I upgraded my new MacBook Pro to 8GB of RAM today ($295 from OWC, plus a rebate when I return my old RAM). It makes a huge difference when running many applications or large applications such as Aperture.
The upgrade was very easy and the Unibody MacBook Pro is very easy to open, despite having 3 screws to remove. Once the bottom is off, the RAM is exposed and can be easily replaced.
The entire process took about 15 minutes, including opening & closing the case.
I often run Xcode, Interface Builder & Photoshop CS5 at the same time, which caused the disk to thrash constantly in 4GB. Now there’s hardly any swapping and I haven’t seen a beachball. Aperture 3 was so slow it was nearly unusable in 4GB, but with 8GB it feels pretty snappy. I can move between photos seeing a beachball.
MarsEdit is one of my favorite applications and it just got even better with version 3. I have been using MarsEdit for this blog almost since the beginning. I’ve looked at other blog editors, but I always came back to MarsEdit because it just seemed more comfortable and it just worked exactly the way I wanted.
Until now, MarsEdit only supported HTML editing, but version 3 also adds a new Rich Text editor. MarsEdit 3 also adds support for WordPress pages & custom fields and a new media browser that supports iPhoto, Aperture, and Lightroom.
The only thing MarsEdit is missing now is an iPad version.
It’s official – I’m going to WWDC. I have my ticket and I booked my flights & hotel.
I’ll be staying a few extra days to look at some homes in the bay area and hopefully buy one. I’ve decided on San Leandro for its convenient location and reasonable home prices. Most places in San Leandro have a pretty high walk score, and it’s 30 minutes from San Francisco.
I always loved how things looks and its simple, elegant user interface. The iPad version is simply beautiful: it works exactly the way a task management app on an iPad should work.
Unfortunately, Things’ syncing has never worked smoothly. Syncing it between two different computers can only be done with something like DropBox, and you can’t run it on both machines at the same time when using the same data file. Things can also sync with iCal, but that always causes duplicate & missing items and doesn’t work at all between two different machines sharing a data file. Things usually syncs nicely between a single Mac, iPhone, and iPad, but today it suddenly stopped recognizing my iPhone, even after I removed it and paired it again.
OmniFocus is a lot more powerful and flexible, but as a result it doesn’t feel as clean & elegant as Things. OmniFocus has a major advantage over Things in syncing. While Things only syncs mobile devices over the local network, OmniFocus supports several different syncing methods, including MobileMe. OmniFocus can only sync manually with iCal, but it doesn’t screw up the way Things does. Most importantly, when syncing via MobileMe, you can run it on two computers at the same time without screwing anything up, and you can sync your iPhone even when you’re away from the computer.
Due to all of the syncing problems I’ve been having with Things, I’ve switched back to OmniFocus. Unfortunately they still don’t have an iPad version, so the iPhone version (like most iPhone apps) is just plain ugly when run on an iPad. I miss Things’s beauty & elegance, but not losing data is more critical.
My new MacBook Pro arrived today, and after using the antiglare hi-res screen for only a short time I can’t imagine how I was able to work on the 13″ screen. It’s bright enough that it’s completely readable outdoors. With the 1680×1050 display, I can use the iPad simulator at 100% scaling. It also feels a lot faster than the MacBook. Photoshop CS4 launches in about 20 seconds vs. 45 seconds on the MacBook and about 12 seconds on the 27″ iMac.
I don’t have the old MacBook’s GeekBench score, but the 15″ MacBook Pro’s score is 5054.
For comparison, the iMac’s score is 8435.
The only negative thing about the new MacBook Pro is the silver screen bezel, which doesn’t look as nice as the black bezel on glossy screen models.
The new MacBook Pro uses an angled MagSafe connector that’s less likely to get pulled out accidentally.
I haven’t run it on battery power for an extended period yet, so I can’t tell how long the battery lasts.
I have been waiting for Apple to release a new MacBook Pro, since after using my iMac, my aluminum MacBook feels extremely slow. The small screen also makes it difficult to work with the iPad simulator since it can’t display a full 1024×768 iPad screen at 100% scale. As soon as Apple announced the new lineup today, I ordered a top of the line 15″ MacBook Pro to replace my MacBook.
