I ran into this New York Times article comparing Obama’s web site style to a Mac…ish interface and Hillary’s to a PC frame of mind. Get serious, none of them are neither, nein. Look at Obama’s site it is definitely crowded, busy, presents too many concepts and ideas on the home page and runs forever, all the way down to the New York Subway. Perhaps all candidates should attend the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June in San Francisco, to obtain some guidance as to what the quintessential Mac attribute is when it comes to designing an interface. The journalist also adds that being compared to a Mac is somewhat derogative as it remains a marginal choice of computer “but the Mac is still a niche computer”. All epochs have had their massively adopted beliefs awaiting enlightenment. I’m just not sure it is coming from either Hillary or Obama…

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Hey PC guy, thanks but no thanks for the choice as I ended up not buying because I was caught in a one sided dilemma. Perhaps this is a new Microsoft e-commerce OS option? In any case thanks for the laugh. I can’t believe I spent so much time in the Windows environment. I must have had no other choice…

The iPhone is continuing its impressive incursion in the mobile phone industry. Apple is expecting sales to reach 12,9M units in the calendar year of 2008 alone. It now ranks second next to the Blackberry in terms of sales in the United States. Not bad for a year’s efforts. RIM must be nervous. Apple is addressing “corporate” issue like being able to erase remotely all data of a lost or stolen iPhone. I guess I’m next in line for purchasing one.

Apple is releasing its SDK and expect amazing apps to surface soon. The Beta release is ready and the real thing should come out in June. Apple will be promoting the applications and handing 70% of sales back to the creators on paying apps. Talk about a revolution. Game designers had already succeeded in converting it into a Wii like device to play in a three dimensional space. Nice application of the accelerometer technology. Proximity sensors, you’re next. Jonathan, you should tell us more about yours…

One of my daughter’s CD game allegedly MacOSX compatible got stuck into the so-called SuperDrive of one of my MacBooks. It has found its kryptonite and nemesis.

Apparently, sometimes disk copy protection on certain audio disk will generate an error that will cause the CD to stick in the drive. I’m not sure this is a rational explanantion. No matter what, the CD was stuck.

I tried the usual tricks. The first thing to do is to reboot while maintaining the left mouse button pressed. That didn’t work. You can also maintain the trackpad button clicked and reboot. Didn’t work.

Next I tried obscure key combinations. Pressing the option key (alt) while rebooting normally looks for all possible system disks. Apparently this routine must start with the CD/DVD drive because nothing but a black screen appeared. Next I tried looking through the drive’s door and tilting the MacBook. No avail.

Why did Apple remove the paper clip hole that would eject anything from previous drives? Design? Change of supplier? Blind faith in Chinese production quality check?

A Google search lead to nothing except many finds for similar problems. Is this a general issue with bad drives?

I tried rebooting the p-ram (legacy habit) thinking I was lucky to have ten fingers and ten toes for the key combination. No result.

Alright, it was time to get busy and bring on the torque artillery. It must be easy to get at the drive, surely designers had anticipated an eventual drive replacement. Is every one at Apple’s so optimistic as to bury a SuperDrive under ten feet of micro technology for Lilliputians (why don’t we ever cite the Blefuscudians)? You need surgeon’s hands to get at it.

When you open your 13″ MacBook (at your own risk as you will read) there is a very good source of play by play commentaries here at IFIXIT.

I thought I could do it myself. I was wrong. I did succeed in removing the CD after having dislodged the “SuperDrive” successfully, even if it did put up a Super good fight. But, I am sure that Steve Jobs who is known for spending days looking at screw details had no intention of me ever servicing my MacBook, had complete faith in his SuperDrive supplier or was so busy designing the iPhone that he missed on the replacement procedure for a SuperDrive.

It is a painstaking procedure better left to professionals who like me must have also missed the lower left hand side, glued, useless bracket supported by 2 Philips screws on their first MacBook opening. Everything went fine except for the keyboard lid being stuck and not popping open because of that bracket. I had to use force and that never goes too well with micro scale anything.

Next, I will take the MacBook to an expert along with three screws, a dent in my pride and afterthoughts for copy protection and the SuperDrive…

First I have to apologize for being so silent for the past few weeks. I was traveling (I know this is not an excuse but I was working a lot too) and I was out of Internet access… Don’t mention it, this is France, land of amazing progress and their associated contradictions. The Internet access providers really have to improve all aspects of customer support and communications, especially here.

