My name is Giles, and I am one of the new contributors here at Cult of Mac.
I’ve been given the job of covering the “Mac community and culture”. It’s the real “Cult of Mac” beat, and it came with a friendly warning from the boss, Leander Kahney: “It’s not an easy beat, because there are no press releases.”
And he’s right. The real Mac cultists do not tend to proclaim their Cult membership by issuing press releases; they are far more likely to post an image on Flickr, a video on Vimeo or YouTube, or a post on an obscure blog somewhere. My job here is to seek them out and share them with you lot.
The iPhone’s diddy little camera wins no photography awards, and rarely even a positive remark from fellow iPhone owners in the pub.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t come up with some interesting images when it tries hard. Or even when it doesn’t try hard at all, and just acts weird. We’ve seen iPhone cubismcovered before, but how about iPhone slants?
I really enjoyed Philip Michaels’ post at Macworld yesterday, in which he discussed the success of retail Apple Stores over the years: you hear a lot about Apple Stores opening, but you never hear about them closing again.
When the news first came out that Apple was going to start opening its own chain of retail stores, there were groans from far and wide. “Apple’s a computer company,” the cynics said (myself included). “They’ll never make retail work.”
Oops. On the contrary, Apple has made retail work, and Philip’s post spells out some of the reasons why: Apple has looked to the long term, taking losses in the early days with the expectation that profit will come later. And it has chosen the store locations with great care, picking out high-profile, high-traffic spots that will pull in a very large number of people, lured in by window displays of attractively priced iPods.
A new Apple store opens this Thursday, just up the road from me in Bristol, and it conforms to the rules. It will be located inside the shiny new Cabot Circus development, a vast mall erected where once there was a grimy, dismal 60s shopping area.
As usual, the store’s opening will be marked with hoopla, cheering, and free T-shirts for the first 1000 people through the door. I’m going to go along; not for the T-shirts, but to meet some of those people.
An interesting little rant at The Daily Telegraph lists the five features the Android-powered Google phone (known as the G1) needs to have to “see off” (that’s east London speak for “compete with”) the iPhone.
Those five requirements are, in a nutshell:
“Lots of Google” — Google integration with everything
“Entertainment” — a vague notion that the G1 needs video and music and stuff
“Looks” — it must match the iPhone in terms of stylish design; I’d argue that this isn’t really a requirement. There are lots of people who value function over design and will gladly put up with the uglies if it means they get a cheaper smart phone
“Online” — it must have a decent browser and push email; duh
“Applications” — there must be an App Store
According to the pre-launch leaks and rumors flying around over the last 12 hours or so, most of that list is indeed present on the phone: Google everywhere, video player, an App Store-a-like, and so on.
So, yeah, a reasonable list of things that an iPhone competitor should be thinking about, but it misses out some other ideas. Such as:
“Multi-touch” — one reason why people like the iPhone so much, from the moment they pick it up, is the multi-touch UI. It adds a great deal to the user experience and makes the phone more appealing. I’ve said it before: it makes people smile
“Price” — much more than multi-touch, much more than any of the others, this is the one feature that I think G1 and its ancestors progeny (sorry, my mistake, see comments) will be able to compete on very well indeed. No matter how many smiles the iPhone generates, it remains an expensive choice. If the Android army can offer a good experience overall (not necessarily one that matches the iPhone feature-for-feature at all) but at a reasonable price, it will have customers lining up at the tills.
The official announcement comes later today. Hold on tight.
We wanted to find out more, so we asked him what it was all about.
“This desk is a design I came up with after unsuccessfully trying to find a desk for use with a zero gravity chair.
“The desk at the bottom of the page (in woodgrain) with just shelves front and rear was the original design but I decided to take it to the extreme and the result was the design at the top of the page and depicted in the animations. The large arch holds two slide out bays that will each hold a Mac Pro and battery backup unit. The arch also provides a support for multiple monitors.”
Multiple monitors we can understand. But two Mac Pros and 12 Mac Minis? What’s that all about?
