Macs Are Great!

There are quite a few innovative and useful features in OS X Lion, the new Apple Mac OS, but the newest version of Apple Mail is not one of them. We’ve never liked the dumbed down interface in the iPad mail client, and when Apple chose to make Mail just as simple it left my heart cold and sad.

I do not wish to be protected from useful information, for example the email address in the To: field. I have multiple email accounts on multiple providers and quite often I’ll receive a terse message sent by a person who has no grasp of context. For cases like that I want to know which of my email addresses the message was sent to in order to figure out what they are going on about.

If you find the new Mail interface as dreadful as I did you might get some relief by selecting Classic view in Mail preferences, but that still left a product that was dumbed down, with ugly, too large fonts in the sidebar, and otherwise a source of constant frustration.

After a few hours of trying this and that I have now settled on a commercial email application called MailMate which is going to save me the hassle of reverting my system back to Snow Leopard.

If you have not installed Lion yet *please* make a bootable total system backup first on an external hard drive using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner (I like SuperDuper) because if there is something you do not like about Lion it will make going back to the way things were just a matter of a few clicks and then a bit of waiting.

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: Apple Mail, Lion, Mail, MailMate, OS X, OS X Lion

In June of 2009 I purchased a 15″ MacBook Pro. I have used it virtually every single day since then, going through two batteries and one replacement mother board all under the Apple extended warranty. It has been very good overall, but recently it began locking up when warm as it had once before when the graphics chipset failed.

I decided I need to replace it with something newer and more reliable. For the longest time I could not decide if I should get another MacBook Pro or go with a MacBook Air. I kept comparing prices and build configurations between Apple, Amazon and MacMall. I knew the MacBook Air was pretty nice because I gave my husband one for Seasonal Holiday Gift Man Day in December. He loves it. But i wanted to be able to edit websites and use graphics applications on my portable too. It came down to a choice between a 13″ MacBook Pro or a 13″ MacBook Air. Because the MacBook Air uses an SSD and the 13″ model sports the same 1440 by 900 pixel display resolution as my 15″ MacBook Pro it was the leading contender, but the MacBook air is so expensive!

Then I found a MacBook Air that was maxxed out option-wise for sale as a refurbished item on the Apple Store. That was the deciding factor.

I have had my MacBook Air about a week now and I love everything about it. It is definitely faster than my MacBook Pro was, disk access is blindingly fast as one might expect from a solid state drive, and the higher speed RAM no doubt helps too. My website editor of choice, Coda, loads and runs faster.

I was able to migrate my MacBook Pro to my MacBook Air by using SuperDuper to backup the MacBook Pro, then using Migration Assistant to bring it all in. I still have over 100GB free space on the amazingly fast SSD.

I see no dead pixels or any other reason that might explain why this piece of techno-art was sold as refurbished, but I saved big bucks.

I am completely satisfied in every way. It is lighter, faster, has a better keyboard and has much longer battery life than my much more expensive MacBook Pro. It does not get as hot, it rarely uses its fan, and when it does it is much more quiet. I recommend the MacBook Air with no reservations whatsoever.

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: Apple Store, MacBook, MacBook Air, Migration Assistant, Refurbished, replacement, Reviews, SSD, SuperDuper, upgrade

I’m dictating this review using the software that I am reviewing. It’s called MacSpeech Dictate and it was a birthday gift I received this week. Having grown up in the 1950s and 1960s I was never taught to type in fact that was women’s work when I was growing up. Maybe that’s just an excuse, but for whatever reason, I’m probably the worst typist I know. I pretty much always know what I do want to say, but when I have to type it it takes me a really long time because I’m constantly correcting typos. I never learned to touch type and even when I look at the keyboard my hand eye coordination is so poor that I often hit a key next to the one I intended to press. The bottom line is I hate typing, but I love using computers.

Years ago when I was still using another operating system that I need not mention I tried a different dictation software package. The state-of-the-art has changed dramatically since then. Apart from occasionally saying the words scratch and that together to correct the word it did not understand I’m finding this dictation software is far more accurate than what I can accomplish using my fingers. It’s fun as well.

