I do believe that iTunes 8 has completely changed how I listen to music at work. Now I just come to work, think of a really great song in my catalog, and then hit the Genius button. Let it select 100 songs, and BOOM! Playlist for the entire day. No twiddling needed.

BRILLIANT!

Here’s the difference between an Apple Store and an Authorized Mac Reseller:

Authorized Mac Reseller: Has had this unit in its hands three times, has never fixed the underlying problems, never returns my calls, and takes 7-10 days to fix the unit.

Apple Store: I visited the Genius Bar yesterday, we looked together at the issue, they agreed that the unit was kaput, said it’d be 4-5 days … then went and looked to see if they had the part in the back. They did. Tonight? I get a phone call just before closing, telling me that the unit’s fixed, and they’ve run unit tests, and everything seems to be okay. On a holiday weekend, and they called me.

Yeah, they’re getting my return business.

I am so thankful for hard drives that work.
Three weeks ago tonight, my 500GB miniStack V3 started screeching something awful—clearly beginning its death throes. I ran a quick Time Machine backup, said a prayer, and hoped it would hold together until the backup finished. It did, and as soon as it was done, I pulled the drive out of service and filed an RMA request with Other World Computing, the vendor I’d bought the drive from. I got them the drive off via UPS that Saturday [it was a crazy, crazy week], and I had the replacement drive last Monday.

Except, 111GB into a 305GB file transfer, the replacement drive woke me out of a dead sleep [it had been an even longer week prior, running almost 70 hours in seven days' time]. The new drive was, too, dead. I returned it the next day, and the drive got there on Friday. Monday, my replacement shipped. It arrived today.

Anyhow, I saw that it was at the house a little before three this afternoon, so I took my “lunch” break [one of those days; I was up at 0400, so I'm fading fast now], came home, and put it into service. I was a bit surprised when the drive mounted … already labeled like I wanted, with my data on the drive. “THOSE BASTARDS!” was my first mental thought, but then I read the packing slip. Bad fan in the casing. Ahh. Makes sense, especially for a new-out-of-the-box drive, y’know?

Anyhow, seven hours later, with 305GB moved, I’ve now got tunes again. Wilco’s “Impossible Germany” has never sounded so sweet.

Predictably, this HDD failure came less than ten days after I finished getting all the music off of my old machine. The only backup I had was the Time Machine backup. I’d never really tried TM before this event, and I must say … I’m reasonably impressed. The UI is still a little non-intuitive for me, but that might be because I spend half my day on a PC and sometimes think like a PC guy even on a Mac. Either way, it works. That said, you can imagine that I’m going to get another 500GB HDD ASAP and use SuperDuper! on it. Not having my tunes has been like lopping an arm off, especially with all that’s happened in the last three weeks.

The source of my mini’s reboot problems? Nothing the folks at Mac Resource can find. They think it’s a peripheral. I am inclined to agree; I had one of my two miniStacks up earlier, attached to the mini, and … reboot. Since powering both off, no problems.

I will have to pull everything off the miniStacks and add peripheral by peripheral to figure out the problem.

Yeah, this is gonna suck.

As I’m not a customer of Rogue Amoeba, I’m not a reader of Under the Microscope, RA’s blog on their software and Apple software development in general. [Notice I say "Apple" and not "Mac" because now you can develop for the iPhone/iPod Touch.] So when TUAW stopped being a wordy version of VersionTracker and posted about Rogue Amoeba’s take on Apple and code signing, I took an interest in it. [You see, I have this problem, and it's that I spend lots of money with this company in Cupertino that makes electronics. Ahem.] There are three pieces of interest here, I think.

First, UtM took on code signing in general:

Like most technologies, code signing itself is neutral, or ought to be. It can be used for good or evil. Code signing is basically a way to cryptographically prove the origin of a particular piece of code, nothing more.

Yeah, it’s just like any other tool. They go forward and talk about code signing in the main branch of OS X, where Apple seems to slowly be requiring code signing for all applications, which I think is generally a good long-term goal. RA objects to the path going forward, which is somewhat understandable:

Ultimately I think the trend is bad. Code signing itself is a neutral technology, but it gives incredible power to the system vendor, and that power is just waiting to be exercised and abused. I believe that the iPhone is serving as a testbed to see how users and developers will react to an environment with ubiquitous code signing and control. If it goes well I think we can expect to see our desktop Macs gradually move in this direction as well. Judging by how badly Apple’s developer servers were flattened during the SDK release it seems like there’s no way it won’t go well.

