Tog on the iPhone - and the iPhone price

Tog (the usability guru) has written an iPhone review -- without ever touching one. It's fun to read while we wait for the inevitably disappointing reality. I particularly enjoyed his comment on price.

The iPhone User Eperience: A First Look

... The industrial design is brilliant. Apple has created another piece of high-tech jewelry. Some fogies of advancing years have suggested the initial price point of $499 is too high. They fail to understand: The “cool” of owning this phone, particularly for the early adopters, is worth an easy $497, bringing the phone itself down to $2 even.

For those who might doubt such a high value of cool, consider the self-winding Rolex, which sports 1/10th the accuracy of a Timex at 1000 times the price. With Rolex, the technology is grossly inferior, and still people will pay thousands to own it. With the iPhone, the technology is clearly superior...

It can't help but be five times better than my $200 Motorola RAZR, meaning it's cheap by comparison.

New Airport Extreme: best thing from MacWorld

Apple recently announced an iPhone (available in June) and an iTV (good only for Apple downloads) -- and a new wireless lan base station. The last is the best. It's almost available, and it's useful:

Macworld: First Look: Up close with AirPort Extreme

...USB printer and hard drive sharing: Both the current Extreme Base Station and AirPort Express Base Station support printer sharing; plug a USB printer into the Base Station’s USB port, and any Bonjour-capable computer (recent OS X machines as well as Windows computers running Apple’s Bonjour for Windows) will automatically detect the presence of the printer on the network and be able to print to it. This capability is carried over to the new version of the Extreme Base Station, but Apple has added an even better feature: AirPort Disk. Connect a USB 2.0 storage drive—in HFS Plus or FAT32 format—to the Base Station’s USB port, and that drive will be accessible to any computer on your local network via both AFP (Personal File Sharing) and SMB (Windows File Sharing) protocols. Hard drives and flash drives will work, but optical drives will not.

... a new AirPort Disk Utility lets you assign file- and folder-level restrictions to the contents of the attached drive, so each user with permission to access the drive can be restricted to particular files and folders. You can even set up drives to auto-mount on your Desktop whenever you connect your Mac to the network—no more having to use the Network browser or Connect To Server dialog to access your NAS-hosted files.

Finally, if you’ve got a USB printer and a USB drive, or more than one of each, you can simply connect a USB hub to the Base Station’s USB port and then connect those devices to the hub. All of the printers and hard drives will be accessible to the local network, and you can use AirPort Disk Utility to configure access to each drive independently.

You know, this is pretty nice. If I didn't already have an Airport Extreme and an Airport Express I'd buy one. I'd like to see what Apple will do now with the AE ...

Zimbra: open source messaging and collaboration

Zimbra offers Open Source email server software and shared calendar for Linux and the Mac. They do Outlook too, but the Linux/Mac support is the big deal. From Macintouch:

Zimbra Collaboration Suite 4.5 is a server-based, open-source, email/collaboration suite that provides email, calendars, RSS/Atom feeds, tags, and more. It includes support for iSync, Apple Mail, iCal, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Eudora, Outlook, and others. This release adds aggregation of external POP email accounts, email identities, personal distribution lists, the ability to require more secure passwords, email reading in basic HTML mode, email push support in Zimbra Mobile, and more. Zimbra Open Source Edition is available free for Mac OS X and Linux. An enhanced Network Edition is priced starting at $25 per mailbox per year.

The minimal pricing is $350 or so per year for non-profits. That's an excellent deal for a small group. Zimbra may make sense for a small business or startup esp. with a mixture of Linux, Mac and XP desktops.

Adobe is doomed: Adobe Download Manager

Adobe uses the adobe download manager to install and update its software. It hasn't worked on the last two XP machines I have. It tries to update or download, produces a meaningless error message (server is unavailable, the file has moved etc) and tries again. Eventually I kill it.

I used to be able to get the full installs when updates were needed and by pass this dysfunctional software, but that's no longer possible.

Ok, I think to myself, I'll just download a new version of Adobe Download Manager. Except, you can't.

Adobe has created a loop. A broken install of ADM means you can't update or replace ADM. Despite Adobe's claims that I can remove it, I can't do that. (I suspect our corporate distribution of Adobe Acrobat Pro broke it on both machines.)

Acrobat is a strategic product for Adobe. [1]. If they can't get the updater right they can't get anything right. Adobe is not doing well.

[1] I removed Adobe Reader from my Mac for other reasons -- it was annoying and badly behaved. ADM on the Mac did work, though it had oddities too I believe. Adobe has never been able to figure our permissions on OS X, which does not bode well for Vista.

9/25/08: The solution in a later post might be worth applying in this setting. I haven't missed Adobe Reader/Mac since I removed it, so I can't test. Adobe's OS X software is pretty much an insult.

Faughnan.com - extended - My Custom Searches

I’ve used Google Page Creator to create a page that holds my custom searches: Faughnan.com - extended - My Custom Searches. As of today there are four custom searches: my stuff, OS X, “foundational content” (work related – industrial ontology) and “Motorola RAZR V3m”. I’ll probably add more. I use these searches quite often, it’s the best way to work around the “marketing” problem in Google searches (first 10 pages of hits are all people selling something).

If you’d like to add to any of these (excepting foundational content, which is work related) let me know, I can add you as a contributor.

Google supports domain-scoped shared resources for families and coops ..

Even I’m having trouble keeping up …

Your Tech Weblog: Personal domain names for more than mail

... As this person notes, members of a family can share a domain name, and each have their own Google e-mail accounts and calendars associated with that domain name. They can then set up calendar sharing so they're always up to speed on scheduled family events. ...

Ok. Put it on the list …

Transiently attach a naked drive to a USB port

This $25 adapter will work with desktop, laptop, SATA, IDE etc (in theory) on OS X and XP

NewerTech® USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter

• Universal to USB2 Adapter
• ATA/IDE/SATA/ATAPI
• Compatible with any 2.5", 3.5", 5.25" IDE or SATA device!
• Supports IDE & enhanced IDE 3.5" internal IDE hard disk
• Supports ATA/ATAPI-6 specification 1.0
• Supports SATA I and SATA II
• USB 2.0 up to 480Mbps transfer speed
• Backwards compatible with USB 1.1
• Plug-and-Play

I don’t need this very often, but probably a few times a year. I’ll put it on my wish list.