(Very) Amateur Golfer
Here’s a useful little utility for OS X:
It allows you to remove languages, input methods and architectures that you don’t require (think: all of the translated help files that you will never use).
It took about 10 minutes to free up about 1.2 GB on my system. Your results may vary.
PS look closely at the list of languages in the screen shot above and see if any of them are familiar. Klingon, anybody? :-)
Lance highlights a problem that needs to be dealt with by all Apple aficionados.
Broadly speaking, Apple are a company that make amazing new products which will be released soon.
They often don’t announce release dates until they arrive. And, as I’ve mentioned previously, they don’t seem to have any issue with selling the old version of the products right up until that date. As a result there is a lively ecosystem of rumour sites which offer up various advice about which products to buy when and why.
This is an extreme version of Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice - not only do you have to choose between the various products and options that are available to buy now, you also need to consider what might (but also might not) be available to buy at some near point in the future.
What can you do?
For a while I subscribed to a few of the rumour sites and tried to keep up with it all, but that got too tiring. I’m obviously not a true fan-boy. I abandoned that when I culled my feeds. Life, surprisingly, has gone on.
Thankfully I didn’t labour the decision when I got my iPhone. I didn’t even have to choose between the 16GB and 8GB model, as they only had the 8GB model in stock the day I was at the Apple Store in San Francisco. As per the book referenced above, one choice means far less room for regret.
So, Lance, my advice …
Buy an iPhone. You’ll love it. There are lots of reasons for this, which I’ll save for a future post, but suffice to say it really kicks ass. You can afford it. What’s more, I doubt the 3G version if and when it’s released and available here will be so much better that you’ll wished you waited, and if it is, you can always sell the old one and upgrade then.
I’ve been doing a bit of design work over the last week or so, which has been fun. I’m not a great graphic designer, but I can do enough to be dangerous. I enjoy having the freedom to experiment with different ideas without having to bother somebody else to do the heavy lifting.
This is the first time I’ve really got stuck into this sort of work since I switched to my Mac, so I’ve had to get used to a bunch of new tools.
For HTML and CSS I’ve been using Coda, which I chose basically on the strength of its logo (see right), but which has turned out to be a nice tool. I especially like the built-in reference books, which are great for somebody like me who doesn’t spend all of their time coding and needs regular help.
For image editing I’m using Pixelmator to replace my old favourite on Windows, Paint.net. It’s taking me a while to get used to this, and I’m not sure I’ll continue with it beyond the free demo period. I am feeling quite slow using it, and it’s missing a few of the things I use a lot - for example, it doesn’t support vectors at all so there is no rectangle tool, instead you need to select the required area and then fill in the selection which seems cumbersome when you’re doing it a lot. I’m also pretty slow with it generally, but I have a feeling that will improve once I get on top of the keyboard shortcuts etc. It’s very pretty, but I’m not sure this is the right tool for the job I have in mind.
http://www.pixelmator.com/
I’ve had a quick play with Inkscape, but it uses X11 and doesn’t really feel like an OS X application.
What other alternatives can you Mac users recommend?
(In looking around I did find a really cute tool called Scribbles. If you’re into graphic design I definitely recommend having a play with this, just to check out the smart interface, including a whole new approach to layers which seems really intuitive. It’s designed for kids, but I suspect that kids of all ages could have a lot of fun with it.)
I’ve also found a couple of other useful tool-lets which I thought I’d share (for my own future reference if for no other better reason):
At Webstock Dan Cederholm talked about basing a colour palette on a photograph from nature. This tool from De Graeve makes it easy - simply upload your image and it will pick out a range of complementary colours from the image. It even gives you the hex codes:
http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/
They also have a simple fav icon editor:
http://www.degraeve.com/favicon/
Robin Wood has a really useful introduction to the OS X Colour Picker, which is actually much more powerful than it first appears.
The magnifying glass and swatch drawer were both new to me.
And, what’s more the picker can be extended with third-party add-ons.
I found this from Waffle Software, which adds a simple hex picker tab (see screenshot right):
phttp://wafflesoftware.net/hexpicker/
Fun, fun!
What other tools are people out there using for this sort of thing? I’d be interested to get your suggestions.
:-)
I picked up an iPhone in San Francisco.
In the queue at the store was mostly Europeans and Antipodeans, which doesn’t bode especially well for AT&T I guess. Invalidating the warranty was much easier than I expected. :-)
When I checked my email I found a message from Apple asking me to rate the customer service I got at the store. Obviously they had matched my credit card details to my previous purchases through the online store back here and got my address that way.