Perfect timing to introduce a secrecy article on Apple. This very good Wired Magazine article explains how Jobs—since his 1997 comeback had gone against the grain in terms of openness. He keeps tight controls over his employees, even isolates them with particular security clearance on a need to know basis. The secrecy around product development, the closed OS and hardware and the company’s creative talent have all contributed to its immense business success. It’s almost a counterculture, contradicting the Valley’s recent way of doing things. Google and others pamper their employees. Not Jobs.

I think that protecting a brand, preserving its integrity as Apple has always done tells a lot about the identity and the style of the company. Steve Jobs reminds me of Guy Laliberté of Cirque du Soleil. They have the same determination and vision for the way their company should be run and how important branding is in the fundamental assertion of that direction. Preserving that capital is the utmost prerogative. Read the article to find out more…

I am not a graphic artist nor do I have the intention of becoming one. But as I have learned it is best to be a jack of all trades when it comes to digital communications as no one might understand your prerogatives as well as yourself (they would not necessarily share their priority either). You might end up having to change a background picture in the middle of the night for a presentation or a web site. Adding to the Swiss knife skills of a typical Office user, here is Pixelmator.

Pixelmator reminds me of Adobe’s Photoshop in its infancy which is not bad considering the $59 price. There are still a few bugs in this fairly recent software but it looks promising. Save often as they say (text layers have a tendency to evaporate). The interface is nice and simple to understand. Most basic features are there, at your fingertips. The filters are impressive and since this is brand new software it does not have to rest on legacy coding and is fast and light in terms of resources needed to operate. It is lacking a recorder for repetitive tasks, batch processing, automatic layer naming and a boatload of Photoshop masking features. But that’s not the point. It will suffice for most touch ups, filtering and photo montage. Be careful, when you close a file, the text layers get rasterized… I think it is a definite must have for those of us who know a bit to survive in artwork but who do not want to pay $1,000 for using 1% of a software’s features.

Reboot. As simple as it may sound, rebooting reinitialises everything and makes you restart from a clean slate. (Doesn’t count as a way to speed up).

1. Repair Disk Permissions. Go into Applications > Utilities > and start Disk Utility. Select your hard drive and click on Repair Disk Permissions. Apparently applications you install or run often mingle with what the OS expects as the right permissions for certain key files. Whatever.

2. Unclutter your desktop. Bad habits have a way of appearing as the natural thing to do. Computer architects are often caught up in a logic of their own (less at Apple’s) that makes no provision for the “natural way” of doing things. Isn’t it easy to just save everything to the Desktop and then just link to it say when you’re adding an attachment to an email? Well don’t. Leopard has addressed this by saving in a download folder right off Safari. Spotlight, QuickSilver and others are there to allow you to be sloppy with your files thanks to meta data describing their contents. Move everything out of your Desktop, leave it at your user level (so you don’t have to worry about “Sharing”). The Desktop makes preview items for all these icons lying around. It takes unnecessary time to process, especially at boot up.

3. Remove unnecessary start-up items. Go into System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items and make sure you understand what is there and for what purpose. Obviously, if you don’t need it, simply remove it.

4. Clean your hard drive. Make sure you have at least 15% of free space on your hard drive. Find files that appear in more than one place, use whatsize to determine where your bigger files are (or use OmniDiskSweeper). Run Xslimmer if you have an Intel machine and couldn’t careless about PowerPC legacy code in Universal Binary applications. Please note that once you do that, your application will only run on an Intel machine. Consider getting an extra drive for data and backups (and for Time Machine). Run AppFresh, stay current and get rid of unused applications. Clear caches. Be careful and use a utility like Yasu. Accept the defaults, don’t over do it. USER and SYSTEM caches are best kept untouched.

5. Add more RAM. Nothing like maxing out your ram and lowering the slower disk access for memory intensive applications or for running multiple applications at once. Crucial and Kingston are probably the two most popular suppliers offering extensive support for finding out what memory chip will fit your Mac. Crucial has a memory scanner that you can download and install on your Mac. Kingston wants you to tell it what computer you have. About this Mac > More Info > Hardware > Memory will reveal the banks of memory your system has and how they are populated at present. Desktop Macs are pretty easy to upgrade. Laptops are another story and involve removing the battery in most cases. Here’s a good chart for the iMacs. Here is a chart for the PowerBooks and the iBooks. Here the memory chart for the Power Macs Finally here is how to change memory on your MacBook.

