Apple — Tag

If anything, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened earlier. The latest Macbooks from Apple have one less thing on the trackpad, buttons. OK, so the trackpad is just one large button, but seriously, who actually “clicks” with those things anymore?

I have more fun tapping – it doesn’t require me to push down, and also doesn’t require me to move my hand. You could call it lazy, but I call it genius. Yet, even though we’ve had this “tap to click” motion for some time in Windows/Linux land, the Macbooks took their sweet time. I don’t remember when they started having the tap, but I do remember for a long time trying to use a Macbook without the feature. (I’ve had too many people point out my ill-informed lies.)

Once Apple did have the tap, they took it one further and added the two-finger tap. Oh man, now I don’t even have to move my hand when I want to do a right-click! I can just tap the pad using two fingers.

But “took it one further” insinuates they took a small step, but no, they took a leap and allowed you scroll through things just by swiping those two fingers across the pad. No longer do you have hotzones that you have to swipe your finger in, now you have the whole track pad.

I just had a play with the new Macbooks, the ones that have no button. You can still click for those moments when your mind flips, and it works very well (as if the button was there). You can even do a right-click by setting a hotzone. But, why do that when you have the two-finger tap? Then you have the two-finger scroll. The new Macbooks added the three-finger navigation (it goes back when you swipe your three fingers to the left, forward when you swipe to the right). Then there are four finger swipes. I’ll admit, these are a bit of a stretch. You swipe up with your four fingers to show the desktop (it was like swiping away all my windows). You swipe down to show all the windows (it was like bringing them in). It all worked, magically. The application switch though was awful. You swiped with your four fingers left or right to bring up the Alt-Tab switch. It just wasn’t as magical as the Expose switch.

I’m quite excited in getting one of these. People may think I’ve gone crazy (I was once an Apple hater), but these things look nice and decently spec’d. I might manage to get one before the year is out, if not early next year. The play also took away my fears of the shiny screen (it isn’t as shiny as it is made out to be), which is good.

So it is well known that Apple have launched the MacBook Air. It is interesting the response from almost everyone. It’s more sure, it looks good, but it doesn’t bring anything new (even on Digg which I thought would’ve been full of praise for Apple). Apple is trying to tell us all that thin is in. It’s almost like the fashion world telling us thin is in, with the really obvious downside – to be ultra-thin you must have anorexia and have no other functionality at all, but at least you look “nice,” (after the airbrushing hides your bones).

That’s what comes to mind with the Air. It’s thin, looks nice, but lacks functionality. Here’s what it’s got,

• It’s less than 2 cm’s thick!
• 13.3″ screen,
• A pad big enough to do gestures on (nice),
• 2GB of RAM
• [up to] 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (custom).

But then you go, what does it lack then? It doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive, something I can’t see many people getting to grips with. There is a Remote Disk feature, which is actually a neat idea. You install it on your other computer and then your Air will pick it up as a normal disk. If you must have a separate drive (this is Mac town though, just what are you going to install on that thing, Windows!?), you can buy one. It will go into the USB port. The only USB port on the entire thing. In fact, it has one USB port, one mini-DVI port (for hooking up to an external monitor) and one headphone jack. That’s it. If you need more (such as if you do get the external optical drive), you’ll need to buy a USB hub. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t supply one of those.

The kicker is the price. $2,999! The price of luxury I guess. If you want the slightly faster, with less space version, you can spend $5,139.00! It almost made me fall off my chair. You get everything cut, have less features, and pay more for something with all the features.

But then there are the accessories. $159 for the SuperDrive, $48 for the Ethernet adapter. If you want to use both of these at the same time (I think Steve Jobs will have a heart attack at this) you’ll have to get a non-Apple supplied USB hub.

Of course with all these little dohickeys you have to buy, you’re suddenly stuck with something that’s thin but you need a carry case to lug around to actually use it. It’s not something practical for people who are getting laptops because it’s a laptop. It seems more geared to the people who get laptops as an accessory to their desktop system – perfect for Apple faithful, but not for who Apple target towards.

$ prices quoted are New Zealand dollars from the Apple NZ Store

Is it just me, or are they terrible? I was in Noel Leeming today and they had the new Macs with the new Apple keyboard and a Mighty Mouse. The mouse was terrible cause it didn’t really fit into my hand, and if it did it wouldn’t of fit well.

The keyboard though was the worst ever (the worst ever mouse also goes to Apple for that hockey-puck style one – I have bad memories of that). I popped open Word to see what I could get. I kept missing the space bar, although soon got the hang of it but it required me to put my hand in an awkward position. I only wrote a few lines, and soon after using the keyboard both my hands had a slight, stinging pain and I felt it move up my arm into the shoulder.