Their service in store was fine, but their CRM system is weirding me out a little.
Meanwhile, Budget let me down and didn’t have any GPS units left when I picked up my rental car, so I’m really loving having Google Maps built into the phone. I would literally be lost without it.
Four snippets from one interesting article …
“To whatever degree Apple can be said to make products with a distinctive genetic code, they can also be said to have inherited most of their traits from a single parent: founder Steve Jobs.”
“There were three evaluations required at the inception of a product idea: a marketing requirement document, an engineering requirement document, and a user-experience document,” [usability legend and Apple's VP of advanced technology from 1993 to 1998, Don] Norman recalls. [Senior VP of creative at Frog Design, Mark] Rolston elaborates: “Marketing is what people want; engineering is what we can do; user experience is ‘Here’s how people like to do things.’”
“The businessman wants to create something for everyone, which leads to products that are middle of the road,” says [Apple's director of industrial design from 1989 to early 1996, Robert] Brunner. “It becomes about consensus, and that’s why you rarely see the spark of genius.”
“Jobs is a dictator, but with good taste.”
There is something to be said for a dictatorship like that, I guess?
The Mac and PC characters have become famous on the back of the Apple ads. Recently they’ve appeared in some cheeky online ads which have been running on a few tech sites.
The actor who plays PC even appears as a guest star in one episode of the Flight of the Conchords HBO series.
Here in NZ we get the US ads, but in some other countries they have their own local variation, and it’s interesting to see how they transplant the humour.
For example, in the UK they use comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb from the Peep Show. Some of the ads are straight copies of the US scripts, but some are new …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBeuKagEiKk
And in Japan they have these two guys (is it just me or are the physical differences between Mac and PC a bit more subtle in this incarnation?) …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qokrYYDCMc
And, my favourite, South Park …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id_kGL3M5Cg
:-)
(Ironically Firefox crashed with a spinning beachball of death when I tried to preview this post … is somebody watching??)
As previously reported, Amnon’s quote:
“How will you live with yourself with that monstrosity in the house?”
There is no such thing as perfect:
http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1190824
Given that, I thought this was a really interesting review (emphasis is mine):
“This phone is far from perfect. It has lots of weaknesses that Apple’s competitors can exploit. The snarky reviewer inside me can point them all out to you on this morning after if you’d like. But it really doesn’t matter. This phone drags you back to it even if you’re kicking and screaming and noticing the flaws.”
From: http://scobleizer.com/2007/06/30/the-morning-after/
That’s love!
:-)
I’ve been Mac-curious for a while, I guess.
All of the cool kids have one.
At Kiwi Foo Camp earlier this year there were so many Apples it was like an orchard!
What was I missing out on?
I’ve been using Windows ever since I bought my first PC in 19961994. I didn’t (and don’t) consider Windows to be broken. On top of that I was obviously at the back of the queue when they handed out the Apple kool-aid … I still don’t even own an iPod.
But, they say a change is as good as a holiday, so I took the opportunity when I moved to Xero to try switching.
A month in and I’m hooked.
I have found that most of my assumptions were wrong.
For starters, I was surprised to find that it didn’t cost much more. I priced up a Dell and sent the details to a couple of Apple fanboys. The challenge for them was to convince me to buy an Apple instead. Actually it was pretty easy for them. I’d always assumed that Macs were more expensive. While it’s true that you can buy a much cheaper PC, when you compare like with like (Apples with not-Apples?) there is not a great difference.
OS X has been a surprise too.
I didn’t expect to rave about an operating system.
And I know that there are lots of people who don’t like it. Phil for one has taken the time to document the specific things that frustrated him.
But, I love it. It took me a few weeks to get through the valley of despair - or more accurately the valley of unfamiliar keyboard shortcuts. But, now I’m there I find I’m spending much less time fighting with software and more time getting on with things. It feels like the operating system has melted into the background compared to what I’m used to.
And I haven’t had any trouble finding software to use. Like Nic I’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover a healthy industry of small application developers creating great software for OS X. My favourites so far are Yojimbo (which has replaced my hitherto dependence on OneNote), VLC, and Quicksilver. And of course Firefox (I’ve also tried Camino, but in the end went back to Firefox for the add-ons). If you’re into Getting Things Done then Actiontastic is also worth keeping an eye on (although it’s not quite there yet for me). I’m also keeping an eye out for VMWare and Pixelmator.