5 ½. Run Activity Monitor. Find out who’s on first with this admin graphic interface. Go to Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor. It will show you how the CPU is running, how saturated your memory is and use it to check out on the processes running in your system. Google is your friend for any strange sounding process. I include this as a speed gainer because it is the best way to troubleshoot an “intuition” or a “feeling” about your computer’s perceived lack of speed.

I always liked the iStat menu item found on the Apple web site Dashboard section. Seeing all these activity gauges reminded me of Flight Simulator (use Flight Gear). But if you’re like me, you don’t often resort to widgets (default “F12″ key) except perhaps for the occasional weather check when you’ve been inside too long, on the computer… So I like the iStat Menus even more now as they can be customized to appear right in the menu bar, at eyes’ length.

Then all hell broke loose. I realized that at least one application was using up to 110% !!! of the CPU, especially at start-up. Aside for the unnecessary wear and tear, that culprit really slowed down resources (memory, CPU and disk access) for everything else. A quick Google search revealed all sorts of Forum truths, some truer than others. I used the Terminal with “top -u” to find out what was hogging all the CPU cycles (q to quit). Alternatively, “ps aux” at the prompt reveals the processes running and their ids.

With that method, “launchCFMA” was found to use all the CPU time. I needed to investigate further as this process manages legacy applications (PowerPC) and bridges the old with the new INTEL Macs. (aside: found this very interesting article if you’re still not convinced Apple is doing the right thing with its OS (inspired from BeOS, that’s how much of a visionary Jean-Louis Gassée was in 1991).)

I then launched “Activity Monitor” (in Applications/Utilities) to isolate the daemon that was ill-behaved. It turned out to be “Microsoft Database Daemon”. Further research revealed that it was used by Entourage and other Microsoft applications to exchange data and especially “Notifications”. I turned everything off as I no longer use these features, especially if they are legacy (4 years ago) and behaving like resource hogs. You go into System Preferences, Accounts and Login to remove start-up applications. You go into the Entourage folder to find Microsoft Office Notifications and in its preferences, you turn it off.

I can’t wait for the new Office release for Mac. Now that promises to be worth some CPU time!

Finally, 2007 is over and the expensive holiday season is behind us. We can now move on to the much more expensive MacWorld season, where Santa Steve showers us with cool, shiny, gotta have ‘em, new products. I have to admit, my chances of not buying anything during that week is pretty low.

As someone who works everyday on a Mac (a MacBook Pro 15″), I’m always looking for new and more efficient ways to manage my work day. Lot’s of tasks to manage, lot’s of email coming in, lot’s of people calling. That’s why MacWorld is so interesting to me. Sure, Steve will give us new products but other 3rd party developers will also do the same.

Leopard was a huge release for developers (in terms of API) and I can’t wait to see what new applications will come out because of it. TextMate, my favorite text editor is scheduled to have its 2.0 release fairly soon, Delicious Library 2.0 is coming any day/week now. OmniFocus 1.0 final is also scheduled to be released monday while OmniGraffle 5.0 is at beta 3 and I’m sure we’ll see many many more in the coming months. Most of these apps will be Leopard-only, a fact that would be surprising if not for the incredible conversion rate of Apple’s OS X releases these last few years. Leopard came out at the end of october, some 3 months ago and we’re already at almost 30% of usage. This is nothing short of amazing to me and it explains why developers are so quick to jump on the new APIs and the new OSes from Apple. This is something you don’t see with new releases of Windows.I’m really excited to see all the cool software we’ll get in 2008.

For now, I’m having a hard time deciding between OmniFocus and Things for my tasks management app. I think I need an app to manage my management of tasks.

How many times have you visited a city thinking where are the hot spots? Oh, sorry I meant WIFI. In any case, here is a quick way of finding hotspots from your hotel room before you go out in the wild. Of course, all precautions should go into effect: a VPN channel to your office, SFTP to any file server and encrypted channels for all your iChat buddies with .mac accounts galore.

Of course I’m the paranoid type when it comes to security and password protection. Not that I own any state secrets but I just like to maintain my privacy. It seems these days, it’s a commodity for organized crime. Hey Computer Associates was hacked!

Pick complicated password. Change them once a month or every time you retrieve your emails in public places. Even then there is so much to discuss. Hey Jonathan that would be a nice discussion to have.