I would hate to feel that after using the keyboard all day.

I watched Diggnation with Kevin Rose practically frothing at the mouth over the keyboard, with Alex just going “it’s a keyboard.” Kevin then went on to say it probably wasn’t designed for comfort. What use is a keyboard then if it is going to give you RSI after two minutes use?

Sure, the keyboard looked good, but as Kevin said it probably wasn’t designed for comfort, and it certainly didn’t feel like it. The Mighty Mouse on the other hand, what’s its excuse? It doesn’t look good, nor does it feel good.

After my earlier post, and after my exam, I installed Safari to check it out. I must say, I am impressed by the rendering speed. It does come pretty close when you modify your Firefox to render a bit faster (Firefox has a paint delay to wait for more data first before actually drawing the page, it seems Safari doesn’t do this).

However, I am a bit disgruntled by a few things. For one, why doesn’t Apple feel the need to follow Windows UI guidelines? True, they moved the menu bar inside the window, but that seems to be the only visible change. It looks just like it belongs on the Mac. Probably good reason for it (so then you instantly recognise it when you go through your computer shop), but still if Microsoft can be bothered, then surely Apple can.

My bookmarks menu doesn’t appear to show me all my bookmarks, just some. What the criteria is I do not know. Annoyingly, the bookmark browser loads up in the same tab that I’m surfing in. Sure, I may be surfing away, but what if I just want to open up another bookmark in the background while I finish reading the current page? If I click the bookmark browser icon again, it reloads the page. I’d hate to be a 56k user. Tabs are indistinguishable from one another, except for the text which is gray, on gray.

By default, there is no status bar, which I have some issues with. In Opera, it doesn’t have a status bar but you can easily hover over links to see where you are going. In Safari, no such thing. Mozilla had planned turning off the status bar by default, but shelved it citing security worries - which I fully agree with. Sure, people probably don’t compare address, but there are people that probably do. The status bar doubles in annoyance, once you turn it on, it is a really thin bar. Just thin enough to fit the text, which once again is gray and on a gray background. I thought Apple were masters at UI? Why do they fail so badly with this?

There doesn’t seem to be a thing called a “tool tip” in Apple land. I mouse over the little orange arrow figuring out what it does, but the developers seemed to have taken a “leap-of-faith” approach by not telling me anything about it. Yes, it’s called “snap back,” but what to?

Close buttons are to the left, which in Windows land is the wrong side. Middle-clicking seems a bit hit-and-miss. For example, I can middle-click a link on a page to open a new tab, but can’t middle click a bookmark to open that on a new tab. Dragging a button from the bookmarks toolbar onto my tab bar doesn’t open it in a new tab (or the current one) - it deletes it! There is no new tab button and you can’t double-click the tab bar to open a new one. It also seems very hit and miss when dragging. Sometimes it doesn’t quite get when I am moving the position of something and actually moving something off the bar.

Mentioning close buttons, can someone tell Apple about Fitts’ Law? In Windows 95, it had broken it with the close button as you moved your mouse right to the edge and clicked yet it didn’t do anything. Same with the Start button. These days, you can fling your mouse in both corners and be guaranteed to hit the close and Start button. Not in Safari! Due to the nicely rounded corners, your click actually affects the window below! I’ve had this problem in iTunes too. It’s highly annoying.

That’s a bit off my chest. The cool things - you can actually drag tabs out of the window and into their own. Mozilla have been working on this for Firefox, I don’t think very hard enough though. And, ummm. I guess I haven’t had a long enough play around. Maybe they’ll improve it in the future, maybe they’ll just stick to the same formula they used on Mac OS X. Thing is, I don’t think that will work. Safari is a Mac app through-and-through and that doesn’t transfer well. iTunes worked, it was a media player, they always tend to break UI guidelines and no one cares. A web browser is a different beast.

At least Mozilla can take the effort to make sure their apps follow at least some of the guidelines on each OS - in Firefox on Windows the Options appears under Tools, but on the others it appears as Preferences under the Edit menu. They also took the time to make a separate Mac OS X skin for Firefox 1.0. Do I sense ulterior motives?

Quick one today, procrastination isn’t good when you have an exam in 3 hours.

Now, people without a Mac can test their websites with Safari, as Apple announced Safari for Windows, along with some announcements about Leopard. This brings more choice to the browser market.

I’m kind of dubious about the following claim,

Safari has always been the fastest browser on the Mac and now it’s the fastest browser on Windows, loading and drawing web pages up to twice as fast as Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Mozilla Firefox 2.

They even claim that Opera is much slower to render pages, which I’ve found to be false in my experience.

