Via Flickr:

After about 6 months of waiting (which seemed pretty out of character) my Panic goods have finally arrived!

-Transmit (FTP client) stylized T-shirt

-”Loading” T-Shirt (been wanting something this geeky for a while!)

-Team Panic T-Shirt

-Full set of 4 Panic faux game boxes (so awesome!)

If you have never heard of Panic, they’re a great Mac software company that has been around since the beginning. Personally I use Transmit and Coda on a daily basis for all my website development work.

Unfortunately there is a rather annoying glitch where horrible noise starts to develop after about 5 minutes of use. (It starts out starts to make things sound like Darth Vader.) This makes it practically unusable for any live or extended use, and has been recognized on the Google Code site.

You can go read through the thread and find out for yourself, but here’s the workaround, in Snow Leopard.

1. Create an Aggregate Audio Device in Audio MIDI Setup (Applications > Utilities > Audio MIDI Setup) by hitting the Plus (+) button.

2. Add Soundflower and your main output (in this case Built-In Output) to the Aggregate Audio Device by checking their ”Use” boxes.

3. Set the Clock Source to “Soundflower”.

This will make sure that Soundflower is governing the timing of your samples, which seems to prevent it from tripping up. Good luck!

If you’ve been following the outrageous communications between Apple’s new PR department and the miffed adopters of the new iPhone 4, you’ll know that there’s apparently a design flaw with the new antenna system of the fancy new phone.

The way Apple’s been reacting suggests to me that this problem was known, but that there are some things that they can do in software to “solve” the issue, such as by recalibrating the signal bars, or even switching to a signal quality meter instead of a signal strength method. There’s probably also an issue with the baseband frequency switching speed, all of which just needs tweaking. That being said, I really don’t think it’s coincidence that for this model Apple just happened to start manufacturing their own overpriced rubber “bumper” which has become the official AppleCare suggestion.

But amid all the chatter is this gem, straight from El Jobso himself in a rather intense conversation between a frustrated customer and Jobs, who has become an unofficial PR department in recent weeks (because really, who’s going to stop him?): “…retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it.” Oh really? Is this not the phone that coined the term Jesus Phone upon initial launch, only to be called the phone that changes everything, again? Surely Apple doesn’t sit around designing their phones with that level of enthusiasm.

UPDATE: So apparently that didn’t happen at all so you can probably disregard all that ridiculous analysis, but the statement still stands: it really is just a phone.

OTHER UPDATE: Also, Apple is apparently releasing an update to reduce the apparent bars on the iPhone which they were “stunned” to find was inaccurate for years. Ha. Ha. Right. But of course, they’re also “making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see,” which just means they aren’t really doing anything besides messing with people. Nice one Apple.

The most fascinating thing about Steve Jobs is how calm, relaxed, yet slightly cynical the guy is behind the veil of Apple secrecy. His statements are incredibly “far out” and airy, sort of like the way Jonny Ive talks about a-loo-min-ee-um. Another point for the Jobs = Ghandi conspiracy. I digress.

Ultimately what struck me this morning about this whole thing is really people, it’s just a phone. Steve Jobs said it, and his will be done, right?

Source

The iPhone 4 came out about a week ago to great awe and amazement. I have yet to comment on it yet, simply because there wasn’t much to say. Apple has done it yet again, this time truly delivering a revision worth upgrading for, with a fabulous screen, front camera, and wicked power enough to start editing in HD in the palm of your hand.

That being said, I was disappointed to see hear that Canadians would not be in the running to pick one up until “June” according to Apple, but based on demand, I suspect that we won’t be seeing it for even longer than that. Remember how the iPad shipments got pushed back several weeks for International customers? Jobs claimed that this was going to be their “fastest rollout ever” but considering that customers are pounding Apple’s servers just trying to preorder the device, I suspect their will be difficulty staying on schedule.

While New Yorkers have been out of luck if they wanted to find an iPad, I just came back from the Southgate Apple Store in Edmonton and watched a young boy hugging his walking out of the store, so we might be in luck. Nevertheless, these situations suggest that perhaps Apple will need a new strategy for delivering devices rapidly enough. In order to have enough supply they’ll need to ramp up production far in advance of an announcement, and at 600,000 pre-orders/day, it’s going to get harder and harder to make sure launches are timely.

Sent from my iPod

Posted via email from jole posterous

The iPad is finally here, in all its glory.

There is no Gap

There’s no end to the amount of coverage and speculation about this product, which can be found here, and here most notably. But my anticipation is mostly in the “surprise” to come since at the moment I’m not excited for this product really. Current offerings out there have some problems with input methods, power, and well… functionality. It seems to me that the gap that the Kindle, eReaders, and these proposed media tablets are trying to fill does not really exist.
I would describe my day as having three “levels of mobility.”