I’m sure it will be a gradual process. If 10.6 ships and suddenly nothing will run without Apple approval there will be a huge revolt among users and developers. In 10.5 it’s pretty much innocent. In 10.6, given what Apple has revealed, I would expect to start seeing some restrictions in place. Perhaps initially there will be some APIs which are only available to signed applications. At some point Apple will decide that there are some areas of the system which are too dangerous to let anyone in, even when signed. Perhaps you will begin to need Apple approval for kernel extensions, or for code injection, or other such things. Then one day Apple may decide that unvetted code is too dangerous. Maybe advanced users could still be allowed to use it, but a setting may show up, “Allow unapproved applications”. It will, of course, be off by default.

I think it’s reasonable to expect the arguments in the second paragraph to come true, save for Apple requiring approval on the apps. I don’t think that Apple is using the iPhone code-signing process to gradually close their ecosystem; I have this feeling that Apple is doing two things: 1) gradually opening the iPhone ecosystem and 2) placing themselves in the iPhone app revenue stream. The second point is obvious—Apple will take home 30% of the app’s sale price in return for hosting the download, processing the payment, etc.—but the first is probably not. Yeah, you can jailbreak your iPhone and do all sorts of geeky things with it,but most users aren’t going to—I certainly haven’t. Allowing apps into the ecosystem, even under Apple control, is an opening, not a closing, of the ecosystem. Maybe Apple never opens it any more than this, but in providing a won’t-break-your-warranty path and a fairly trustable path for users, this will be a net win for the user.

[And if you don't like it, well, there's gonna be this Android system that Google is doing that will be open, etc. And that'll be good, in its own ways. If someone builds a killer handset with it, it oughta grab some market share. Me, I welcome my Cupertino overlords.]

The second UtM post, a bit more iPhone focused, is on the limitations of the iPhone SDK, especially the no-background-apps bit:

I don’t mean to suggest that an application like Switcher should come from a third party on the iPhone, merely that such feats of magic are possible on open platforms. As it stands today, as a developer who much wants to take the iPhone to the next level, I must constantly watch to avoid running afoul of Section 3.3 of the SDK license. I must ask “does this go too far?”, and worry about pushing legal limits instead of mental ones. When Andy implemented Switcher, such thoughts never crossed his mind once, and he was able to create something spectacular as a result. We hope that Apple will see the potential of their great little device, and allow developers to push it to its utmost as well.

I think the issue here is that the assumption is that this is where the iPhone app line will be held. The post references Apple not allowing the first Macs to multi-task and how Andy Hertzfeld wrote Switcher to make it happen. And … well, I think that’s apt, but not in the way that RA wants—they seem to want it all, and want it now. I, as a user, well, I just don’t. The iPhone is a nascent platform—really quite revolutionary in terms of what can be done on a device that does everything it does and still have enough battery life to get you through the day. [Okay, enough derisive snorts.] I think that a 3rd gen iPhone might allow 3rd party, background-task apps. I really do. But to do so now is to do too much, too fast.

If I’d actually read The J Curve, I’d make some argument about how this argument applies here, too, and that Apple has to be a bit restrictive now, slowly opening things up over time. Or I could make an argument that Adam might appreciate, and note that, when leading, it’s always easier to start off the hard-ass and ease up than it is to get more restrictive after being Mr. Nice Guy. Both responses work on the same point: restrictions provide initial stability that allows for maturity, whether it’s in the classroom, the office, or the software world.

Maybe I just think too well of Apple.

And lastly, well, it seems that RA is taking the Mark Pilgrim approach and filing bugs about things that they don’t like with the iPhone SDK. I guess that, when all you have is a hammer …

Just my thoughts for now. I reserve the right to change my mind in the face of stronger counter-arguments.

Okay, so I’m up and running on my new Mac mini [two days behind, because, well, I've been sick since Friday], which is running Leopard. And my AppleScripts for spam wrangling work just fine … except every instance of a new message is brought up with an actual window. As you might expect, that’s highly annoying. Anyone got any ideas?

I love Camino. I really do. But there are some tweaks I’d like to do inside of about:config that I used to do in Firefox, and I have no idea how to do it. Any ideas?

Anyone got suggestions about how to start over with Apple Mail? I’m trying to resolve some crashiness issues with it for me—stuff that was making my entire Mac unstable, as I’m discovering now with Mail not running for the last 36 hours or so and all the problems I was having [Launchbar locking up, Camino sometimes locking up, Address Book eating its files completely] seeming to go away now that Mail is in the off position_[1]. That said, here’s what I’ve tried to no full avail:

• rm -rf ~/Library/Mail
• rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

Do I have to do more? Yes, I backed up ~/Library/Mail and the .plist before I did this. [I'm not that dumb.]