“I wanted a unit that would hold at least two Mac Pros because I get tired of waiting for a test image to render and wanted to be able to switch between machines. I thought the 12 Mac Mini render farm would be just the ticket for rendering my 3D lenticular images because it takes 10-12 frames to comprise a 3D image and each frame can take hours or even days to render just one frame.
“The full blown desk was designed to replace the typical office cubicle with a 7′ x 10′, ergonomically comfortable, workstation solution based around a reclining zero gravity chair.”
Right now the PerDesk is just an idea in Peter’s head. But if any manufacturers are interested in turning into a product, he’d like to hear from them. Perhaps we should put him in touch with the OneLessDesk guys, although then they’d have OneMoreDesk, so maybe not.
They call it the “OneLessDesk”. They say it will be “the last desk you’ll ever own”. It’s … quite a desk.
Sleek. Silvery. (Unless you buy the white version.) Made out of solid steel, strong enough to hold two 24 inch flat panels side-by-side, cut from raw sheet metal with lasers, baby.
“Built”, they say, “like an American tank.”
And a steal at just $649. I’ll have two. I’m going to melt them down. I could do with a tank.
Admit it: you’ve always wanted an office like this, haven’t you? Your dual-monitor setup looks a bit pathetic now, doesn’t it?
This is the massive eight-monitor workspace of Mitch Haile, and when we saw it on Flickr we knew we had to share it. You can see the original pics of his iMac and his Mac Pro, as well as many more photos of his office space. But why on earth does he need so many monitors? We asked him. Over to you, Mitch:
“I am working at a stealth mode start-up in San Jose, where I used to live. I commute from Boston. Part-time I do some consulting and oversee back-end software architecture for a new DVD cataloging service, www.take11.com.
“The iMac is for email and mundane tasks like bug triage,
documentation, etc–stuff that doesn’t require 6 monitors.
The MacBook Pro is obviously for travel. Both of these machines have 4GB of RAM each.
“The six monitors are connected to the Mac Pro. Main apps are X11, Eclipse, Terminal, BBedit, gvim, VMware. The Linux box next to the Mac Pro also is a VMware-oriented system and I run xterms and another Eclipse application on that box, using X11 forwarding to display it on the Mac. NFS all over the place. The Mac Pro has about 4TB of storage, the Linux box 1TB.
“The main reason for the 6 monitors is to see multiple debuggers concurrently. The 95” or so of width is about
the physical maximum I can take in at once; it’s not really
enough room but I don’t want to kill my neck.
“The boxes in the closet are more testing infrastructure. More RAM, more VMware on the towers. The small shuttles were cheap (about $200 each) and perform small little tasks that are important but need isolation from the rest of the environment.
“I have been running multi-monitors for about 9 years now. I think I upgraded to 4 monitors in 2004; as LCDs have gotten cheaper, it’s been more practical. Three 21″ CRTs would
kill a desk, but 6 LCDs weighs a lot less.”
Thanks to Mitch for the guided tour and permission to re-use the pics. Image smushing was done with DoubleTake.
By day, Damian Ward operates Macs for a printing company in darkest Buckinghamshire, a county just to the north west of London. He’s been doing this for 15 years or so.
By night, Damian hunts for batches of unwanted, unloved old Macs. He hunts down 512k machines, Classics, SEs and SE30s, and early iMacs. He takes them in — from colleagues, friends, Freecycle, eBay, junk sales, anywhere — and tinkers with them. He has quite an impressive collection.
“You bring them home and you think they’ll be beyond repair, and that you’ll only be able to use them for parts,” he says.
“Then you discover they’re working fine, and then you can’t get rid of them can you? You have to keep them.” That’s right. You have to.
Macenstein has a beauty of a post, explaining precisely how to remove Apple’s own apps from sight on your iPhone.
If you’ve ever wondered how many screenfuls of apps the iPhone will let you store, the answer is nine – or a total of 148 apps. But it turns out that there’s a secret, hidden, 10th screen.