Much as I love the 13″ form factor, lighter weight, and longer battery life, I decided to go for the 15″ for the faster processor and larger screen. The 8-9 hour battery life isn’t as good as the 13″ model’s 10 hour battery, but it’s better than my MacBook, which gives me less than 5 hours.
The iPad looks awesome, and of course I want one, but most likely I won’t get an iPad for one reason: it can’t replace either my MacBook or iPhone, so I’d have to travel with three different devices. I would definitely get an iPad rather than a Kindle or Nook, if I did get an eBook reader.
Since the iPad doesn’t have a camera and isn’t usable as a phone, I still need an iPhone. Since it can’t run Mac software I need such as XCode and web development software such as Coda or BBEdit (or MarsEdit, which I’m using now), I’ll still need to use my MacBook.
I often review UNIEA’s products at MacMegasite, so they will send me a package with some of their newest items. This time they sent me a 10.2″ “U-Sleaf”, which claims to be for a 10″ netbook. The flap makes me think it’s actually designed for a tablet-type device.
At final count there are over 140 developers signed up for Indie+Relief. Although they only list PicSlide, I’m donating all of my app sales tomorrow to Partners In Health.
Here are some scenes of the earthquake destruction, set to the song “Haiti” by Arcade Fire.
Arcade Fire’s Régine Chassagne, whose family is from Haiti, wrote a very touching piece about how the earthquake affected her and telling why she endorses Partners In Health:
It is strange that I was introduced to my country by a white doctor from Florida called Paul Farmer who speaks perfect Creole and knows how to pronounce my name right. He is the co-founder of an organisation titled Partners in Health (Zanmi Lasante in Creole). There are several charity organisations that are doing good work in Haiti – Fonkoze is a great micro-lending organisation – but in terms of thorough medical care, follow-up and combining of parallel necessary services (education, sanitation, training, water, agriculture), there is none that I could recommend more than Partners in Health. It takes its work for the Haitian people very seriously and, indeed, most of the staff on the ground are Haitian. PIH has been serving the poorest of the poor for more than 20 years with a curriculum that really astounded me, given the limited resources available in the area.
Visiting its facilities, I was overwhelmed by, and impressed with, the high-level, top-quality services provided in areas where people own next to nothing and were never given the opportunity to learn how to sign their own name. I was delightfully shocked to see the radically positive impact it has had in the communities it serves. Of course, during my visit, I saw some clinics and hospitals that were at different stages than others, but through it all, I could clearly see that PIH staff are very resourceful and set the bar extremely high for themselves. I know that, right now, they are using their full capacities to save as many lives as possible.
So in these critical times where death comes every minute, I urge you to donate to Partners in Health (www.pih.org) and be as generous as you can. I know from having talked to some staff that they are on the ground right now, setting up and managing field hospitals as well as receiving the injured at their clinics in the surrounding areas.
You can follow Partners In Health on Twitter and see the great work they’re doing.
Via Slashdot:
plasmacutter writes “The Video Lan dev team has recently come forward with a notice that the number of active developers for the project’s MacOS X releases has dropped to zero, prompting a halt in the release schedule. There is now a disturbing possibility that support for Mac will be dropped as of 1.1.0. As the most versatile and user-friendly solution for bridging the video compatibility gap between OS X and windows, this will be a terrible loss for the mac community. There is still hope, however, if the right volunteers come forward.”
VLC is one of my favorite applications, so I’d hate to see it die. Unfortunately I have too many other things going to take on another project, especially an unpaid one, or I would get involved.
My 27″ iMac arrived today and it was well worth the wait. This is by far the fastest Mac I’ve ever used – it scores 7995 on Geekbench 2.1.4, vs. 3180 for my MacBook. The screen is humongous.
Most applications launch instantaneously. iPhoto with a library containing 8385 items takes 6 bounces to launch and is ready to use in about 5 seconds. It takes less than a minute to start Parallels Desktop 5 and boot to the Windows 7 desktop.
Here are the Geekbench results of the iMac:
For comparison, here’s the MacBook’s rating:
I ordered the 27″ i7 quad core 2.8GHz iMac last week. It still hasn’t shipped – the order status still says “Ships: November”. A lot of people who ordered them earlier are starting to receive them, and from early reports, the performance is outstanding.
