Macs Are Great!

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

I resisted as long as I could. I kept telling myself that since I was home most of the time I had very little need for a smart phone. My husband has had an iPhone for over a year now, but I kept resisting, content with having 5 Macs and 4 iPods.

What finally did me in was a recent trip back east to visit my kids and my grandson. My daughter was having a fatal problem with her existing cell phone, it would only hold a charge for a few minutes. She asked me if I would go with her to the AT&T store so that she could look at a new phone. The conversation turned to the fact that my husband (her third Dad) had an iPhone and she wondered how much it was costing him per month.

My husband was back in California, so I typed out a text message asking him about how much his iPhone was costing. When I hit send I discovered that my cheap T-Mobile prepaid phone had no service at my daughter’s house, so we just went to AT&T and she got a 3G leftover iPhone for under $100. This left me still not having an iPhone while my über-geek programmer husband had one and my Registered Nurse daughter had one.

Last Friday I phoned my local AT&T store and they said they had no 3GS iPhones in stock, but I could come in and order one. The helpful clerk asked which model I would choose if I could have any of them at all, and I said “Well, I’d love to have a 32GB 3GS in white, if you had one.” So he went into the back room and a few minutes later came out with a white 32GB iPhone 3GS, which I bought fast before anybody else saw it.

Gosh, what an absolutely wonderful toy! I’ve been tracking my trips to the store using GPSed and listening to local police radio with Police Scanner. I guess I have about 90 Apps total on my iPhone now, plus a gazillion songs from my iTunes library.

I’ve added a new Apps page to our Apple downloads pages maintained here at Macs Are Great. I really ♥ my new iPhone.

[tags] 32GB iPhone, iPhone 3GS, GPSed, Police Scanner, Apple downloads, iPhone apps[/tags]

written by Steve Rider

As I’m typing this I’m on an American Airlines flight from DFW to Palm Springs using their new GoGo Inflight Internet service. For only $5.95 I am getting quite fast Internet access, and they do not seem to be blocking any ports. I was able to use SSH to connect to a secure site I manage, and the throughput is really fast.

A combination of coincidences led to this unexpected event. My flight was delayed a long time for aircraft trouble, then I was upgraded to an exit row seat. The battery on my MacBook Pro was virtually flat before I boarded, but I had my Apple MagSafe Airline adapter with me, and the exit row seat I was upgraded into had a power adapter underneath. Woo Hoo, the 21st century has now arrived. If there was a Jeebus he could take me now

[tags]Apple Magsafe Adapter, Inflight Internet, Aircraft WiFi, American Airlines, MacBook Pro, GoGo Internet[/tags]

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: Aircraft WiFi, American Airlines, Apple Magsafe Adapter, GoGo Internet, Inflight Internet, MacBook Pro

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

Recently we created a new website for people with celiac disease, All About Celiac, using a content management system, and designed to act as a news aggregator for information about celiac disease, gluten-free recipes, and gluten free food shopping information. Today Apple has posted our latest widget designed to pull any of 6 RSS feeds from the site.


download

We used Dashcode, as supplied in the Leopard developer tools, to create this widget and it was really quite easy. If you’ve been thinking of trying some lightweight programming, perhaps as a way of getting into more serious stuff later on, Dashcode might be a good place to start. To install Dashcode run the Developer Tools installation package from your Leopard DVD, the devtools are not installed by default.

[tags]OS X, widgets, Leopard, Dashcode, celiac disease, Apple, downloads, gluten free recipes, gluten free diet,RSS, feeds[/tags]

written by Steve Rider

Recently I received one of the new aluminum Apple keyboards. It is the full size version with the cluster and it connects via USB. I’ve never used a keyboard in my entire life that I liked more than I like this one. It is fantastic.

I find that I’m able to type faster and with fewer errors, it is amazingly quiet, the spacing of the keys seems almost perfect, and in addition to all of that it has the typical Apple stylish good looks.

[tags]Apple, Keyboard, aluminum keyboard, review, hardware, low profile, anodized aluminum, numeric keypad[/tags]

written by Steve Rider

One of the most successful of my various websites is one for people with celiac disease, the Sensible Celiac. In case you did not know, celiac disease is an inherited autoimmune disorder that causes the immune system to attack the small intestine when a person eats wheat, rye or barley. I’ve got it. Celiac disease requires a gluten-free diet. I also sell gluten free food here.

When I installed Leopard I also installed the Dev Tools and Dashcode, and was very pleased and surprised to see how easy it is to make a widget. So I created one for my Sensible Celiac site that pulls the RSS feed from the discussion forum and shows the 10 most recent messages. It’s nothing fancy to look at, and offers only very basic and typical functionality, but Apple has posted it in their downloads section.

If you have ever wanted to create a widget, check out Dashcode, it’s drop dead easy. And if you want to learn more about celiac disease, visit the Sensible Celiac. Check out our over 600 Gluten-Free recipes.
[tags]Leopard, widgets, dashcode, RSS, celiac disease, gluten free diet, Sensible Celiac, Apple, Downloads[/tags]

written by Steve Rider