New Apple products came out this morning. Here’s an overview of the updates, and some of my thoughts.

• MacBook (Starting at the usual)
  • Unibody plastic case
  • No SD card reader
  • FireWire dropped
  • Single Audio port (dual in/out functionality)
  • No Trackpad button
  • Shinier!
  • Rounder!
  • Worse heat dissipation! (See: http://www.engadget.com/photos/new-macbook-unboxing-and-hands-on/2378308/) It now has a slip resistant bottom, but what I see is non-heat dissipating bottom. No2feet on your ultra-thin laptop? Yikes!)
  • Conclusions: A modern new look and design should fix certain design flaws with the current MacBooks such as the splintering plastic on bottom right hand of the top case. Not really surprised they dropped a
• Mac Mini (Starting at the usual)
  • More RAM apparently
  • Available sans optical drive and with extra hard drive, marketed as “server” edition, includes OS X Server. Pretty neat, but it’s like $1000 for it.
  • Conclusions: Finally Apple is giving people what they want and acknowledging people use it for random things (see the “The Many Uses of Mac Mini” http://www.apple.com/macmini/design.html )
• iMac (Starting at the usual)
  • Now in 16:9!
  • Randomly 21.5″ and 27″
  • Available with Core2Duo or i5 or i7 (the latter two being Quad Core (!!))
  • SD Card reader
  • Faster processors for your buck
  • Seems to be higher resolution screen
  • 2Conclusions: Notice the abandonment of NVIDIA chipsets/graphics in these machines except on the low end. This is partly because Intel refuses to let NVIDIA build chipsets for i5/i7 processors, but also because apparently NVIDIA is failing in the graphics department. This will be a reflection of what is to come in the notebook arena I suspect.
• Apple Remote ($19)
  • Now in brushed aluminum (thank goodness, the old one always scratched up in your bag)
  • Conclusion: It’s about time, although I’m not sure how many people buy this thing. I only use mine because it was included back when Front Row was a real feature.

Magic Mouse™ ($69, included with any new iMac)

• Seems totally ridiculous
• No buttons or something
• No pinch and zoom
• Shinier
• Looks not very fun to hold
• Conclusion: I have a feeling that, because I do not hold a mouse like Steve Jobs, this isn’t going to work properly for me, despite it’s customizability.

I think overall Apple is continuing it’s purge of esoteric features in favor of optimizing their designs and simplicity. FireWire and separate audio in out are standard features on most computers, yet they have determined that only x% of people use them on the low end so they remove them for simplicity or cost saving or whatever reason they dream up. I don’t really have a problem with this since, as a user of these features, I would probably just buy the higher end anyway, but it’s also frustrating at the same time. I would really like separate audio in/out on a 13″ computer, but that’s not available. I HAVE to buy a 15″ MBP for that functionality, which is a bit depressing considering every other laptop in the world has them.

This has a lot of Apple philosophy implications about weaning us off old technology towards the future. FireWire cameras are pretty much dead now, but that doesn’t mean you need to kill off the whole thing. I’m glad it’s still on the 13″ MBP.

As a Hackintosh user who occasionally feels like pulling my hair out during times of frustration, I’m glad to see that Quad core is finally available without buying a Mac Pro. It’s about time. I can actually see myself buying an iMac in the next few years now.

The Mac Mini remains to be overpriced it seems. I’m not sure the small design is exactly worth the premium, but I’m sure it will continue to be succesful. I find it interesting that it was never really adopted the way Apple had intended: as a way to swap out your Dell tower with a Mac without paying too much money. Obviously their marketing on that has shifted as time goes on.

Bonus: Still working out the prices on this one… (“$XX”)

After forgetting to take the headphones out of my shirt pocket, I realized after the weekend that the shirt had gone through the wash cycle. Not sure if  it went through the dryer too, but it definitely went through the wash, and felt very very clean, but works just fine, distortion free! Not bad Apple, although I wish I could say that they last very long, they seem to withstand *certain* elements…

Things have been busy, as always. I have some photos to upload, but once again I’m stuck in this chicken-before-the-egg dillema of whether to just upload my pictures or optimize my photo management so that it’s easier to do… sigh…

So after looking into RAMDISK as an awesome way to get hyper fast workspace, I began to realize what the issues were with modern day RAMDISK and why it is that it’s not very popular.

