Results tagged “apple”

Apple's big iPad announcement last week has been sinking in for the past few days, and I've concluded that the iPad sucks. I could live without multitasking if push notifications work (with only one exception). The lack of a camera and the silly USB and SD card adapters were dumb design choices, but the iTunes syncing bothers me the most. iTunes is slow, bloated, and horrible.

And the iTunes syncing proves to me that Apple really doesn't understand what makes Amazon's Kindle so great. Yes, the eInk screen is awesome for reading in direct sunlight (except in temperatures below 41° F), and yes, the free wireless 3G service is a nice perk. But there's one reason why the Kindle is a perfect gift for anyone in the family:

Kindle owners never need to connect their device to a computer.

Until this is true of the iPad too, I don't see it mimicking the success of the Kindle.

Apple unleashed the 3.0 software update upon iPhones and iPod Touches everywhere yesterday. I've been enjoying all the new goodies, particularly search, copy and paste, and landscape keyboards, which you can read about elsewhere.

This iPod feature caught me by surprise! Apple finally revamped the podcast playback controls, eliminating the repeat, genius, and shuffle buttons that made little sense for audio podcasts. The new left button e-mails an iTunes link to the podcast. The center button leaps backwards thirty seconds, an operation I've frequently needed with audio content. The right button doubles or halves the playback speed, a feature I've quickly come to love. The position slider has been revamped too: while seeking to a new position, I can slide my finger down the screen to reduce the speed of movement. This makes finding a particular spot in a long podcast tremendously easy!

Expect my next several posts to be about the iPhone. My favorite IM client has yet to be updated for push events and my new iPhone 3G S is sitting in a box in Kentucky. I'm quite excited to finally be retiring my well-worn nerd taxed model.

I'm sure most Mac users encounter situations when they're forced to use a Windows keyboard. In my case, I attach a Mini and ocassionally my MacBook to a KVM switch shared by Vista, Ubuntu, and a Windows keyboard.

Up until now, I've just dealt with the fact that Windows keyboards switch the Option and Command key locations. I've trained my brain to use the Windows key rather than the key immediately adjacent to the space bar when I need Command. Previous versions of Mac OS had a feature that remapped the modifier keys, but this was a global setting that remapped all keyboards whether they be Windows or not.

I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered this dialog under Leopard's keyboard system preferences.

That new drop down list at the top lets me create mappings for all keyboards or specific keyboards, identiifed by their USB device name. Very nice, Apple!

I wanted to do something very simple over the weekend. I wanted to set up my Windows Vista computer to backup automatically to a drive shared on the network by my Mac Mini. In this day and age, digital information has become so important in our everyday lives that one would hope this is now relatively straightforward, right?

First, let me say that I can accomplish this in my sleep on any non-Windows computer. I work, live, and play on unix operating systems. I know how to configure key pairs and schedule a regular cron job to rsync files over a secure ssh connection. These technologies have a significant learning curve, but they work consistently and reliably.

My first hurdle was Leopard's horrible SMB support. Enabling Windows file sharing on Leopard confronts the user with an intimidating dialog box that warns about storing passwords in a less secure manner. The password on my primary account is important, so I decided to create a separate backup user. Unfortunately, Leopard "sharing only" accounts don't appear on the list of accounts available for Windows file sharing. I had to create a full user account, complete with a home directory.

The next hurdle was logging in from Vista. As I discovered after a solid half hour of tinkering, Leopard's SMB support only accepts the account's full name, not the abbreviated short version.

Vista comes with a backup tool that only supports network backups to Windows file shares. Once I had file sharing with the Mac working, I happily pointed the backup tool at that location. Windows complained about not having "full access," and Leopard doesn't have any option for enabling a higher level of privileges beyond "read & write." So there goes that idea. My Vista computer doesn't store anything more valuable than saved games and screenshots. It's not worth the time to hack something together for automatic regular backups.

Microsoft, how about adding support for backing up to SFTP or WebDAV? These are not new file sharing protocols, and they work cross-platform!

And to be fair, Apple's Time Machine is equally frustrating when backing up to non-Apple computers over the network. Time Machine relies on specific features of HFS+, including a hack in Leopard to enable hard links for directories, so network backups must create an HFS+ disk image on the remote computer.