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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…

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.

Over at the Montreal Mac User Group, I get to do a presentation every month and somehow I’ve become the “software” guy among presenters and I gotta say I love me some good software. The OS is important, and certainly I’m glad I’m on Leopard and not on Vista, but the Mac shareware scene is incredibly good and I thought I’d do 2 posts outlining some of the best software I’ve found. First one is about freewares, next one will be about paid shareware.

ImageWell

If you have to often resize or convert images, ImageWell is a small freeware that will make your life much simpler. A great piece of software, it does exactly what it needs to do, it does it well and doesn’t get in the way. It also starts quickly and doesn’t take a lot of resources. There’s a paid update to it, but the base freeware does everything.

WriteRoom

Do you often have to write long text? If so, you might have my problem where I get distracted by a lot of things on my Mac. New emails come in all the time, RSS feeds are updated, iChat invitations, etc. There’s a lot going on at all time and this is where WriteRoom comes in. This is an extremely simple text editor that has a full screen mode that blocks out everything else. The new version is a paid shareware, but the old 1.0.4 is free. Given the nature of the application, I find that this version does what I need it to do.

Audacity

This one is pretty well known but I thought I’d include it here anyway. Audacity is cross platform audio editor that does a lot of what the bigger (and more expensive) softwares do. It works great on Mac and once you learn how it works, you can use it again on Windows or Linux if you ever need it. There’s a ton a plugins and filters, the audio editor works great and it supports a bunch of file formats.

Paparazzi!

This gem is one of my favorite shareware on Mac but it’ll be especially good if you design or work on websites for a living. Paparazzi! is a small freeware that takes a ’screenshot’ of a website as seen by Safari and saves it in a PNG image. You get the whole page, not just a screenful of it so it’s extremely useful. There’s also a little bookmarklet to make it even more useful. Make sure to drag this link to your link bar if you use the software, it’ll make your life even easier.

Caffeine

Caffeine is a small utility that is especially useful for those of us on laptops. What it does is that it adds a menulet (a little icon to the right of the menu bar) and when you click on it, your Mac will never go to sleep. Your screen won’t dim, it will just keep going until you run out of battery. I use it all the time because I hate it when the screen dims or worse still, goes blank. Small. Useful. Free. That’s good for me.

TextWrangler

This one’s a puzzle to me. First, if you’re a developer, you’ll like TextWrangler. It’s a free text editor from the makers of BBEdit. BBEdit is a great piece of software, but it’s expensive and for some reason I never got around to buying it. One thing that didn’t help was TextWrangler, a free software that does pretty much everything I need. I’ve since switched to TextMate, but there’s no question TextWrangler is quality software.

NeoOffice

OpenOffice is a well known, cross-platform MS Office replacement that works well. NeoOffice is based on Open Office but is done for Mac users. It looks like a Mac application and acts (mostly) like one. With Microsoft Office 2008 getting very mixed reviews, this can be a great alternative if you’re on a budget.

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’ve been having some problems dealing with emails lately. I’m now up to anywhere from 500-800 emails a day now — on the accounts I check daily only — and that’s been difficult to deal with seing how 80-90% of junk email.

My problem is that I’ve always been hesitant to setup junk mail filtering because I’m always afraid of losing emails. I decided to do something tonight because I simply couldn’t deal with all the mails anymore.

Step 1 was setting up the mail server (postfix on Linux for me) to use some real-time black lists. That step, alone, removed a ton of SPAM for my personal accounts. That was awesome, but of course it’s no good for all the accounts that do not live on my server, including my 3 accounts at work that get a ton and a half of SPAM daily.

I looked around online and someone on a random forum suggested SpamSieve, a Mac OS X software I had tried a few years ago and discarded immediately. The setup is quite easy and the documented suggested training it with 1000 emails, 65% of which are SPAM. A few minutes later I was all done and now I’m waiting to see the results. So far, so good, but I hope I don’t get too many false positive.

In the past 5 hours or so since I started this, I haven’t received a single SPAM that was not either deleted by the server or wasn’t detected by SpamSieve. This is unheard of. Of course, as I was typing that last sentence, one got through.