First let’s make a ramdisk. Easy enough, OS X is unix based, so let’s just map some RAM off to a device. Then format and mount it. The process it outlined here:

http://osxdaily.com/2007/03/23/create-a-ram-disk-in-mac-os-x/

Next let’s do a few speed tests. First, a standard SATA 7200RPM drive (seagate) nothing fancy, but no slow poke either.

Sure enough, the results are as expected. Sequential writes are decent, averaging out at about 35MB/sec. Random writes are weaker though, due to the mechanical nature of the drive.

Next let’s take a look at the RAMDISK. We begin to start measuring things in GB/sec here. Scores of 1336 on an XBench test are pretty insane. Overall, just plain incredible.

So what can we use this in the real world?

1. High bandwidth video capture or rendering:

Sounds intriguing, as reading or writing to disk large HD files can be difficult on traditional HDDs.

2. Use as a photo storage while photoshopping

Would offer rapid access to all your images while loading.

3. Large file transfer over network etc.

If the bottleneck is the disk like I insist it is, then file transfers should be exactly 1.0GBps – overhead

So what happens really?

1. In video application, the problem lies within the size of the Ramdisk. While if you had a large capacity for storage of video captures or render, your’e still limited in terms of capacity. If you’re working with a video that is smaller than 1-2GB in footage or render size, then chances are the render times won’t be too terrible, that is, assuming you’re not doing anything intensive. However most applications who are working with large intensive files are going to load them into RAM first anyway and then work with them, especially if you have the memory to spare that you’re making ramdisks in the first place. So really, there’s no advantage there.

2. Next, we have a similar roadblock here. Photoshop loads your images into RAM anyway so by loading all your work files into a ramdisk, then opening them, they might load quickly into the application, but you’re better off ejecting the ramdisk and letting photoshop use the memory itself once everything is opened, which is really just a waste of time.

3. On the other hand, large file transfers seem to be quite good. I was able to transfer a 653MB TOD over SMB, gigabit, jumbo frames from jQuad ramdisk to MacBook ramdisk in 10 seconds flat. That’s about 65.4MB/sec. That’s about 0.5Gbps. I’m sure if I did some better tests with HTTP and other protocols, doing multiple tests I’d get a better result of .6 or .7, but overall it was quite impressive. In comparison, HDD to HDD did so in about 22.5 seconds, which is about 0.2Gbps. Pretty impressive increase.

But after considerable thought, it’s virtual memory and intelligent applications that killed the ramdisk. Before the time of virtual memory, (and system 7 and 8

didn’t have it as I recall) your system basically would have to use memory as carefully as possible, because once it was full, you basically were told to close applications and try whatever you wanted to do again. (If you want to experience such nostalgia, disable page file in Windows, it’s a party and a half) but nowadays the operating system just writes out to disk any memory that isn’t going to be in use (such as background applications) so that it can be given to the application at hand. Because applications can now use just about as much memory as they want, they do. Most applications now will simply load the entire file into RAM and work with it from there. As a result, it’s really only the initial load into the application that the hard disk is penalizing your speed.

Now one of the other downsides of virtual memory and it’s effect on ramdisk performance is that once another applications starts to request more memory that is currently available, the system will start to write memory to disk to offer it to the application. In this case, RAMdisk is not actually clear from this dumping to disk, and so if Photoshop decides to use more memory, then the system will simply write out your ramdisk the hard drive, and all of the sudden your hyper-fast temporary space is back on the disk and not so speedy anymore (that is, until it is restored to memory.)

