphasis on how it works. From the original announcement:

Official Google Mac Blog: Google Gears for WebKit

... Google Gears ... adds support for local data storage and helps web application developers manage resources so you can make your web application work offline. It is currently available for Linux, Windows, and Macintosh platforms and you can learn more at http://gears.google.com....

.... Google Gears for WebKit is made up of an Internet plugin for Webkit or Safari (Gears.plugin) that's installed into /Library/Internet Plug-Ins and an InputManager (GoogleGearsEnabler) that's installed into /Library/InputManagers. The GoogleGearsEnabler ensures that Google Gears can provide resources to web applications. It registers a NSURLProtocol class only if the OS X Application is a supported version of Safari or WebKit. Once installed, the registered class will check any URL requests to see if Google Gears can provide the content. If so, it will intercept the call and provide the data. Otherwise, the URL will be processed normally. This is how Google Gears is able to work when you're not connected to the Internet.

Google Gears is an open source project and we're working with partners like Adobe, Mozilla, Opera, and others to make sure this is the right solution for users....

Note from the description that Google Gears, once in place, works all the time. So it has the not insignificant side-effect of dramatically decreasing some web traffic. In this regard it reminds me of some of the technologies currently built into IE 7 [1]. Google Gears is providing a similar application foundation universally.

[1] Incidentally, earlier versions of IE made a big deal about being able to browser pages offline. Those were the days of intermittent connectivity ...

MarsEdit: how not to distribute software

MarsEdit is a blog editor for OS X. In the XP world Microsoft's free Live Writer has crushed the competition, but the OS X world is wide open. MarsEdit should have a niche. I'm the perfect candidate for them since I blog a lot, prefer to use dedicated editors and I buy software. Happily. When I know it's good.

I downloaded MarsEdit and tried to run it. Nope, my trial has expired. I'd tried an earlier version, years ago, and it clearly wasn't ready for use. Apparently, that's all the trial I'll ever get.

This is so dumb it's sad. Each significant update, at the very least, should have a renewed trial period. Best of all:

1. New trial period for each major release.
2. Trial period is 30 uses, not 15 days.
3. After end of trial period can still try the app again, but now it's limited -- so you you can test it but not exploit it.

I'm still waiting for someone to clone Microsoft's Live Writer ...

Update 6/6/07: Hoisted from the comments:

For now, if you're still interested in giving it another spin, you should be able to get a fresh start by removing the Application Support and Preferences file for MarsEdit:
[Home] -> Library -> Application Support -> MarsEdit
and
[Home] -> Library -> Preferences -> com.ranchero.marsedit.plist

I'll give it another try!

Update 6/11/07: The good news is I was able to try it out, and it did an excellent job fetching blogger posts. The lesser bad news is that you can't save as draft to blogger, drafts are local to the file system. The bigger bad news is that it's not a wysiwyg editor, it's an html editor that doesn't emulate paragraphs. For my purposes Camino with Blogger's native editing controls is a better option.

Camino 1.5: recommended for OS X

I move between Camino and Firefox depending on sunspot activity, with a rare pause at Safari. For the past month I've been using Camino 1.5 pre-release on an ancient iBook (10.3.9), an iMac and an Intel iBook running 10.4.9. It's been great everywhere, fast, reliable, attractive. I sometimes miss Firefox's Google integration, but the OS integration, efficiency and performance outweigh that. I found only one ultra-obscure issue that would, I think, also occur with Firefox.

Now Camino 1.5 - is officially available.

There are almost no visible feature changes since 1.1. The big changes are spell checking, Keychain integration with Safari and excellent Gecko rendering. They don't have full OS X services integration however, for that you need to use the OS X text services and that's not compatible with Gecko. Camino also lacks the phishing protection built into Firefox.

So you get 90% of the OS integration of Safari with 100% of the rendering excellence of Firefox and performance that's at least as good as Safari. I almost never run into the CPU spikes that can force me to kill Firefox.

Recommended.

A stalled restore from screen saver in 10.3.9

Debugging an ill-behaved XP or OS X machine can strain anyone. My latest OS X adventure is illustrative.

The ancient G3 10.3.9 iBook was being found unresponsive. If I touched the mouse pad a cursor would move about, but the screen remained uniformly gray. I couldn't force quit or logout, and I had to power cycle the machine. This went on for several days. The only recent change was installing a pre-release version of Camino 1.5 (excellent browser, btw).

