1FPS|by David Chartier

YouTube - iPhone’s Apple Light.

You could almost poke an eye out with that thing. Wow.

I picked up a second internal (SATA 3.0Gbps) drive for my Mac Pro and popped it in yesterday. After working on probably hundreds—if not thousands—of desktop PCs in my past across various jobs and the personal machines I used to build, I have to say this is the greatest experience I’ve ever had inside a desktop. Granted, The Mac Pro may not be quite as hackable as a beige box in a few respects (due in part to sensitive areas being blocked off with metal enclosures), but this hard drive installation experience was so enjoyable I had to create a video.

Apple pays a lot of attention to the little details, and the pleasantly accessible construction of the Mac Pro is a great example of how that effort pays off.

Altec Lansing’s T612 (nice job on the model name guys. No, really) is the first speaker system that officially supports the iPhone. It’s $199.95. Is GSM shielding really this hard and expensive to do?

Western Digital is getting around to updating some of its Mac utilities that help with drive management, but some of its efforts are pretty baffling. Take the WD Drive Manager, for example. This utility’s sole purpose in life is to sit in the menu bar and display the disk’s free space as a percentage. Pretty useless, especially considering that your friendly neighborhood Finder window can display this information in hard numbers (which are arguably far more useful). Heck, a simple View > Show View Options (Command-J) on the desktop will allow you to display this information directly below the drive, making it always available.

But the utility requires an installer and a bloody restart of the system for it to work. There’s no documentation included in the download, and no decent explanation at Western Digital’s download site of what this utility actually does besides:

This installer - WDDriveManager.dmg installs the Drive related light and button functionality program for Mac OS 10.4.x or higher. This is a replacement program for the WD Button Manager program.

I can’t even find the “light and button functionality program” that explanation is talking about.

For the record, I downloaded it because I was hoping WD had finally created a Mac utility that can stop the drive from overriding Mac OS X’s preferences for spinning down the drive when idle. I am thoroughly convinced that all the major external drive manufacturers had a meeting some time ago and decided that forcing their drives to spin down‚Äîregardless of what the user specifies in the OS‚Äîis a good idea. Now I don’t want to start another debate over the spin down/continuous running topic; I simply prefer to have the choice, as any modern or even not-so-modern OS offers these options to the user already.

Fortunately, WD’s utility offers a “remove” option, which I just made use of.

I completely agree here:

When Goldman repeated Bach’s statement about how the version 2 Zune was now a worthy alternative to the iPod, Jobs replied, “Was he inebriated? Do you even know anyone who owns a Zune?” Ouch. People excuse Apple’s jabs toward Microsoft because they’re underdogs in the OS market, but it just seems mean when they do the same in the iPod-dominated portable media player market. [From Steve Jobs Smack Talks Zune, Brings Drunkenness Into It [Apple]]

Boasting features, simplicity, and design over the competition is one thing. But mucking silly crap like this is just childish, even if Jobs simply said “inebriated” (and don’t get fooled by other media blowing this out of proportion: asking if someone was inebriated is a far, far cry from calling them a drunk). Bad form, and very un-Jobs like.

Apple, pre-October 26th: “Look everyone! Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard + a $180 AirPort Extreme station + a USB hard drive = effortless, wireless Time Machine backups. Won’t this be wild and awesome and a very smart and responsible feature for Mac users to adopt?”

Apple, post-Macworld ‘08 keynote: “Wait, wait, wait… never mind. We decided it would be a lot better for us‚Äînot you‚Äîto make you buy a $300-500 device with a built-in “server-grade” hard drive (bonus points: you probably can’t replace the drive yourself!) instead of rolling out this previously-promised feature that was one of the deciding factors for many of you to run out and buy an AirPort Extreme station in the first place.

Sorry about that… cheers!”

This isn’t about being grumpy that a new product has new features. It’s about wondering where those previously-promised features are that many of us based a nearly $200 purchase on. I asked a few of Apple’s reps on the Macworld showroom floor today if they heard anything about bringing Time Capsule/Time Machine functionality to current AirPort Extreme stations, and all I got was “no current plans.” I just hope that’s an issue of Apple keeping quiet about a 10.5.2 update and a firmware update for these stations, otherwise a lot of people are going to be very upset.