Steve Jobs quote that I’m also concerned about,

“We think Windows users are going to be really impressed when they see how fast and intuitive web browsing can be with Safari,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Hundreds of millions of Windows users already use iTunes, and we look forward to turning them on to Safari’s superior browsing experience too.”

“Hundreds of millions of Windows users already use iTunes,” because they think it is the only thing they can use with their iPod. iTunes is a horrible and slow application. I can’t use the cover view as it is a pain to browse through and having the covers down the side (a view similar to that from Windows Media Player 11) makes scaling your library a pain as well. If Safari really is faster, which I’ll try after my exam, then I’ll update this here. But for now I see through Steve’s “reality distortion field.”

• Download Safari for Windows (beta)

Yesterday the internet went abuzz with excitement at the long rumoured Apple iPhone. And once again the Apple hype stream was flooding the villages. Suddenly everyone wants an iPhone. Despite their current phones possibly being capable of a lot of the features that the iPhone currently has.

My first impressions were “nifty.” A touch screen on a cellphone - who would-a thunk? Well, myself for one many years ago. However with this one you can do little gestures to do things. Like pinching and stuff. To unlock the phone you slide your finger from left-to-right. It plays music, video, surfs the web, oh it even has a 2 megapixel camera.

But then as I heard more, things started getting sour. The iPhone isn’t 3G because the locked-in partner, Cingular, doesn’t support it in many markets. Although, one is coming! (So you can buy a new one and give Apple more money!)

One of the features is Google Maps. Wow-wee. I can get that on my Motorola v360v. I just go to mobile.google.com and download the Google Maps program. The other odd thing is that the iPhone supports “push” e-mail (the e-mail gets sent to you, instead of you checking for mail first) only if you have a Yahoo! Mail account. So, Google for maps, Yahoo! for push e-mail. Any other and you’ll have to pay data charges (which are apparently high on Cingular).

It runs OS X, though the differences are yet to be completely revealed. The system though is closed, so no third-party apps for you. There is no mention of Java support either, which is something greatly missing.

You can’t buy music from iTunes on the iPhone. You can’t even synchronise your music using the WiFi or Bluetooth.

And why has Apple opted (once again) to restrict you to a closed battery? You can’t change it, so you’ll be out of action as far as mobiles go while you wait a number of days for Apple to swap the batteries over. I can’t imagine that going to well with some people, especially with the problems that iPod batteries have had in the past.

Apple has stated that you get 5 hours talk/video/photo time, and 16 hours music time which looks pretty good to me right now. Though, how long does it last on standby? No mention of that little factoid either.

Also the screen is apparently smudge free with some sort of coating, but no word on it being scratch free (remember the Nano incident)?

Gizmodo seem to have a pretty good run down of the events of iPhone. See the iPhone tag on Gizmodo.

Today Cisco sued Apple over trademark infringement. Cisco has owned the iPhone trademark since 2000, and it was registered before then by Linksys in 1997 (before the iMac was around). However, things on the Cisco iPhone front have been quiet - until last month. So either they released the iPhone to protect their trademark, or go with silly people wanting an Apple iPhone but getting a Cisco one and still be happy. But, it is worse that Apple has just gone ahead with the iPhone without confirming the rights to the name. Shame on you Apple.

So the only thing that the iPhone adds to a mobile is a touch screen. Which is what a Smartphone has anyway, so I guess it doesn’t even add that. However the thing is that it is the cool kids Smartphone. Unlike those Windows Mobile phones which are more for business. But the cost and the service lock-in is prohibitive for that market. Though, the same goes for the regular iPod, and look at how many kids have those!

The iPhone isn’t due until 2008 here, and a date is not confirmed.

After much of the typical speculation, and denials from Apple, New Zealand now has it’s own iTunes Music Store, launched today.

At $1.79 a track, it is slightly cheaper than other competing music stores in New Zealand, like Digirama and RipIt. Thanks to Mike for pointing this out, Digirama is actually cheaper. Not by a lot. iTunes sells songs at $1.79, and albums at $17.99 (most of them anyway). Digirama on the other hand is $1.74, and albums at $17.

There are a number of New Zealand artists on the store, including Fat Freddies Drop, Tim and Neil Finn, and Pluto.

To get to the iTunes store, download iTunes from Apple, and select the New Zealand music store from the picker at the bottom of the iTMS home page.

Russell Brown is taking great delight at being the first to announce the date of the store… however rumours have been spreading like wildfire since the Australian music store launched a year ago.

There is also an Apple Store too, with 10% cheaper products.

• Speaking of Playstation 3, who do you think will win?
• An RSS feed generator for MySpace blogs - because I’m sure the devs on MySpace had no clue.