I spent a day or two trying various experiments before I came upon a fix. At first I treated this as a "wake from sleep" problem; OS X 10.3.9 had quite a few of these. I even reset the PMU

The Power Manager is an integrated circuit (computer chip) that is usually on the logic board of the PowerBook and iBook. As the name implies, it is responsible for power management of the computer. It controls backlighting, hard disk spin down, sleep and wake, some charging aspects, trackpad control, and some input/output as it relates to the computer sleeping.

Over time, the settings in the Power Manager may become unusable, which can result in operational anomalies with the computer. Examples include not turning on, not waking from sleep, not charging the battery, or not seeing the AC Adapter, among others.

but that was a waste. The machine was not asleep. It had the look it has when it's waiting to start the screen saver -- a JPG slideshow that takes minutes to start on this old, slow, machine. I wondered then about a corrupted JPG messing up the screen saver, so I refreshed my images and tested my ability to copy them. I switched to a different screen saver temporarily, but the problem returned.

Next I wondered about a network issue. 10.3.9 has a lot of issues with losing connectivity (esp. SMB) so I made sure none of my 4 users (mom, dad, child, admin) had any direct or indirect automatic network connections. Along the way I solved an unrelated Airport bug. In 10.3.9 if you set a client to automatically login to a network, then renamed the network, the client would simply not login (rather than default to the last used network). I also figured out a very annoying behavior with security updates, key chains, multiple users and WLANs. If one user makes a WLAN (WEP 2) connection, every user inherits that connection. If they inherit, however, they never do the OS X keychain update magic that happens the first time you make a connection after a security update.

Eventually I fixed all the network issues and all my users stored the WEP password correctly in their keychain, but the problem still persisted.

The clue was noticing that sometimes the machine was responsive. When it did respond I'd find one of two things. Either I'd find the last user had logged out or Camino 1.5 pre-release had canceled the logout -- because I'd not responded to a user dialog. I dug down into the user prefs and I found two relevant settings and one probably irrelevant:

• users were being logged after 6 minutes of inactivity (security)
• the screen was going blank in about 30 minutes (power)
• (probably irrelevant) the screen saver was set to run around the inactivity time, but it took a very long time to startup because the image folder had thousands of JPGs and the old iBook is very slow ...

This is what I think was happening:

• the machine tried to log a user out
• Camino blocked the logout with a dialog
• the power setting tried to blank the screen
• around the same time the screen saver kicked in and blocked interactions ...

I think some combination of the above setup the locked state.

I made these changes:

• turned off auto-logout
  
• set dim screen to 3 hours (because I wanted to display the family slideshow)

That seems to have done the trick. There's no more auto-logout, so Camino doesn't block anything.

Now that was a hard one to figure out!

I think these machines have too much of the emergent behavior of evolved systems without the built-in homeostatic mechanisms ...

Update 6/5/07: No more occurrences over the past week, so this problem has been fixed.

Photo Sharing for parents: Pogue on SNAPFISH, Kodak Gallery and Picasa Web Albums

Pogue makes the rounds of the "free" photo sharing sites. The one surprise is he liked SNAPFISH, which I don't know very well:

Photo Sharing Even the Folks Can Handle - Pogue - New York Times

SNAPFISH.COM Now we’re talking. One click begins a slide show, complete with speed slider, background-color control and a relatively huge photo size. Moms, dads and grads can flag the shots worth printing with a single click.

All the usual goodies are here: electronic sharing with family (although not with the public); editing and cropping tools; and a catalog of photo prints, posters, mugs and decks of cards. All of it is designed simply and clearly, making it impossible to get lost.

There are paid subscription options — to upload videos, for example — but the free account is everything a family shutterbug could desire. Storage is unlimited if you order something once a year.

The bottom line. Next time my mother wants to review my photos on the screen and order prints with one click, I’ll use Snapfish or Kodak Gallery. And next time I just want my friends to be able to see and grab copies of my pictures online, I’ll use Picasa Web Albums.

I've used Picasa with some success. I'm quite surprised the photo sharing sites aren't better. I played around with some designs years ago but figured there was no way I could get anything out before the competition improved, but it never has.

Forklift: Norton Commander for OS X

I've never used a file management tool on any OS as good as John Socha's Norton Commander for DOS. Nothing in OS/2, GeoWorks, Commodore, Windows 3, 95/98, NT, 2K, XP, MacOS, OS X, Palm etc. Others must agree, there've been clones for years, including clones of clones by people who don't remember the original (FileCommander for OS/2 came closest to the original).

Norton Commander was like Symantec's MORE 3.1 or GrandView -- software so good it cannot be adequately replicated. NC even has a fan pages and an official history. It was the progenitor of what's now called an "orthodox file manager" (OFM).