The switch has also highlighted to me how much of my software now resides on the net and so is independent of the operating system - Gmail, Google Reader, WordPress, Xero, etc etc.
I’ve heard a number of people say that OS X isn’t suitable for business use. Now I can understand why.
Microsoft Office for the Mac is a pale imitation of the Windows equivalent. Entourage is especially painful. I’ve failed to get our Exchange server working with OS X Mail, so for now I’m stuck with it.
I’ve started to learn Omni Graffle and Keynote, but I’m still a bit of a novice with both, so I’m not as productive.
So, until the new Mac version of Microsoft Office comes out I’m resorting to running Vista on Parallels for some of this stuff. It’s a bit of a security blanket, but I’m cool with that. It’s a feature. As Marc Andreessen points out, with a Mac you effectively get three operating systems in one (OS X, Unix under the covers, and Windows in Parallels/BootCamp). Or, for a slightly more fanboy spin on the same point: “… all computers can run Windows, but some, the special ones from Apple, also run Mac OS X.” (from John Gruber).
I haven’t tried to do any development yet - although I know plenty of great developers who are Mac users, so I don’t expect any problems and again, with Parallels and/or BootCamp the development languages and environments I am more familiar with are only a mouse click away.
Of course, the hardware itself is super sexy. As Amnon said about the Dell when I sent him the comparison: “How will you live with yourself with that monstrosity in the house?” The only downside is I have had to upgrade my laptop bag to match!
As a long time ThinkPad user I wondered how I’d go with the track pad (I always thought I was more of a nipple man!) but I haven’t had any problems adjusting. I’m now addicted to the two-finger scroll.
Downsides?
Choosing the right time to buy seems to be a secret art. I was all ready to go until a friend pointed out that there would be a new version out shortly. I realise that Apple manage to generate a lot of buzz via their rumour mill. But, I have to wonder if they don’t create a fair bit of bad-will (is that a word?) when they make sudden leaps forward in their product lines. Take, as an example, this comment from the MacRumours.com forums following the announcement of the new MacBookPro range:
“NOOOOOOOOO! I’ve just bought my new Macbook Pro! Loving it alot. But now……. a little less.”
To get around this I got a temporary machine from Rentamac for a couple of months until the new model was released. This would also be a good option if you’re not totally sure that you’ll want to stick with a Mac.
Would I recommend it?
Definitely give it a try.
I can also recommend a Mac to anybody who is looking to opt out of providing tech support to their extended family. I got an iMac to replace Mum & Dad’s old PC, and I can now honestly say I don’t know how to fix any problems they have when they call. Although, so far to be fair there haven’t been any to fix!
Now, about that iPod … :-)
Cartoon from: Hugh McLeod
[Blogged from SuperHappyDevHouse Aotearoa!]
Do you remember what MP3 players were like before the iPod was invented?
I wonder if the same will be true of the smart phone:
“The iPhone won’t do anything that can’t be done with devices that are currently on the market. For that reason it won’t appeal to gadget freaks, but the Apple’s innovations on the user interface will ensure that the iPhone appeals to those who would otherwise not have considered buying a smart device.
Remember that digital music players already existed long before the iPod, but the iPod has been hugely successful because everything before it was perceived as being awkward to use and best left to those with a good understanding of the underlying technology.”
From: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=40&topicid=14275
As it happens, design matters.
If people don’t think it’s easy to use it’s unlikely to be used.
Andy Lark has a nice post on The Power of Community.
This quote of his has stuck in my head:
“Marketing programs, clever PR and community activation aside, nothing really beats giving people what they want.”
Too true!
As I’ve noted before, one way to market a product or service is to build something that people love to use and happily tell their friends about.
He also maks an interesting point about how much of the iPhone story has been told in community-driven sites like Digg et al:
“Apple is launching the iPhone at a time when content aggregation sites like Digg, Techmeme, and even Google News can put a potential customer before hundreds, if not thousands, of possibly interesting stories about the product. All Apple has to do is trickle out information every now and then, as it has done in the weeks leading up to Friday’s launch, and watch the frenzy take hold.”
Here’s an interesting comparison along those lines:
A pretty standard marketing site: slick, flash-based, but doesn’t really tell me much about the product that I really believe.
The Nokia N95 page on Wikipedia
A pretty good summary of the phone and it’s features, including some of its flaws:
“Nokia N95 handsets supplied by Orange and Vodafone in the UK have had the VoIP facility removed from the phone to the annoyance of many users. Vodafone’s explanation for removing the facility was that ‘it doesn’t believe it’s a mature technology’.”