Suggestions desired. People who tell me to use GMail will get my foot up their ass.

[1] The true test will be this: I’m heading out of town for three days tomorrow, and I will leave Launchbar, iPulse, iTunes, Camino, and Seasonality up and running while I am gone. [Not NetNewsWire, because I imagine that I will read news in the hotel room at night. NNW is the only other program that I have up at pretty much all times, but to sync NNW properly, you best only have one instance of it running at a time.] If I come home with none of those programs in need of a Force Quit, life will be good.

Alex talked up LaunchBar enough that I finally started using it. I like it, but it has a tendency to cause my CPU to spike, all apparently due to “perl”. Is this an indexing thing, or do I have something set incorrectly?

2304 CDT: Looks like the indexing of Camino’s history was hanging up. Because I have a ridiculously large History file [I kept it at 365 days until just now], it was just taking forever to index. I changed the configuration in LaunchBar [Open Configuration, deselect the Camino History checkbox] and then opened Terminal to kill the process [ps -aux | grep "perl", look for the process ID, kill -9 process_id] and my load went back to normal. Learn something new every day, I guess …

Last week, I vowed that I’d give Camino a week. I’ll be giving it a lot more than that. I’d had issues with Camino 1.5 back in June, but it works just fine now.

Things I like:

• Speed. Oh my, I didn’t realize how sluggish Firefox on my Mac was being until I switched. [Note: my iBook doesn't struggle as much, because it has 50% more RAM.]
• Mac-iness. Like everyone else, I recognize that Firefox-on-Mac is not Mac-native feeling. This really doesn’t bother me much, because I spend ~40% of my computing time on PCs at the office. But there are little Mac things that Camino does that Firefox-on-Mac doesn’t. Mainly, it revolves around using Gecko with OS X GUI goodness, rather than relying on XUL and then having a XUL-to-Mac-GUI abstraction layer. If you’re thinking, “Oooooh, abstraction layers, no wonder it’s slow,” well, yes. And it’s also non-Mac.
• Minimalism. I’m glad that I can’t glom everything onto it. Having been on Facebook since before Applications turned some users’ Facebook pages into MySpace-on-white-bread, I can appreciate minimalism. [Note: the users most likely to have 47 Facebook Applications installed were people who used MySpace before they used Facebook hardcore. When you don't know better, you want the kitchen sink.]

What I don’t like:

• The lack of a home button/the funky home keyboard shortcut. Shift-Cmd-H? Really?
• The lack of a keyboard shortcut to take me to the search area.
• Furthermore, I miss the extensibility of multiple search engines—and yes, I know I can add them, but the process of adding them is such a pain in the ass. One thing I love about Firefox is Mycroft, which allows you dozens of site-specific search engine access points. There are a handful of sites [Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, IMDb] where I find these things very useful, and I miss them on the Mac.
• No Ctrl-Tab rotating through tabs.
• Firefox’s Cmd-Return shortcut for taking “cnn” in the address bar and making it “www.cnn.com”.

Camino is going to be my main Mac browser for the next little while. Firefox could win me back with better performance [unlikely, given the bloated nature of the FF codebase], or maybe going to a faster Mac in the late fall will help things. Not sure. But for now, me and Camino are good.

In a larger piece on why the iPhone doesn’t have a clipboard, copy-and-paste, and other things, John Gruber caught my eye with this comment:

The trade-off is that tap-and-drag is not available for selecting a range of text. I’m convinced this trade-off is worth it, if for no other reason than that I primarily use my iPhone for consuming — reading, viewing, listening, looking — far more than I use it for creating. Scrolling is important for reading; selecting is importing for writing. Better for the iPhone to optimize for reading.

Grubes nails it for me. I’ve been thinking about getting rid of my iBook, and today when I went down to my grandmother’s, I only took the iPhone. I consumed plenty of things on the Internet while I was down there, but given that I wasn’t going to create anything, it was just fine. And honestly, I don’t find myself creating much while on the road. So I think I probably will get rid of the iBook. iPhone consumption FTW!

Twice now, I’ve gone into my iPhone expecting to show people music and seeing … nothing. When I get back home that night to synchronize, the sync goofs up, and all the disk space being used on the iPhone shows as “Other”. A new sync fails, of course, because I’m syncing a music library set larger than the spare space.

Restoring the iPhone and re-synchronizing it after the restore worked last time, and I expect that’s what I’ll do tonight. But man … this is frustrating. As Jeff said at lunch, “Ahh, the joys of a 1.0 product.”