Macs seem to sell themselves (and users help) | Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

Greg Reinacker, founder of NewsGator, switched to a Mac about a month ago after being a die-hard Windows users since 3.0. He blogs about some of his experiences here, offering a couple personal “it just worked” anecdotes that are textbook cases for why people are finally appreciating the Mac. His thoughts on why so much of this is happening just in recent years though were particularly interesting:

I think Apple is in the middle of a bit of a perfect storm at the moment. People I’ve talked to, while not necessarily disillusioned, are not generally impressed with (or excited about) Vista. It seems there is no “wow” factor making the average Joe want to take that step, unless he’s buying a new machine where it comes already installed. And even then, I’ve got some friends (Tom is one of them) who have new laptops with Vista, and are trying to figure out how to switch back to Windows XP. So while usage remains obviously strong, I think loyalty to Windows is waning.

NewsGator, if you aren’t familiar, provides RSS apps and services for big business all the way down to itty bitty consumers like you and I. Guys like Greg Reinacker don’t switch lightly, but when they do, you almost always see them post “breath of fresh air” stuff like this after taking some time to actually get to know Mac OS X.

Here’s another one of Reinacker’s posts from when he first picked up his Mac, exploring some of the initial reasons for the decision. This stuff is fascinating.

Ask 37signals: Installable software? | 37signals

37signals is the company behind such smash web-based software as Backpack, Basecamp and Highrise. This answer to a user-submitted question on why 37signals doesn’t sell user-installable software rang a bell in my mind as to why, for many (but not all) products, I prefer a closed software + hardware system from their manufacturers:

Software is hard enough to get right when you control the variables. With web-based software we have a single code base optimized for a single operating environment. We’re in charge of putting together the optimal software and hardware set-up to run our products. The significance of this can not be underestimated.

I understand the place that products like open source and Windows have in the world, but the success and exceptional design of closed development systems (but not necessarily closed products) cannot be ignored. Just look at 37signals widely-hailed yet refreshingly simple web-based productivity apps, or Microsoft’s Xbox, Apple products, even the BlackBerry hardware + software‚Äîall software designed in-house to work on very specific hardware devices, all enjoying an unusually high amount of customer satisfaction and fandom. You can’t buy that kind of satisfaction and success‚Äîyou design for it.

I know the iPod and iPhone are the big product pushes for the holidays, but still‚Äîit saddens me just a little to see everything *but* their computers on the main page right now. The good news, however, is that they’ve been selling more Macs each quarter than any previous quarter, so things are going well at least. Hell, even Dvorak is using and liking a Mac now, and that’s gotta be a good thing, right?

I’ve owned $30 routers from Netgear, I’ve owned $80 routers from Linksys. Sometimes I set them up with WEP and WAP security, sometimes I felt like leaving them open because I had nice neighbors. Sometimes I customized the crap out of them by locking down the network, hiding the SSID, using a password even a computer couldn’t remember, specifying a specific broadcast channel and doing a rain dance in the room I kept those routers. Sometimes I didn’t.

Never, with any of those routers, did I have 1/100th of the trouble, frustration or hair-tearing moments that I’ve had with your AirPort Express and new AirPort Extreme (802.11n) routers. Never.

Your routers frequently flip out, drop connections, seize up Mac OS X (on both a MacBook Pro and iMac G5) and generally make me want to bulldoze your company headquarters to the ground. Whether I’m running 802.11n only, n/g mixed or b/g on the AirPort Extreme, using password security or leaving the networks open, your routers are by and far the absolute worst, most unreliable and frustrating products you make, and inarguably the worst routers in the industry. No no, I mean: inarguably.

If a $30 router from one of your well known competitors or even a no-name brand that might not exist next week can work more reliably than yours, something is seriously fucking broken. Fix it. You have some cute features like AirTunes that no one else does, but if you can’t allow your users to maintain a basic connection to the internet, you are doing something wrong.

Please, for the love of all things wonderful in this world, give me a reason to not regret spending $280 on your networking products when something for a fraction of the price puts them to absolute, inarguable shame. Your computers are great, your OS is second to none, the iPod is cute - but your routers are a pathetic shame. Fix them.

Love and hugs
- David