All these factors contributed to the ultimate demise of ramdisk on the consumer desktop. While it’s still very useful for nimble linux live discs and to my knowledge Google uses it extensively in their server technologies, ramdisk will most likely stay a benchmark dream rather than a useful tool for high performance computing.

So I don’t think I’ve given a full review to my iPod Nano yet, but I will make a quick note on some cool features (a complete review is yet to come.)

One neat feature that I really like is the sleep timer. I regularly use my iPod to put me to sleep , and it’s a great way to keep it’s battery alive by the next morning. For those of you unfamiliar, it essentially turns off your iPod after a set time.

Now, by no stretch of the imagination is this a well designed feature. Something it is missing is: exact times, fade out at end of time (nothing like about to fall asleep and it CLIPS right off) but I did notice that if it isn’t going to be able to finish the song in time, it won’t start it, which is pretty neat.

I will complain however, that it no longer displays the time remaining on the playback screen like it did in previous generations.

One thing I never really thought of is just to use an On-The-Go playlist, let it play through, and then just let it put itself to sleep.

Either way, I though it was some neat functionality. Thanks again !

Well it’s been about a day and a half with Leopard, and after reading a few reviews, I’m happy with it.

While it has it’s little quirks, and Apple unnecessarily removed certain functionality for some arguably ineffective functionality, it still is a significant improvement over Tiger, and it’s growing on me.

Overall there’s no real grand features, but lots of polish, which is still really great. Most of the advancements occurred “Under the hood” at the API and Programming Level, which means while Leopard isn’t SUPER fantastic right now, it will be soon as developers discover the great new technologies emerging.

I’ve compiled a list for things I hate and love about Leopard below.

Annoying things in Leopard:

• MDS still can’t be turned off (MDS = spotlight service), although spotlight is a lot fastetr
• iTunes has skipped twice in the past half hour. It never does that. I think it might be the single-coredness of my first install.
• Stacks are a bit pointless, but fairly useful.
• Spaces are ok, but are more like switching around too much. I think it will come in handy for when I’m not in full desktop mode with dual display, but I can see using it with FCE and stuff
• Maudio doesn’t work in any way (yet)
• The Menu Bar is a bit dark when there’s a dark background, but it’s less distracting, however there’s a “star” right where the application is right now and it’s driving me up the wall. For those of you dying for a hack for this, you can always just make 20 pixels along the top of your desktop background white (or black for a consistent silvery look) and you’re done. No special apps or defaults writing required.
• Time machine shows a status bar all the time when it’s backing up…maybe that’ll go away, but it’s ticking me off. Also, it didn’t exactly work the first few times, but I think it is now.
• Notes folder randomly takes time to “Load” (Spinny thing) even though there’s only one note, wtd? UPDATED: I hate Mail notes and Todos. I am not using them whatsoever.
• They did some weird thing with the bezel interface, making volume controls etc, harder to read. I’m pretty sure the drop shadow is gone.

Things I love in Leopard:

• Scrolling background windows
• The fact that when i’m done this note, I can just hit send. UPDATE: Not really, I went back to stickies.
• Time Machine is SOOOO awesome.
• Coverflow is neat, but not as useful as i thought it would be. We’ll see. Ars Technica goes into details about the UI changes in the Finder, but I find it pretty good.
• QuickLook is excellent. It even does SVG! 
• FrontRow is better….I guess. I wish I could use the same keyboard shortcuts, and also, I hate that it’s not the fwoosh it used to be. Also, it pauses iTunes when it launches. wtd is that? I don’t like it.
• Instalations made with Installer now do the iTunes “Complete” sound when they’re done. Also, an obnoxiously large green check mark shows up. Great.
• Mail.app is like Apple Outlook. I love it. Sort of.
• The new network preference pane are excellent.
• iCal, Mail, and pretty much everything is very quick. 
• Terminal updates are nice, but I still like iTerm
• My MacBook speakers actually have decent volume now UPDATE: Maybe not, I think iTunes was just preamped.
• AirPort finally shows secured/not secured in listing
• AirPort seemed to connect to networks really fast…
• Not only does “Scroll another window” work, but you can also right click a non active application, VERY useful for when say, you ahve a window on a second monitor, move your mouse over to the window, have something selected and right click to copy it. Amazingly, it works! AWESOME!!
• Cool feature: the checkbox in todo lists changes to an alert box when it is overdue
• Photo Booth effects are neat, the hacks are neater.