A few minutes later: Now the amount of “Other” disk space is far smaller, on the order of the size of calendars and contacts, and the music can be re-sync’d. Perhaps my “let me not sync music twice, then pray” trick worked.

“Hey, do you want to see the iPhone? Geof’s got one.”

“Ooooooh, pretty!”

“I can tell you’re checked out of this meeting. Why don’t you just go ahead and leave?”

“You got an iPhone?! We need to get $co-worker in here … we were talking about them just last week.”

“Yeah, Geof claims that his Treo died. I don’t believe him.” [said as I walked out of a meeting to answer a call from my business manager ... tried not to flip my colleague the bird for pulling my leg]

“It’s just too much fun, isn’t it?”

“So, has that gotten you any babes yet?” [my boss]

Brian Lam’s iPhone review on Gizmodo has a lot of salient points: there are things that the iPhone doesn’t do that lots of other, 1/10th-the-cost phones do perform, and that the iPhone could have many of these with software updates. Therefore, he argues that people wait on buying an iPhone if they haven’t done so already until some of the updates have rolled out. That’s reasonable. I do think those rollouts will come, too—after all, the iPhone was announced with 11 apps originally, and now there are 12 in the initial production run. Looking at the home screen, the UI would easily accept four more apps without anything having to be swapped out, re-ordered, or anything. [One could argue that Apple could put any number of apps on the phone, but two things jump out at me: one, having to scroll the main UI would stink, and two, those apps would have to be small so as to not cripple the 4GB iPhone.]

But here’s what makes Lam’s review slam-worthy: the conclusion:

One more thing. What took you guys so long to review this? And where are the fanboys I know and love/hate?
Like you, I’ve coveted the idea of an Apple phone since it wasn’t any more real than a unicorn. And when it was delivered last Friday, almost seven months after the announcement at Macworld 2007, the hype and spin were so thick, there was no way anyone could write an objective review. Ten days after I camped, plunked down $600 for one, and signed the two year contract, I think I have the perspective to understand what it means to live with this phone. Many reviews abound, but I don’t think anyone has written about it from the perspective of ownership yet. That’s my take on the situation. My mind is clear; this isn’t a knee-jerk reaction.

Ten days? Really? I know that we’re living on InternetTime these days, but ten days is an eyelash blink. That’s what makes the “I want to defend the skeptical nature of this review” thing so laughable. Ten days isn’t enough time for anyone to evaluate it.

Face it: most everyone who’s bought one to this point is a gadget geek. [Check.] Whether or not the device truly has any lasting impact isn’t going to be known for some time yet—probably not even in 2007. Sure, you’re going to see brisk early sales for a device that’s this hyped—just like Hollywood blockbusters have an initial boomlet. But for an early adopter to argue that ten days gives him enough perspective … sorry, I don’t buy it.

[My initial feelings on the iPhone---with just three full days of ownership---are twofold: one, I really like using it, and two, I really like watching other people use it. But I really only care about the first in the long run; the second just strokes my considerable ego.]

Yesterday at dinner, Jason noted, “It’s surprising to me that none of us has an iPhone yet.” I think Amy and Jeff both looked right at me. “I thought about it,” I said, “but my Treo is doing okay, and I just couldn’t justify it.”

When my Treo started doing random weird shit this morning, I … changed my mind. Stifling the urge to eject it from my vehicle while cruising at 69 mph down US 72, I pulled into the AT&T store in Corinth, MS and purchased an iPhone. 4GB, if you must know, but that’s because I’m not a wicked crazy iPod user, and I really want to replace my Treo as a light Web/email device [I'm no Crackberry guy like Alex, who has plenty of reason to not be using his iPhone as a primary device for him] that also happens to be a phone. If it’s an iPod, too, well … bonus.

I activated it when I got to my folks’ house, and after I really got into it, I … flipped my lid.

I like it. Will it replace my iBook? No. Will it replace my Treo, for what I used it for? Absolutely. I can stop fighting with my Treo to make it play nice with my Mac—Contacts worked fine, but iCal never really seemed to behave—and let a native device work with a native device.

:sigh: I’d hoped that my new Mac this year was going to be a new desktop, not a new palmtop. [And don't make any mistake, folks ... this is a tiny computer that happens to make phone calls.] But hey … I wasn’t really happy with the Treo, and when it came time to replace it, I was going to replace it with an iPhone. That just came a whole lot sooner than it did.

Okay, time to stop blogging and go back to hanging out with my parents [the real reason for the trip today].