Category Archives: Macintosh

Thoughts on Macworld

I’m in San Francisco, but not expressly for the purpose of attending Macworld. Moscone Center is on the way from my hotel to the OSAF offices, and it’s easy to get a free exhibit pass, so I managed to drop into Macworld for an hour. When I was in college, I used to go to the Macworld that was in Boston, and when we lived in Silicon Valley, I used to go to Macworld for a day. During the years that I worked at Apple, I even worked booth duty in the Apple/Newton booth. In that sense, I’m not a stranger to Macworld. At the same time, I’ve been doing stuff related to Java or open source since I left Apple, and I think that this is the first Macworld that I’ve been to (if you can count an hour) since then. It’s also the first Macworld that I’ve been to since the iPod came out. So I felt a little bit of culture shock as I went in to the exhibits. It feels, well, very commercial. There were tons of companies who were just selling stuff at discounts. B&H Photo had two separate booth areas. I’d say that about half of the booths were iPod related. I don’t remember Shure and Etymotics having booths at previous Macworlds, but they are there this year. Of course, there were also the usual Macintosh hardware and software vendors, with their large booths and theaters. And it goes without saying that the biggest and most centrally located booth belonged to Apple. Since it was the second day of the exhibits, there were no surprise discoveries to be made. Due to RSS, I’d already heard about the products that were being announced, so I took brief glances, and refused most of the product literature sheets. There were a few times when I stopped to look at products that just have to be seen. Things like monitors and color printers just need to be seen in person to get an accurate feel for them. Since Duncan has been writing about the HP 9180, I stopped to see what the fuss was about. One the whole, though, the web has drastically reduced my need to go stalk the floor at Macworld.

What the web can’t replace, however, is the social component that surrounds an event like Macworld. Tuesday night I was fortunate enough to go to dinner with a small number of Macintosh developers. The setting was small enough that you could hear all the conversations and ask questions (if you dared). Again, it was a bit of a culture shock (although not totally foreign, as I have done my share of commercial software development in the past), and it was interesting to me to listen to the conversations and hear the experiences. I’m not sure I’ve ever been in on something like this before — I worked at Apple and big companies, and I worked for myself as a small business owner, but I appreciated the chance to hear about the life of the small software developers that make the Mac software ecosystem great.

Obligatory Pre-Macworld Post

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‘Tis the season for MacWorld predictions. I’m not going to predict much, but I am going to comment on what I’d like to see at MacWorld and some of that will overlap with popular rumors.

New Macs
I don’t think there’s much excitement here. One of the results of the transition to Intel is that you can get pretty decent visibility into the basic skeleton of future Mac by looking at the Intel roadmaps. So we might see an 8 core MacPro, although it’s seems like it would be awkwardly positioned, since the clock speed on the 8 way machines is relatively slow, and it doesn’t seem like there are many apps, even Photoshop (see this excellent post at John Nack’s blog), that could really take advantage of the cores at this point. Still we know that the 4 core Xeons exist, and that they can work in the Mac Pro as it exist today. So maybe it will happen just because it can.

On the notebook front, you have the availability of Intel’s Centrino Pro/Santa Rosa chipset, which includes Robson flash technology. This might combine with the rumors about LED backlit notebooks, which could mean new laptops, and possibly that top to bottom Pro laptop refresh that I wished for last year. The only problem with this theory is that Centrino Pro hasn’t shipped yet.

There are a few things that could happen that would get my attention. I’m likely in the market for a Mac Pro sometime this year – primarily for the memory expansion capability. A notebook that went to 4GB or more would be interesting, and a smaller Mac Pro would also probably get my attention. Since I am looking for a machine to do lots of Aperture (and Photoshop and general hacking), a GeForce 8800 series video card option on Mac Pro would be cool, as would some better hardware RAID support so that you could make really good use of those new 1TB drives. Blu-Ray or HD-DVD burners are interesting as backup solutions. But these are all at the periphery of the system because Apple is constrained to what Intel has today. Unless Steve has charmed Paul Otellini into holding out on the whole rest of the world, which I think unlikely.

New Displays
New LCD displays with iSight’s aren’t interesting in and of themselves, but if they have the increased color gamut of the Dell 3007WFP-HC or the HP LP-3065, then that would be noteworthy.