* Overall very solid.

Well, I'm waiting for Leopard to (re-)install and surprisingly (or not) couldn't think of anything to do while I'm waiting. So I decided to blog, here in IE6.

You're probably wondering why I'm REinstalling Leopard. I just finished installing Leopard, and was enjoying some of the greater unadvertised features or bug fixes, what ever you want to call them. First off I noticed right away that my MacBook speakers were back up to par with some of the other laptops. Many many people were crying on the forums about how the MacBook's dinky speakers delivered lame-o sound, and it looks like Leopard resolves this issue. Yay! No more distortion with iTunes pre-amping.

Photobooth background effects are also cool.

That's all I tried out until I started to realize that it wasn't really getting up to speed. Usually computers take a few Application launches and other time to load and cache stuff, but it definately wasn't doing this. In fact, it was freezing. Spotlight was MDS'ing it up in the corner, and was occupying all my CPU.

Now after reading all about how Leopard was much faster, thanks to it's more multithreaded processes etc, I was thinking, wasn't this the exact problem they were trying to fix? Process hanging on single core-ness?

So then I look down in Activity Monitor, and sure enough only one of my cores are doing any work. That's odd. Maybe just an activity monitor bug. Nope. In System Profiler, OS X is only reporting 1 core. Crap. So after being frusterated with the overburdened, slow, and lack-of-password-remembering Apple forums, there doesn't seem to be anybody reporting this issue. I'm doing an archive and install right now, and hopefully that resolves the issue. More on that later…but next up, my new organizational system

One reason why I like the Mac platform as a whole is that Mac developers communicate properly.

OSS

In the open source world, if you have a software problem, you go into the land of mailing lists or forums and try to ask someone who happens to know anything for an answer. 50% of the time the project has gone dead and no one's around to reply to your messages. The other 25% of the time the developers are "too busy" to help with support, or they are just a bit on the snobby side. You also end up with tutorials and FAQs that are completely overtechnical or underwritten and hard to follow. You end up with nothing but trying to figure out the problem yourself, which, can happen, but not always. Not to downplay OSS, I use it daily and love it, but "support" can be an issue.

Windows

Most "proprietary" or freeware !OSS software are explained insanely elaborately. For example, video converters (mostly shareware) are all ducked up with 5 paragraph long explanations of functions in some humongous Windows help file. It takes you 10 minutes to find the help article you were looking for, and then you have to spend 10 minutes readnig the whole thing only to find out "oh, it's in the TOOLS menu" or something of the like. Overdocumented.

Mac

On the Mac however, it's more or less shareware-esque companies. They understand Apple KISS philosophy and explain things as straightforwardly as possible. Help files are clear, and if you DO ever have a problem you can email them and they'll send you a friendly reply. If you bought the software, you get what you pay for.

I just noticed this after a few issues with GNU screen. I wanted some information on how to use it and the GNU Homepage about it is laughable. It gives this weird technical explanation for it and then the "more information" link leads you to some random GNU-Land page that was clearly written by an Open Source evangelist. Your best hope is to find a random blogger who wrote a GNU screen primer about it, which I did.

I've used Windows and have been baffled by some freebies out there. Either there's absolutely NO documentation or way too much, and on the Mac I've had few complaints.

]]> http://jole.ca/posts/thoughts-on-software-developers/feed/ 0 http://jole.ca/posts/iphone-review/ http://jole.ca/posts/iphone-review/#comments Thu, 05 Jul 2007 03:19:15 +0000 jolephoto http://jole.ca/blog/index.php?post=1183605555

Ok, so I don't have an iPhone so I totally don't have the right to give it my review, but I can still have an opinion.