So when TUAW wrote about a "dual pane" file manager for OS X I had to investigate. TUAW's writers are too young to recall NC, so they didn't mention it, but indeed ForkLift ($30) is an NC clone for OS X. They even use tabs to switch panes. There's no command line (odd omission really), but the Spotlight integration is well done and substitutes for NC's marvelous NCD command, no tree views, and sadly there's no real equivalent to the NC Alt-F10/NCD functionality (see below). (Now if only Microsoft would remember that search strings need to execute against folders...)

Will I get it? $30 is quite a bit for something like this, I think they should have gone for $20. It feels like a starting point rather than a finished solution -- there are no tree views for example. Still, I'll try it for a week and see ...

Update 6/3/07: Alt-F10. That's what they're missing. That would make this worth $30, its absence makes this worth $10. Sometime in the evolution of NC, perhaps even NC 5, Symantec integrated NCD/Norton Change Directory (esp. see WCD) into Norton Commander. Tap Alt-F10, and the currently active pane was replaced with a tree view of the disk directory structure. Type a few characters and the view switched to the first match. Tap a quick key to move to the next match, always in the context of the tree. Hit Enter to switch the pane to the selected directory.

Brilliant. Nobody has done it better. This was post John Socha I believe; true genius in software requires multiple contributors working around a shared theme and vision.

The Forklift team ought to be able to leverage Spotlight and Cocoa to provide the indices and tree views, so much of the heavy lifting would be done for them.

I doubt they'll do it, but I'll send them a comment.

Incidentally, speaking of parts of the later NC that everyone's forgotten, there's NC Mail/NCMail. Symantec bundled the most efficient email app I've ever used with NC in the waning days of DOS. It was plain, but it was hyper-efficient.

Fast user switching and automated software updates: The complexity problem

One of the more obvious issues with modern software is that system complexity has evolved more quickly than system repair and recovery mechanisms. The rules of biological evolution don't fully apply, at least in the near term, to computer systems.

Multi user accounts, on both OS X and XP, illustrate this. Today my Firefox update failed with a cryptic message on my XP box. It said a file was in use and could not be replaced. I checked my processes and didn't see anything. Logging out didn't help. Downloading the full executable and reinstalling didn't help.

Right. Firefox was running in another account, indeed the Firefox Update was running in the other account -- and it was stalled there too. The Firefox installed Google toolbar process was running in both user instances as well.

Ideally the Mozilla installer, or the underlying OS, would detect this state and provide a meaningful error message.

One day ...

Windows Live Writer blog authoring client is in beta 2

The announcement is here. My favorite blogging tool has had a big update - and it's still "beta". I especially appreciate the Sharepoint 2007 support and the "paste special" options. No mention of Firefox support, unsurprisingly. IE only, Windows only, etc.

Alas, the Sharepoint integration suggests Microsoft won't kill this product. Live Writer will kill every other Windows blog authoring tool on the market, I suspect it's already finished off BlogJet. There's nothing as good on OS X; that's particularly disturbing.

Update: A local tech column reveals WLW has Minnesota roots. The chief architect "J.J. Allaire, is a Macalester College graduate and a former Minnesota tech entrepreneur". I live just south of Macalester ...

Update 6/2/07: I thought I used to be able to view and act on prior blogger posts using WLW. The update information claims I can edit in the blog and in WLW and WLW will manage versioning. Neither of these are working for me today.

Update 6/15/07: Duh. You can download the lasts 500 posts easily from any blog, and then, like this one, edit it in WLW. Just use the File Open menu. I had to be told this by one of the product architects after asking for this "feature" on his blog. In retrospect this is how the prior version worked. Just another sign of dementia. After weeks of regular use the only complaint I have is that it takes a while startup on first use on my system. This is one beautiful product! There's nothing like it in the OS X world, Microsoft is trouncing Apple here.

Update 7/25/07: There's a Firefox extension for Live Writer. It didn't work when I tried it last December, but it's been working perfectly for the past month.

UI Design: start with your grid

I built quite a few user interfaces around HTML table tags in the old, old days. I actually like HTML tables -- they were very clever about self-arrangement if you thought about the problem correctly.

So I was receptive to this CH article: Coding Horror: Let's Build a Grid. It's a great brief introduction to thinking about grid layout in an UI. Lots of graphics and valuable links.