• Home: At my desk with a 23″ display or two, running a Quad core processor. My computer keeps up with my workflow, it never lags behind. Video is large, clear, and stutter-free, and since I’m at my desk, that’s the only thing I would tolerate.
• Portable: I have my MacBook with me, and I’m setup somewhere other than my desk. Perhaps I’m on my bed, downstairs, outside, or in the library. I’m in class or at work somewhere, but I’m still computing. In this case, I tolerate some mild lag in my computing environment, since there isn’t really a laptop that is as powerful as my desktop and still within budget both money-wise and battery-life wise.
• Mobile: I am likely physically moving, whether on the bus, in the car, or simply walking around. I can still receive content and view it, although I don’t expect to perform a lot of input, it still is effective when it needs to happen. Loading times are much slower (or not available at all on my iPod Touch), but I can look out the window of the train or put it in my pocket for a few moments while it does its thing, and I’m not irritated.

At each of these stages, I feel that all my needs are fulfilled despite having limitations at each of these mobility levels. Most of my tasks can be performed at all levels.

So at which point would the tablet enter my workflow? Naturally it would be somewhere in between Portable and Mobile. I’m lying down or on the bus for more than a minute or two, and I’d like to read a book, watch a video, or take a note. Yet, a tablet would not fit in any pocket, and would likely need to be extracted from a bag, and thus somewhat of a hassle for that extra few inches of reading room. Why not hit up the iPhone/iPod Touch? Assuming that this Apple Tablet would be equipped with a nearly identical Operating System to that of my iPhone/iPod, what advantage in terms of functionality would really be present?

(The HP slate, a lamefest. Probably the closest thing to the iTablet that I can imagine, but maybe my imagination is simply too small for the likes of Steve.)

Put simply, the Apple Tablet seems to be far too close in functionality to the iPhone/iPod to be advantageous over it, and yet remains less pocketable and more of a pain to whip out, so any advantage is nullified.

An Industry Shift

Despite all this, and the terrible mystery of input method which I won’t address except to predict: there won’t be any, I still think that tomorrow will be revolutionary in a market sense, and here’s why.

If you look at Apple products of years past, you’ll see a common theme to emerge: changing the industry. Steve Jobs and his followers really aren’t interested in doing something unless it’s going to change the way we think about an industry entirely. While the slogan is now gone, “Think Different” remains Apple’s philosophy. They took a boring business machine and turned it into the Mac: the computer we all wanted in our homes. They took the MP3 player and changed the way we think and listen to music. In just 2.5 short years, they turned the cell phone on its head and is only now having to watch out for competition with the arrival of Android. The Amazon Kindle hoped to be the iPod of eReaders, but most of us just groaned the moment we saw the bland grayscale display. Amazon didn’t do anything to change the book industry. They simply put a book into binary.

So as I sound more and more like a ridiculous Apple fanboy, here is my prediction. The Apple Tablet will be about engaging the user in their content. YouTube, Blogs, Twitter are already social, but books on the other hand, are not. Yesterday, I went to the library and took a look at the Edmonton Public Library’s fairly recent database switch to Bibliocommons. I could look up a book in the catalog and see a review from libraries patrons in other cities all over the world, all within a mouse click of requesting the book be brought to me. Take that one step further, and imagine seeing everything your friends are reading on your tablet. One tap: you have the book in your hands. One tap: you’re in the first chapter. But then when you get to Chapter 3, you see comments from other readers about the shallow character development in this chapter, and they provide a synopsis for you to skip to the next chapter. It’s book-reading on Shuffle.

Perhaps this idea is way too far-fetched and old fashioned, since we all know that according to Steve, “people don’t read anymore.” I doubt that the killer app will be social book annotation, and perhaps I’ve just spent too much time in English class, but the fact is that this mind-melding new tablet is going to need some sort of killer app that makes it a truly useful product. It needs to find the period in between Portable and Mobile where I say “Yes, this solves a problem,” but if this whole iPad thing is going to be nothing but a 9″ iPhone sans-phone, I’m not sure I’m interested.

To have iTerm open to a certain directory for a bookmark, simply set the “Working Directory” to the path you would like to open. This seems ultra obvious, but the trick here (which I got confused about) is to not escape the path.

Usually anything shell-related requires either escaping spaces (/Users/horse/Documents/My\ Documents/) or using quotes of some kind around the string so that the command line know you’re not trying use the space as an argument delimiter.

Obviously iTerm does this escaping for you, but it doesn’t actually say that anywhere in the documentation, so here ya go!

Speaking of terminal emulators for OS X, what do you prefer? I started using iTerm when I first got a Mac, since it was far superior to the Apple-supplied Terminal.app application. As of Leopard, Apple has included a much more feature-rich version of Terminal.app, although it still seems to be lacking in the Bookmark department. You can setup different window-sets and styles, but it’s not quite the same thing as being able to just save out certain commands or SSH connections easily.

What do you think? Do you use iTerm or Terminal.app? Do you have a trick for bookmarking in Terminal.app?