Basically from the vast reviews I've read, I think that overall it works very well, and all in all, as advertised. As for this insane hype around it, I agree with [http://leoville.com Leo} on this one, that basically everyone hates their phone for the most part. It's awkward to use, the screen sucks, and they wish they didn't have to carry their iPod AND cell phone at the same time. This sums everything up into one device, and everybody went banana's over it.

In regards to these little software annoyances. (eg. Keyboard can't go landscape 'cept in Safari; Mail app sucks, Bluetooth is headset only, No Flash/Java) are…just that. Software annoyances, that most probably will be upgraded as time goes on. We know they will actually push out software updates, because they kept their word for Apple TV and delivered YouTube as a bonus.

Of course the question is, "Am I buying one?" and for now the answer stays no.

• Doesn't work in Canada (yet, and some have shown ways to circumvent that. I still need a phone though )
• Apple is literally pocketing almost double the actual price of device, which means as they get less greedy and they sell more of them, prices have to go down. Plus like the iPod I can see there being an iPhone Mini (don't know about the iPhone shuffle though!)

Some of my other complaints such as lack of video recording on the camera, and other features are upgradeable and I see Apple updating the firmware very soon.

]]> http://jole.ca/posts/iphone-review/feed/ 0 http://jole.ca/posts/wwdc-2007/ http://jole.ca/posts/wwdc-2007/#comments Mon, 11 Jun 2007 20:51:14 +0000 jolephoto http://jole.ca/blog/index.php?post=1181595074

So here's what's happened.

1. Apple has lost it's mind and released Safari for Windows.
2. Apple announces THE SAME Leopard features at WWDC
3. Apple redesigns their website

and a few other things…

Obviously you can see my disappointment in seeing Safari on Windows. Sure, it makes sense. You're going to have millions of people in just a few short weeks using iPhones and it would be crazy not to offer a parallel browsing experience on their PCs. And after all, Apple is a great Windows developer.

I'm also not to impressed with the Leopard feature demonstration. They're basically just showing the same features over again, and I wish Jobs would show us the other 280 instead of reshowing us the ones he showed us at MacWorld. I'm still excited for Leopard because while careening around the Leopard mini-site I found some intriguing features, even subtle ones, like a great new DVD player and an improved Terminal.

I also like the new website, well done Apple. It's also great that Leopard will be $129 across the board. Yay.

It's also great that iPhone supports third-party apps. If it turns out I can bring one to Canada, I would probably switch to Rogers and drop the 500 dollars for one.

What I really missed from the Keynote was:

1. iWork & iLife. Seriously where the duck is Apple's mind here? It's halfway through '07 and you still haven't released new iSuites
2. ZFS. The revolutionary new Filesystem that Sun themselves declared Apple was going to use wasn't even mentioned to my knowledge. Is it there or did they trash it at the last second?
3. New Macs. I don't know why I expected new Macs, but I did. I would like to be blown away with something super thin, powerful, and efficient, and I haven't.

Anyways, maybe I'll change my mind after watching the official Keynote video, but right now I'm not impressed Steve. Or did I just set to high of expectations? Oh well…

]]> http://jole.ca/posts/wwdc-2007/feed/ 0 http://jole.ca/posts/the-macbook-returns-home/ http://jole.ca/posts/the-macbook-returns-home/#comments Fri, 19 Jan 2007 05:06:47 +0000 jolephoto http://jole.ca/blog/index.php?post=1169183207

Well it's been exactly a week since the click of death visited my house, and since then there has been a lot of waiting and frustration with other operating systems. I've taken a tour around the world of Operating Systems in the past week, and am glad that I call the Macintosh my home.

Things are returning to normal faster than I thought they would. All of my music restored absolutely beautifully thanks do Senuti, (http://www.fadingred.org/senuti/) and I'm slowly restoring all my programs and settings.

I'm certainly glad this whole ordeal is over, and I am enjoying the fresh start.

Have a good weekend everybody!