Last night I was using it in an online chat session and the performance was fantastic. People used to wonder if I’d gone away in chat sessions because it took me so long to type, now they can hardly keep up with me.

If you have been considering using dictation software I honestly can recommend MacSpeech Dictate as having exceeded my expectations by far.

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: audio transcription, Dictate, Dictation, MacSpeech

After installing iTunes 9.1 yesterday I found that it was trivial to import my existing eBooks that were in Epub format.

I’ve been using the Amazon Kindle products, a 1st generation Kindle and a Kindle DX, for some time and have been gathering books from sources other than Amazon so I can read them using Stanza on my iPhone or Macs. I’m very much looking forward to the 3G iPad I ordered, and now I have a few books already loaded into iTunes (larger image) ready to sync to my iPad as soon as it arrives.

Apple does seem to be positioning the iBook store to compete with Amazon, and as is also the case with the Kindle they have wisely arranged it so that users can add their own Epub files gathered from public domain sources as well as other vendors.

It will be interesting to see how many eBooks are available through the iBookstore at roll out in a few days.

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: ebooks, epub, ibooks, iPad, itunes, itunes 9.1

Two and a half years ago I bought a 15″ Apple MacBook Pro. It was the first model released with an LED backlit display. I’ve had very good results with the notebook until recently. About 2 weeks ago it began locking up after being used for a while. At first I thought it might be just overheating so I started using a laptop cooler with fans. But just a few days later it failed again and would not work properly since.

In this failed state the Apple logo shown during bootup appears much larger than usual, as does the rotating gear, as if it did not know the resolution of the display. Once the MacBook Pro reaches the point in the bootup process where the splash screen with the login dialog box should appear the display goes dark and stays that way. Connecting an external display brings no joy, as it never displays anything. Resetting the PRAM did not help, nothing seemed to help. Booting from the Snow Leopard DVD did not help. Booting from a bootable external backup drive created with SuperDuper did not help.

Fortunately for me I did buy the AppleCare Extended Warranty when I bought this MacBook Pro, and it is still in effect until June of this year. The Apple Support rep quickly agreed with my conclusion that there is a problem with the video hardware, and a ship it back to us box is on its way here to my remote desert physical location.

I had a concern, though, about all of the personal and business data stored on the machine. While no doubt Apple hires trustworthy people with no criminal intentions, there was data on that computer that could be used, for instance, to log in to this server as root (I own this server). And there was source code for some of my ~130 websites too, some of which had secret key information for certain APIs that I use. I’m a stickler for security so this was a troubling issue for me. However, because Macs Are Great it was easy to resolve these concerns. Here is what I did.

I connected the MacBook Pro via Firewire to my Mac Pro, and booted the MacBook Pro into Target Disk Mode, and used SuperDuper to completely back up the hard drive to yet another external drive connected to my Mac Pro. Then I started Disk Utility and used it to zero out the entire hard drive in the MacBook Pro. Next I used my Snow Leopard DVD to install Snow Leopard on the MacBook Pro while it was still in Target Disk Mode (you can do this and it does work) rendering it very much like a brand new out of the box unit – except for the being broken part.

I’ll be pleased when I get my MacBook Pro back, in the meantime I still have my cute little MacBook, and tomorrow I’ll be ordering my iPad.

UPDATE: Less than 48 hours after I dropped off my MacBook Pro at FedEx I had it back, repaired, with a new mother board to correct the video problems. I’m quite pleased!

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: AppleCare, Broken Mac, hardware problem, Install Snow Leopard, It's dead Jim, MacBook Pro, no video, Target Disk Mode, zero out hard drive

I received Snow Leopard today and have upgraded an older MacBook, a MacBook Pro, and my Mac Pro with no problems at all. It was the easiest operating system upgrade I’ve ever done. I now have a lot more free hard drive space on my two notebooks, making room for more movie and TV files in iTunes.

As expected Snow Leopard is much faster, especially Safari. I also notice it is faster in Mail when I switch from one mail folder to another. Even my Mac Pro is notably faster.