For the last few years, I’ve been using laptops with 15″ or smaller screens & speeds of 2.5 GHz or less exclusively, so this will be a nice upgrade. I’m really starting to feel the limitations of the MacBook Pro when running a Windows 7 VM and trying to do useful work like XCode builds in OS X with 4GB of RAM.
I’ll be keeping only the 13″ MacBook, since I prefer it to the 15″ for traveling.
Parallels Desktop 5 and VMWare Fusion 3 were both released in the last week, and as usual I tried both. I find that Parallels is noticeably faster running Windows 7, and it doesn’t slow down my MacBook Pro like VMware does.
When running a Windows 7 VM with 768M RAM allocated, VMWare uses 1GB of physical RAM and at least 20% CPU most of the time. Parallels uses around 632M and almost no CPU time when idle.
Parallels Coherence mode still looks a lot cleaner than VMWare’s Unity. Parallels starts up cleanly in Unity, while VMWare can’t switch to Unity until the virtual machine is fully booted & the VMWare tools are loaded. Dragging windows in Unity tends to be ugly, with desktop artifacts appearing, while dragging seems faster & cleaner in Parallels.
Parallels 5 adds a new crystal view, which resembles Coherence plus it makes the Parallels application disappear completely, with an icon added to the menu bar that lets you launch Windows applications.
I use Choosy so I can switch between browsers easily. Instead of having to set Safari, Firefox, Google Chrome, or some other browser as my default, if I have one browser open, links will automatically open that browser. If more than one browser is open, Choosy will let you pick which one to open a link in.
Today I discovered that it’s even more awesome than I realized: It not only lets you choose Mac OS X browsers — it also supports Windows browsers running under VMWare Fusion 3 (I haven’t tried it with Parallels yet, but I suspect it will work as well). If you have both a Windows and Mac OS X browser open, Choosy will show both of them in its menu and let you open links in either one.
I’ve been using laptops exclusively for several years. I now have both a 13″ aluminum Macbook, which I bought late last year, and a 15″ unibody MacBook Pro, which I won from DriveSavers at Macworld Expo earlier this year. I use the 15″ as my desktop system at home, since it has better graphics performance and a nicer screen for editing photos, but I prefer the 13″ for traveling, since it’s lighter, more convenient, and has better battery life.
Although the 15″ is an excellent system, it’s still a lot less powerful than a dedicated desktop machine like the new 27″ iMac. In particular, I’ve been getting very annoyed with the slow virtualization performance, since it’s limited to 4GB RAM and I need to run both XCode and a Windows virtual machine, as well as Mail & Safari which max out the RAM.
I’ll most likely get the i5 quad core iMac and upgrade the RAM to 8GB.
I’ll cut right to the point: the Magic Mouse is the best mouse I’ve ever used. The scrolling is so smooth & effortless that when I first started using it, I kept scrolling around just to admire how nice it feels. Unlike the Mighty Mouse, the right click works easily and I’ve never had any false clicks. I haven’t had much of an opportunity to use the swipe gestures, since not too many applications support it. The only feature I miss is the middle button click. I suspect it may be possible to implement it in a future software upgrade.
The Magic Mouse requires a software update, which is available from Apple’s download page. Without the software, none of the gestures work and the mouse movement is erratic. The new mouse preference panel lets you enable the various gestures.
I ordered the Magic Mouse as soon as Apple announced it, and it finally arrived today. The first thing I noticed was the minimal packaging. The shipping box contained only the small plastic box with some padding instead of the usual big cardboard boxes. Unfortunately a bit of sticky tape on the bottom left a bit of residue on the mouse, although it came off easily.
See the full unboxing gallery here.
Microsoft’s new retail stores are such a blatant ripoff of Apple stores. They use exactly the same layout and the display table setup is identical. They even have the same accessory section in the back near the GeniusGuru Bar.
At work we use Microsoft Team Foundation Server to assign tasks & work tickets. When someone assigns me a work ticket I get an email with a subject like ‘so and so assigned you work ticket 12345 – fix some bug’. It would be really useful if they could be automatically added as a task to OmniFocus.