Foleo: Hawkins peculiar extension to the mobile phone

Hawkins designed the original (since debased) PalmPilot as an extension to the PC rather than a Newtonish replacement for a PC, now he's imaging the Linux-based Foleo as an extension to a phone (emphases mine):

Hands-On with the Palm Foleo: More Cool Features - News and Analysis by PC Magazine

... To respond, you need to be near a Wi-Fi spot or use the smart phone as a modem via its Bluetooth connection, which is why Hawkins calls Foleo a mobile companion and emphasizes the role of the smart phone in this type of digital lifestyle.

... It weighs about 2.4 pounds but feels much lighter, and even with its small battery it can deliver five full hours (even while using Wi-Fi the entire time). The large screen supports 1024-by-600 or 1024-by-768 VGA resolution. Navigation is done through a TrackPoint nub in the keyboard and it has a roller wheel below the keyboard to provide fast and easy scrolling. Foleo's price at launch will be $499 and it should be on the market by mid-summer.

... Foleo would give them a light, lower-cost option that could make it easy to hit the road without a laptop. But, whether planned or not, Hawkins may have actually hit on a more powerful mobile-computing idea. Since this is a small, lightweight Linux computer, it could eventually become a new stand-alone portable-computing platform that the Linux or open-source crowd embraces...

I don't get it. You can't put it in your pocket and it weighs and costs about as much as an XP laptop, but it doesn't replace a laptop. I assume it uses Flash instead of a hard drive. It sports an OS that corporate IT types will never accept (i.e. not Microsoft). It reminds me of the legendary Tandy 100 (I think that was the number -- the original road warrior palmtop), the numerous failed WinCE palmtops, the very shortlived Newton portable, the never-released PenPoint device ...

I just don't get it. A computing/email/browser extension for something like the hideous Motorola RAZR makes sense, but this isn't it. Either Hawkins has lost it or there's another part of the puzzle we don't know about ...

Update 6/2/07: Stross says there's another part of the puzzle. He claims it's a covert web 2.0 network computer device, Larry Ellison's old dream made real. I hate to think Hawkins has lost it, so I hope Stross is right. I still can't see it working within Palm's life expectancy however.

Update 6/4/07: Still trying to figure out how the Foleo makes sense. It makes very little sense by itself. What, however, if the Foleo enabled Palm to produce something like the iPhone?

via Brighthand

... Since that announcement, Palm's Jeff Hawkins told CNET that because the Foleo gives smartphone users the option of full-sized keyboard, then it might no longer be necessary for the Treo to have its own smaller one.

I don't want to reveal too much. But I can now think through the problem differently. I can think through tradeoffs. Well, if I have something with a bigger screen and a keyboard -- whether it looks like this (Foleo) or something else -- where I can view and manipulate data, does it change how I design this guy (pointing to Treo)? Yes.

Hawkins also suggested that Treo with larger screens or smaller form factors might also be possible.

Now it sounds like a multimedia Linux Palm/phone with an external Linux screen/keyboard option. The first part of the equation sounds a lot like an iPhone, but Apple hasn't yet announced its plans for an external screen/keyboard. This is something I used to ask about eons ago (on usenet actually); it makes sense to me.

MacLinkPlus Deluxe 16: a handy but costly tool for old-timers

The big news for the venerable $83 MacLink Plus 16 file format translator is read-only support for Office 2007 documents. There's still no support for OpenOffice/StarOffice open file formats, which is disappointing. It's also still a Rosetta application, running in emulation on Intel Macs. That's not too surprising considering the age of the code-base; version 6 came out in 1991 and I first started using it @ 1986. Looking at the release dates it seems to have been on hiatus since 2004, that suggests it was brought back from the dead recently.

There's no way to download a trial version. That's particularly worrisome given the age of the codebase -- does it really run safely on new machines? There's also no support for presentation software, such as PowerPoint - a viewer would be much appreciated! Symantec MORE 3.1 is not supported (Brad's site still has his 1999 MORE2XML converter and this dated page describes other options.)

So, is there any reason to be interested? Microsoft, for example, supplies free Office 2007 converters and I think NeoOffice and the soon-to-be native OpenOffice will open those documents. Heck, I expect the new version of my favored Nisus Writer will do it as well, not to mention a future update to Google Docs. Why spend $83?!

The only good reason can be support for very old file formats. MacWrite, WordPerfect, etc (but not, for example, Volkswriter and all those long forgotten apps of the early PC era). If you're an old-timer converting to the Mac this application probably makes sense. I'd be tempted if they offered a demo version I could hammer on for a month or so. I don't trust DataViz quite enough to buy a non-universal app without a trial ...