Screen fonts in OS X vs. XP/Vista: Round to Microsoft

Alas, even those who prefer OS X must admit that sometimes Microsoft wins one. Safari/Windows has allowed side-by-side comparison of Apple and Microsoft's approach to font rendering. Both are defensible, but today Microsoft's is better. I suspect Apple's approach is a descendant of NextStep's Postscript display technology, which became OS X's PDF based display technology. Ideal for a very high resolution output, like 300 dpi printing. Not so good for 100 dpi screens.

Google Docs acting up today

Google Docs & Spreadsheets has been acting strangely today. One spreadsheet reverted to a prior version -- I only noticed the change after printing it. On a recheck the document was up to date again, but service is slower and I've gotten some '404s'.

Looks like a bad night at the Googleplex.

Safari 3.0: Apple's beta is Google's alpha

I'm playing with Safari 3.0 on Mac and Windows. On Windows it has problems with dual monitors [1], some font configurations, BlogThis! bookmarklet didn't work, and it's crashy. On OS X we get full support from Gmail, Gcal, Google Documents and blogger/BlogThis (!). Google spreadsheets don't work on either platform.

On a minor footnote Safari finally renders renders nested bullets correctly. That's been a long time coming.

So now there's competition for Camino 1.5 on OS X. Talk about an embarrassment of riches! (BTW, Safari does inline spellchecking as nicely as Camino.)

A word of warning, however. Those who do not know Apple will need this translation table:

• Google pre-alpha 1.0 = Apple beta
• Google alpha 1.0 = Apple 1.0
• Google beta 1.0 = Apple 2.0
• Google production 1.0 = Apple 3.0

Apple treats early adopters as alpha testers. You have been warned.

Update: Even though it seems to work on blogger, it really doesn't. Many post actions fail.

Update 6/17: The developers made this classic windows programming error.

Twin Cities now hi res on Google Maps

The Twin Cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul, MSP) have graduated to highest-resolution on Google Maps. We get a lot more detail now ...

OS X Leopard: All is forgiven

Ok, so an out-of-cycle release of Safari is impressive, and a Windows version is astounding. Integrated GGears-style iPhone development -- perfect and wonderful. New Finder - at last, long needed. 64 bit - fine. A viewer architecture -- very good if it lets us finally view PowerPoint files [1] on OS X. Spotlight with Boolean operators? Duh, yes. Remote file access and/or synchronization via .mac - nice.

All more than sufficient to make me very happy to fork over $130 to Apple and some larger amount for family .Mac services. Heck, one or two of 'em would suffice. I wasn't expecting Jobs to address my longstanding whine anyway. I shed a few tears and turned to my work.

Then Andrew burst into my office and ripped the keyboard from my hands. His eagle eyes had spotted a small button in the Finder demo that nobody had commented on, a button that led him to this fragment on Apple's new Leopard page:

Apple - Mac OS X Leopard - Features - Finder

... With shared computers automatically displayed in the sidebar, it’s far easier to find or access files on any computer in your house, whether Mac or PC. All it takes is a click. But here’s where things get really interesting. By clicking on a connected Mac, you can see and control that computer (if authorized, of course) as if you were sitting in front of it. You can even search all the computers in the house to find what you're looking for...

So the very biggest "one more thing" is so big it didn't even merit a mention. This is what will allow Apple to sell the next, much more ambitious, version of Apple TV.

I'm a happy man today.

[1] Listening to the video there's no PPT support - just word and excel. Shame. Maybe later.

Atwood: why we don't miss Microsoft Streets and Trips

There are some applications that don't exist for OS X. One of the biggest omissions is quality speech recognition, but another is maps. There's nothing on the map like Microsoft Streets and Trips, even though S&T has been getting slower and buggier over the past two to three years.

I used to miss that application, though I became accustomed to its absence. Google Maps, and Google Earth, eased my pain -- except when I was on an airplane.

Now Jeff Atwood tells me I don't need to miss Microsoft Streets and Trips any more. His head-to-head real world testing demonstrates Google Maps is substantially faster and more usable than MS&T. Not merely comparable, but absolutely better. Also free, and it runs just fine on Camino/Firefox (Safari? What's that?).

I actually don't care that much (yet) about speech recognition on my desktop, so if Jobs today introduces OS X remote control functionality even 80% as good as Windows' ancient terminal services/RDP functionality the day of the PC will have truly passed.

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 ...