I looked at OmniFocus’ mail rule for creating new tasks, but unfortunately it won’t work with TFS work ticket notifications because it requires a specially formatted email.
Using that script as an inspiration, I came up with this script that creates a new task with the message linked to the note field. I’m sharing it just in case anyone else finds it useful.
First you’ll need to create a mail rule that filters messages matching the criteria of the subject ‘assigned you work ticket’ and the TFS notification email address as the sender.
Here’s the mail action script:
using terms from application "Mail"
on process_message(theMessage)
tell application "OmniFocus"
log "OmniFocus calling process_message in MailAction script"
end tell
set theSubject to subject of theMessage
set p to offset of "Work Ticket" in theSubject
set theSubject to characters p through end of theSubject as string
set theText to "message:%3C" & message id of theMessage & "%3E"
tell application "OmniFocus"
tell default document
set ctx to context "Work"
make new inbox task with properties {name:theSubject, note:theText, context:ctx}
end tell
end tell
end process_message
on perform mail action with messages theMessages
try
set theMessageCount to count of theMessages
repeat with theMessageIndex from 1 to theMessageCount
my process_message(item theMessageIndex of theMessages)
end repeat
on error m number n
tell application "OmniFocus"
log "Exception in Mail action: (" & n & ") " & m
end tell
end try
end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from
I’ve gone back and forth between Things and The Hit List for a while, but I was never completely happy with either one of them.
I like THL’s user interface and flexibility to set up nested lists & folders, but I’m frustrated with the lack of an iPhone app, which I find essential.
I use Things just for their iPhone sync, but I’m frustrated with its inflexible structure and lack of folders or outlines with subtasks.
After trying the Mac app for a while, I finally took the plunge today and got both the Mac & iPhone versions of OmniFocus. Like The Hit List, OmniFocus allows complete flexibility to create outlines of subtasks and it goes even further by letting you promote a task to a project. iPhone sync is even better than Things, which can only sync over the local network. OmniFocus syncs via Mobile Me, so you don’t have to be near your computer to sync with it.
OmniFocus is more expensive than the other applications but it’s well worth the price if you want complete flexibility and iPhone support.
Kevin Ballard explains how 1Password is able to load an extention into Safari when running in 64-bit mode:
When Cocoa was introduced, one of the behaviors that every Cocoa application automatically acquired was the loading of Input Managers. These Input Managers were intended to allow developers to extend the text input system of OS X in ways that the system did not provide by default. However, these Input Managers were really nothing more than Cocoa bundles that got loaded by every single Cocoa app at launch. This means that it was very quickly abused to become a general plugin mechanism for applications that do not natively support plugins (such as Safari). In recent OS updates, Apple has been deprecating this mechanism, and now in Snow Leopard it’s completely gone for 64-bit apps.
Luckily, the smart folks who make 1Password came up with a solution for their upcoming 1Password 3.0 (which is in public beta right now).
AppleScript is a rather old technology, first introduced in System 7. It is a human-readable scripting language that can control any application that implements support for it, along with a slew of system functions. Under the hood, it sends Apple events to actually talk to each process.
Scripting additions are bundles that provide additional functionality to AppleScript, generally by installing Apple event handlers or doing Apple event data coercion.
The thing about scripting additions is that they will be potentially loaded by any process on the system. Generally, they get loaded into a process that attempts to use an AppleEvent that the scripting addition handles.
The ability to load a scripting addition into a target process simply by sending it an Apple event is the key mechanism that allows us to restore the old Input Manager functionality. And this is exactly what 1Password does. 1Password includes a scripting addition that handles the ONEP/Load Apple event with a context of “Process”. This handler takes a single argument, the path to a given bundle, and it loads that specified bundle into the target process. The last component is a background daemon called 1PasswordAgent. This daemon sends the ONEP/Load Apple event to Safari immediately after Safari is launched, causing Safari to load the 1Password WebKit plugin.
This actually sounds a lot cleaner than the input manager hack. I hope Apple doesn’t disable this in the future. Hopefully it will also provide a mechanism for 1Password to work in Opera & Google Chrome.
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