I’m very pleased
[tags]Snow Leopard, OS X, Apple, Mac OS, upgrade, Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, MacBook[/tags]

written by Steve Rider

will be releasing Snow Leopard on Friday and I have every intention of installing it ASAP. I intend to start with my main workhorse computer, my 8-core Mac Pro, on which I do all of my website development work. I ordered the 5-pack to include some of my other Macs too.

In preparation for the upgrade I’ve just started a complete backup of my 4 drive RAID 0+1 array using SuperDuper! so that I can boot back up immediately if it all goes horribly wrong. I still use Time Machine and SuperDuper! as a combined backup strategy. I have no intention of losing any of my over 2 million data files.

I’m not expecting trouble, but knowing I’m prepared no matter what happens reduces the stress involved with an OS upgrade.

Among my other computers are an original first Intel MacBook, still running Tiger, and a 15″ MacBook Pro. I think I’ll upgrade the MacBook to Leopard today so that it can be then upgraded to Snow Leopard.

I understand that the Snow Leopard upgrade set being offered on Friday requires Leopard be already installed. People not already running Leopard can buy a box set that contains a full version (not just an upgrade) of Snow Leopard along with the excellent iLife and iWork packages. $149.99 might seem like a lot of money until you compare it to what it would cost for another operating system and comparable applications, imagine buying an OEM copy of Vista with MS Office and some photo package from Adobe, it would almost certainly cost $500 to $1,000 depending on versions and any student discounts. And that would not include an analog of Garage Band either.

Price comparisons are moot anyway for my purposes, Apple produces the operating system and hardware I prefer to use, so I will continue to do so.
[tags]Snow Leopard, Apple, OS X, 10.6, release, Mac Pro, upgrade[/tags]

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: 10.6, Apple, Mac Pro, OS X, release, Snow Leopard, upgrade

It has been nearly nine months now since I abandoned using Dreamweaver and adopted Coda as my HTML/PHP editor and site manager. I never look back. Coda does have a few minor oddities about it, cases where I wonder why they did it that way, but I’m able to use it to do everything I need to with all of my blogs, associate stores, plain HTML sites and forums. My swearing while web editing has been reduced at least 90%.

One oddity I’ve noticed has to do with adding new files to your site. Assuming that you are creating, editing or otherwise manipulating these files on your Mac first, let’s assume you add a new folder to a subfolder of document root, for example you might add a folder named “tiny” to an existing folder /images. If you select this new folder with the intention of uploading it to your site Coda will offer to upload it to the document root folder. I would have expected it to offer to upload it to the same folder on the server as it is in the local copy of the site. The simple fix for this unexpected behavior is to access the remote site in Coda, navigate to the folder that will contain your new upload, images in this case, then return to the local view of your site layout. Coda will now offer to upload the new folder to the desired location.
One of my websites is intended to provide support for people with celiac disease. On that site I’m using a number of different pieces of software plus some static and a few dynamic PHP pages of my own design. I’m using SMF in the forum, Associate-O-Matic in the store, Video Niche script to display YouTube videos, and Carp to show the content of RSS feeds. I wanted them all to look the same. I settled on an SMF theme that I really liked, then used Coda to force feed the layout into all of the other pieces of software. I’m rather pleased with the results, see what you think. The CSS editor built in to Coda was immensely helpful in this project.

When editing files Coda behaves exactly as I would want it to, it is a well designed, stable, well supported program and I’m abundantly pleased with it. No more Dreamwrecker swearing at this house. Coda gets 5 stars!

written by Steve Rider

For the last ten years of my career in corporate America I used Adobe nee Macromedia Dreamweaver for a living. It sucked. There is not a webserver with enough storage capacity for me to list all of the things I hate about Dreamweaver, but I knew how to use it, and the support it offered for maintaining local and remote copies of a website had me addicted like a crack junkie. Once I retired and became a web hobbyist I kept using it out of habit, but it is a bad habit like smoking.

My frustration with the program I had begun calling Dreamwrecker was so bad that my husband had learned how to recognize a particular sigh of exasperation I made only when running Dreamwrecker.

With the advent of Leopard and Pages Dreamweaver was driving me insane with its extremely amateurish handling of focus, foreground, and active windows. It just sucks so badly I had to either find something else or give up web hosting. Thankfully I found Coda by Panic Software. Panic is well known for their widely used FTP and SFTP client Transmit.