“It should be noted that the N95 does not support US based versions of UMTS/HSDPA; UMTS features in the US versions of this phone are disabled by default (but can be reactivated if needed).”
Which is more useful to somebody considering a purchase?
So the iPhone hype (iHype?) is reaching fever pitch.
I’m struggling to get excited … yet.
I’m guessing it’s going to be years before they are available here in NZ.
And it doesn’t look good for those who were considering using something like Shipbuktu to get their hands on one …
“Then there is the issue of the iPhone being sim-locked. And I don’t just mean that the phone is locked, nope, the sim is locked physically into the phone! It can’t be removed. Seemingly there is a way to map your existing number to the sim in your iPhone - this will be part of the activation process. But you can’t take your sim out of the phone for any reason. What happens when you want to upgrade to a new phone? No idea. Presumably this will be straightforward if your new phone is another iPhone - but if it is not…”
From: Tom Raftery’s Social Media
Those in the US need to sign up for a two-year contract at US$60 per month.
Now that’s lock in!
UPDATE: (from this thread on GeekZone) apparently this video shows that you can actually remove the sim by poking a paper clip into this hole. So, not easy, but possible.
Yesterday, as I’m sure you’ve heard, Apple announced a version of Safari for Windows and also revealed that Safari will be the platform for app development on the iPhone.
Josh Catone on Read/Write Web has a good summary.
Understandably there has been a mixed reaction to these announcements.
Here are my random thoughts:
Safari is right on the brink of becoming a browser that web developers need to care about. This might be enough to make that happen. That would take the tally to four (including IE6, IE7, Firefox). It’s like the 90s all over again, which will come as a bit of a shock to developers who grew up in the Internet Explorer dominated era.
Some people have questioned who in their right mind would run Safari on Windows? That’s an easy one to answer: all of the Mac fanboys who are stuck using Windows PCs at work will (cough Amnon, cough Tim) and, I suppose, all of the Windows developers creating apps for the iPhone.
I agree with Jason from 37signals. Creating a separation between the platform (the physical phone and the browser) and the apps which third-party developers create is a smart move.
What do you think?
In the last 12 months Safari has grown from 1.1% market share to 2.1%. This is a simple result of selling more Macs. According to this recent Bloomberg report Apple now has 7.7% market share in desktops and just under 10% in laptops, which is a lot more than I would have guessed. So, what does the future hold for Safari?
And, related to this: what will happen to IE7? As I noted yesterday, it’s grown quickly to ~30% in the first half of this year, but seems to have stalled there.
Let’s hear your predictions for the next 12 months.
We’ll come back to them in a year and see who was closest.
This coming week is the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in the US.
Expect the buzz around the upcoming launch of the iPhone to reach fever pitch by the time Steve Jobs takes the stage.
Check out this competition, where people had to make their own iPhone advert (via Michael Gregg). Amazing free publicity for a product which isn’t even released yet.
This entry is a bit wacky:
I could swear those are kiwi accents too. :-)
And so the anticipation builds.
Meanwhile, for those sitting on the Windows side of the fence (or for that matter Apple fan boys in NZ who will no doubt be waiting a while for the local release of iPhone) … no need to feel totally left out of all this touchy feely stuff.
Check out the just launched HTC Touch, which runs Windows Mobile and has a touch screen interface.
Sounds great in theory. But when you look closely at the photos of the physical design of the phone or see the user interface in action, it seems to lack the final 1% which makes the iPhone appear magical.
As Joel Spolsky wrote this week: it’s a games of inches.
I’m reading Naked Conversations at the moment.
They quote Apple as an example of a company that doesn’t have an open blogging culture.
Actually, I’d say Steve Jobs will be pretty happy with the buzz created by his first post.
;-)
My current phone is an i-mate SP5. Until yesterday I though it was pretty good. Now, all of a sudden, it doesn’t seem as cool as it could be.
The animations of the iPhone UI look amazing. The hardwear design is georgous. They’ve completely whomped the competition. I’d love to know how much of this is built and how much is currently vapourware?
They are not scheduled to launch in the US until June. It’s likely going to be quite a while longer before these make their way to NZ - it took over 3½ years for the iTunes store to open up a kiwi version. But, still something to look forward to for Apple enthusiasts … which increasingly seems to include everybody.