So if Calculator, Clock or Contacts drive you crazy and you want to be rid of them, all you have to do is get yourself nine screen loads of apps, and be sure that the 8th and 9th screens are full to the brim. Then get the icons wiggling and start shuffling from screen eight to screen nine. Boom!, as Steve would say.
The apps aren’t actually deleted, just removed from sight. And even then, they will re-appear after you restart the phone or sync it.
Full details are at Macenstein. And if you read it and think: “Why would I spend so much time doing that?”, then you and I both have great minds.
Every high school and junior high student in the Ballinger school district near San Angelo has been given a brand new MacBook. Lucky them.
Let’s assume that most of these youngsters have not owned a Mac before. What advice should we give them? What tips would make their computing life a happy one?
Here’s my list, which in some respects is similar to Alex Payne’s, linked above:
don’t let your Mac automatically log you in. Pick a good system password and make sure you have to enter it to gain access
back your stuff up. If your computer is going to die, the chances are good that it’ll die the day before you have to hand in that important assignment
don’t overload your Applications folder with stuff you don’t need
use a text editor to write. Only use a word processor for final formatting, if it’s necessary; even then, TextEdit or Bean are just fine for most of the basics
learn about properly quitting apps (not just closing their windows); about using disk images and installing software from them; about grabbing screenshots with Command+Shift+3 and Command+Shift+4; about Expose and Spaces and Quick Look
Just a few tips off the top of my head. If you were in that school hall while those MacBooks were handed out, what advice would you have been giving the kids?
Stuff Magazine: iPhone in Gadget of the year contest
The summer holidays are barely over and the children only back at school for a week, but already the Christmas tat has started appearing in the shops and the media is casting its collective eyes over the events of the last few months to put together some “thing of the year” contests.
And first on the radar is the UK’s Stuff Magazine, best known for the scantily clad ladies who adorn its front cover (usually clutching some gadget or other in their manicured paws).
In the Reader’s gadget of the year category, the iPhone 3G is up against Nintendo’s Wii Fit, the Asus Eee, game consoles the PS3 and XBox 360 60GB, and the B&W Zeppelin speaker system.
That’s not all though. The MacBook Air crops up in the Design of the year category, against the Zeppelin (again) and a bunch of other things that, in my opinion, don’t even come close.
So does the iPhone deserve Gadget of the Year status? I’d say it does, yes. I’ve not seen anything else — except perhaps Mario Kart on the Wii — make people smile so much. Everyone who picks up an iPhone, whether they’re playing with a friend’s or toying with one of the demo models in a shop, smiles. You watch, it’s true. They pick the thing up for the first time, they start tapping on it, and they smile.
There’s a bunch of iPhone/iTouch apps that offer some sort of sketching functionality. It was only a matter of time before people started sharing some of their sketches online, and my favorite gallery so far is the Flickr iPhone Sketches pool, which contains some real gems (like Luis Mendo’s untitled sketch, above, and Waiting by Pepita P.) There’s loads more:
iPhone art pool
If, like me, you like the idea of drawing during dull moments but are rarely organized enough to carry around a sketchpad and a pencil, iPhone artwork is probably the next best option.
Got some iPhone artworks you’d like to share? By all means post links in the comments. A URL on a line of its own gets auto-linked. Let’s see whatcha got.
Wanna build an iPhone robot? Of course you do. And the people at BattleBricks have got everything you need.
You need two iPhones for this trick, thanks to the robot’s ingenious control system. The robot is controlled via a simple Google Web Toolkit app. The iPhone in your hand is used to issue commands; the iPhone attached to the robot displays coloured squares in different shades of grey, and an on-board light sensor watches what it’s showing; one shade says “turn right”, another “turn left” and so on.
Full instructions can be downloaded from the BattleBricks page. There’s exciting video to watch too.
And if you should happen to build your own robot, do let Cult of Mac know, so we can share your creation with the rest of the Cultists.