One thing Coda has going for it is a well thought out minimalist approach. When you tell Coda to push a file up to your server (using SFTP because you are not an idiot) it does not pop a modal dialog box saying “Oh My God, Really?” it just does what it has been told to do. Instead of popping a dialog box and conveniently hiding it behind another window, Coda shows a small circle next to the file name which becomes filled by a rotating decoration as your file is uploaded. And it does not mess around writing teeny tiny empty directories named _notes all over your freaking hard drive either. If there was a God, I’d tell her how much I hate Dreamwrecker.

In some ways Coda is a bit lightweight, it seems impossible to get a file from the server and have it land anywhere except in the site root, that’s stupid, but I still have my delicious SFTP champion Yummy to use when I want files I transfer to land in the relevant target directory. Coda is OK doing uploads, it is just downloading files from the server where it currently falls short.

Editing files in Coda defaults righteously to code view, you can configure a local HTTP server on your Mac to preview files, but for PHP/MySQL based websites like blogs this quickly becomes a bad joke.

I looked at a few other HTML editors too, but I absolutely require SFTP support because real men don’t use FTP, and I also require a program that is conscious of sites and relative file structures between local and remote.

If you like to use slow and highly unreliable web services, Coda understands iDisks.

Another absolutely delicious feature in Coda is that you can SSH right into the domain you are working on as that user, and it even sweetly does a cd to your web root folder. All this with one mouse click on an SSH icon, and no idiotic dialog boxes to piss you off

Still, with just a dash of eye candy and window/focus handling that is 100% consistent with other well-designed Mac applications, Coda has already reduced my stress level enormously. And it does not cost $500 like certain pieces of crap software that I have not used in over a week. What a glorious, wonderful week. I don’t think I have yelled Jesus H. Christ once all week!

If you already own Transmit you can get $10 off on Coda. It will do wonders for your blood pressure, honest.

Just say NO to industry leading crapware!

[tags]Coda, Dreamweaver, Panic Software, Transmit, Yummy FTP, escape, modal dialog, Adobe, Macromedia, crapware, Dreamwrecker [/tags]

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: Adobe, Coda, crapware, Dreamweaver, Dreamwrecker, escape, HTML Editors, Macromedia, modal dialog, Panic Software, Transmit, Web Hosting, Yummy FTP

Last year we expanded our web operations and invested in a 3.0GHz 8-core Mac Pro. The machine has performed flawlessly and met all of my expectations up until it was upgraded to Leopard. Apparently Leopard places higher demands on the video card, and as a result the fan on the original ATI X1900 graphics card began making more and more noise until it became intolerable.

It had gotten so bad that the tiniest task given to the video card, such as switching between Spaces, would cause the fan to start whining even louder for 10 or 15 minutes.

We found references to this happening as a result of dust buildup on the poorly designed intake area of the video card fan, but on inspection found ours not so clogged at all. We do open our computers for cleaning every 6 months or so, as we live and work in an area subject to powerful sand storms (Macs Are Great comes to you from the Sonoran Desert).

So in an effort to resolve this issue we ordered the new NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 GT KIT from Apple. Installing this new card was a breeze, and of course it was not necessary to install any drivers or dismiss 5 annoying dialog boxes about unsigned drivers. It just worked.

Once everything was all done, put back together, and working great I discovered another thread on Apple Support that suggested this noise might be caused by the air intake on the card being clogged by dust. Of course I knew that was not the case on my Mac Pro, as I had tried cleaning it to resolve the noise. Then I saw a photo one guy had taken of the dust clogging up his card, and I realized I had failed to see that spot when cleaning mine.

So just now I took the old card out of it’s static bag and examined it more closely.

Ooops! It was so thoroughly clogged with dust that you can’t see the heat sink at all. So maybe it is a perfectly good expensive 512MB video card. My bad. Maybe I’ll be more thorough in the future while cleaning inside my Mac Pro. I think I paid enough for the new card to learn a lesson from this experience

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: Apple, ATI X1900, cleaning Mac Pro, dust buildup, fan noise, Mac Pro, NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 GT KIT, video card fan noise