Leopard
Mostly what I am looking for is a ship date. We saw a bunch of stuff at WWDC, and I know there is the secret stuff, but I don’t have many expectations here. If there is something cool, that would be fine. The biggest things I want from OS X are more performance and more stability. In particular, I want Spotlight to be usable — it is just too slow now.

iLife/iWork
We all know this is coming, I mean the products have the year in them, after all. The only piece of iLife that I used to use was iPhoto, and now I have Aperture. I will be paying attention, though, because Julie is using both iPhoto and iMovie.

Wide screen video iPod
I have a 3G iPod that’s still going strong. If the thing is really wide and full screen, it might be a great way to take a photographic portfolio around, but I’m not really in the market for that yet. It would be cool, but I won’t be lining up with my credit card if it launches.

iPhone
I’m not sure what I think about this. Replacing a phone and and iPod sounds cool, except that what I want from a phone and what I want from an iPod are different. What I want from an iPod is wide-video. What I want from a phone is clamshell (small size), very tight, wireless, integration with my computer (ala Parliant’s PhoneValet or even further), ability to run apps, GPS, long battery life, and being on a clueful 3G/EVDO carrier. Music isn’t that high on the list.

Not very high expectations, but that ought to make it easy to impress me. I’m more interested in the Canon PMA announcements than I am about MacWorld. Other than for standard extrapolations of current systems, things are working pretty well for me in Mac land.

Hats off to the iTerm folks

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Hat’s off to the iTerm folks. During my PowerPC OS X days, there were very few updates of iTerm, and while I used and liked iTerm, I despaired of ever getting any bugs fixes or enhancements. Recently though, things have really picked up. Not only did iTerm go Unversal, but it also included Sparkle for automatic updates. And boy does it update now. It seems like everytime I start iTerm (which isn’t that often because it’s gotten pretty stable), there’s a new update.

So to the iTerm team: Thanks from a happy user.

Photoshop and Switching

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For the most part, I’ve been very happy with Apple’s Aperture photo post production app. Of course, it’s also the only such program that I’ve ever used. When I got started in photography, I was convinced that I was not going to modify my pictures in a computer, and therefore I wasn’t that concerned with the image modification capabilities of Aperture.

However, as I’ve learned more about the art and craft of photography, I’ve also learned that many many modern photographs were altered in the darkroom, or with filters, or by some other means. One particularly important moment for me was a scene in the movie War Photographer, where James Nachtwey is working with someone in a darkroom on how to print a photo. The scene shows the actual dodging and burning being done to a wall sized print. So as I’ve learned more, I’ve accepted that someday I was going to come to the point where I would want a program like Photoshop, which could perform edits and modifications to portions of a photograph, instead of all of a photograph.

Funny thing is, that I already have a copy of Photoshop, or should I say, had. Back when we lived in Silicon Valley, I won a copy of Photoshop at a trade show. I took it home and installed it on my WIndows box, but I didn’t really have the interest or pressing need to learn how to use Photoshop. Of course, that’s all different now. And now I am back on the Mac, not on WIndows. So that copy of Windows Photoshop wasn’t really doing me any good.

I figured that I would be stuck buying a brand new copy of Photoshop once the Intel Mac version came out. On some of the photography forums that I read, some people were saying that they had convinced Adobe to allow them to upgrade a Windows Photoshop to the Mac version. I took heart from this, but didn’t do anything about it. When the Beta of Photoshop CS3 came out, I learned that Adobe was going to restrict the set of versions that would be allowed to upgrade to CS3, and version 5.5, the version that I had, was going to be dropped from the list.

I figured that two upgrades of Photoshop were still cheaper than buying a brand new copy, and finally picked up the phone and hoped that Adobe would let me upgrade. It turns out to be ridiculously easy. I called the Adobe sales phone line listed at http://www.adobe.com/buy/. The person that I talked to was very helpful and there was a clearly defined procedure for doing what I wanted. In addition to my order information, I had to fax back a form where I promised to get rid of my copy of the Windows version – no problem there. After that I was all set. Yesterday my copy of Photoshop CS2 arrived, and I installed a copy of CS3 as well. I haven’t had any time to play with them yet, but I figured that there might be a few people out there that might benefit from my experience.

Props to Adobe for making this possible – in fact, you can do this for any Adobe product that has a Mac and Windows version, and you can do it the reverse direction as well. I wish Microsoft would let me do the same from an old Office for Windows version.