One common problem I’ve noticed is that recent switchers from Windows to OS X don’t expect to encounter problems. At all. In many cases, they’ve heard so much good stuff about OS X that they expect it to be good stuff all the way through.
I make a point, these days, of saying to potential switchers: “Macs can break, you know. They do break. They can drive you crazy.” And the potential switchers look at me like I’m mad and say: “So why switch then?” And I reply: “Because it will happen far less frequently than it does with Windows, and most of the time recovery will be quicker and easier.” Note that: most of the time.
Anyway, Asraf Sani has a disappointed tone in his voice when he writes about the artistically interesting graphics failure that hit his iMac running Leopard last Friday. The colourful light show made it unusable, but at least the screenshot controls were still working, enabling Asraf to grab a few snaps for his Flickr stream.
“Here’s what I was thinking: all my music is in iTunes. iTunes, via an Airport Express, plays out through my Big Speakers. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to use it to find out what this week’s Thinking Allowed is about, or to enjoy some rough dubplate pressure from 1Xtra? … Simply, the app grabs programme information from /programmes and re-presents it to iTunes in its native tongue: DAAP.”
In short, Matthew’s code grabs the BBC’s Flash-based online radio service and hooks it up with iTunes, ending the need for using horrible Real Player (and therefore browsers or Dashboard widgets that depend on it). What a neat idea.
It’s not very consumer friendly yet, but it’s pointing in a very attractive direction.
I don’t often read Windows sites, let alone link to them, and even then not when I think they’re rightly criticising Apple or Mac OS X. But in this case, I think it’s justified.
Ed Bott got a surprise when he upgraded to iTunes 8 on his PC running Windows Vista. Not only did he get iTunes 8, he also a QuickTime update – and that’s fine, because the installer told him that was going to happen, and he continued with the upgrade knowing what to expect.
Or so he thought.
But on further investigation (see the annotated gallery), it turned out that the upgrade process also installed a bunch of other things: Apple Mobile Device Support, Bonjour, and Mobile Me. And on top of those, a couple of drivers, one of which is a known cause of serious crashes.
Ed’s post isn’t a complaint about the software itself (although the crash-causing driver is a pretty annoying problem). What he’s most annoyed about is the manner in which it was installed. If Apple wanted to install all this extra stuff, it should at least have the courtesy to tell him so first.
This is precisely the sort of behavior that Microsoft, Real, and many other Windows software companies got into trouble over back in the 1990s and early 2000s. I can remember people getting hugely angry with Windows software that tried to sneak its way into your computer.
Perhaps Apple is doing it this way because it thinks Windows users are accustomed to it. But think how you’d feel if, next time you ran Software Update on your OS X Mac, it told you there was one upgrade available and then started to install six different things? Wouldn’t you be suspicious? Wouldn’t you be just a tad annoyed?
His answer is a resounding affirmative, but then you’d expect that of an article at Low End Mac. Simon’s a writer, too, so his requirements for a work machine are pretty minimal: just a word processor, most of the time.
My oldest Mac is a 600MHz Dual USB G3 iBook, which copes bravely with Tiger. It does nothing other than play music streamed from elsewhere, and does that job just fine. The only problem is that getting it started up and playing takes a while:
press on/off button
(make cup of tea while it boots, connects to network, launches iTunes)
tell iTunes to connect to shared music
(make another cup of tea)
select desired playlist
(look out of the window wistfully)
start playing music
Apart from that, it’s fine.
What’s the oldest Mac you’ve got that does a decent job of something or other?
My inability to do a simple task, like call up the international character palette, or even remember its (mostly) system-wide shortcut, is well documented.
That’s why I love something like Copy Paste Char; I’m so much better at remembering URLs. This simple web page will save me whole seconds every year.
I shall now paste in some celebratory glyphs, because I can: (Squiggles omitted — Ed)
(Whether or not they’ll show up properly in your browser, having been mangled in turn by TextMate, WordPress and the browser itself, is a whole nother question entirely.)
