Macgasm

Maybe I’m alone here, but every now and again an application running on my iPhone 3G (with its fancy 2.0 firmware) crashes. It usually occurs at the precise moment when I need that particular application to be doing what it’s supposed to do. I mean, seriously: Twitter updates are vital when I’m mobile, right?

Well, whether or not you think Twitteriffic is important (or any other app for that matter), the underlying fact still remains; apps crash on the iPhone. I’ve seen lots of ire raised on this particular issue, and thought that I might throw in a couple pennies. To clarify, though, I’m not talking about applications that crash the phone – that’s a completely separate distinction that I want to make upfront. I’m talking about applications that just bomb on the iPhone for no apparent reason other than the inherent decision by the app to prematurely give up the ghost.

Most of the frustration that I’ve read about has been directed at developers for releasing not-ready-for-market applications OR at Apple for releasing an appliance that can’t stand the heat, so it sits firmly in the fire. And me, I say “meh.”

Pretty arrogant, huh?

Now before I have peeps storming the gates of Macgasm, let me explain. At the core of all that is beautiful, fun, delicious, and orgasmic about the iPhone, it’s still A PHONE. That’s the whole reason that we all had to sign our lives away to whatever carrier is supporting it for us. I repeat, it’s A PHONE.

Any application or process that prevents the iPhone from fulfilling its prime directive is violating the original intent of the device – to be a phone. When an application crashes on the iPhone, it’s a signal to you that the app was utilizing an excess of resources that would violate the prime directive. Whether that’s RAM or processor cycles or whatever, the iPhone OS has certain requirements that have to be present for it to function according to spec.

This shows one thing about Apple that you MUST appreciate: it will defend the intended purpose of one of its appliances, even in the face of possibly taking it on the chin (MobileMe, anyone?). A crashed application on your iPhone is symbolic of this very principle.

That said, break out the tamales and the tequilla – and say a hearty “Gracias!” for the crashy apps.

As I mentioned in my inaugural post, I’m an IT guy. And as an IT guy, if someone has broken a piece of tech in the weirdest way imaginable, I’ve seen it. Suffice to say, nothing prepared me for the near mutant-style destruction that my wife caused her old iBook G4. Sadly, my wife has a reputation, and it started with a Dell laptop (this happened in our pre-Mac days) that she destroyed within a matter of 18 months. She swears that our boxer pulled the laptop off of the table as he barreled through our dining room, taking with him the power adapter – obviously not a MagSafe! – which sent the laptop careening to the floor. It didn’t explain why the battery never again charged correctly, even after the laptop went back to Dell for repairs. [Insert snarky Dell support comments here.] Ultimately I chalked this all up to crap design and support from Dell, and went and bought an iBook G4 for her. She was in love.

She’s a pretty tough user on tech (which has ALWAYS made me a little hesitant to hand over my MacBook Pro to her). About six months ago, her iBook started indiscriminately shutting down on its own, or rebooting without warning. Kinda frustrating if you’re in the middle of writing a document that you haven’t saved (or in her case, in the middle of a game that didn’t have a save point). The problem got bad enough – and she started swearing loud enough for someone to hear a couple counties over from us – that I had to address it. I tore apart her OS, tore apart her machine, reinstalled the OS, cleared out the PRAM and NVRAM, and much more. It seemed to resurrect her poor little iBook. Still, she had this lusty look in her eyes every time she saw my MacBook.

Then one day, about three weeks ago, the poo really hit the fan. Not only would her iBook shut down for no apparent reason, but it wouldn’t power up either. So again, I cracked the casing open, and found that her PMU (the Power Management Unit) wasn’t shielded at all, and everytime it touched the metallic chasis of her laptop, it would short out. I covered that thing with a crap-ton of electrical tape, and got her laptop to boot, and stay on! And then my wife’s mutant powers took over.

I must have had the old iBook on for over 20 hours as I worked away at it, and during that span there was nary a problem. It just behaved. I handed it back to my wife, with a smug look of satisfaction – I felt damn near heroic. Within 4 hours of her having the laptop back in her possession, the crashes returned. And not a single entry in any log file to point me in a direction. In my final round of “support” I somehow came to the conclusion that I might’ve been dealing with a corrupt installation of the OS. In the meantime, I handed over my MacBook Pro, and within 5 hours of her using that, she grey-screened it! I freaked! Thankfully, it was a simple repair of disk permissions, and I was back in business. Whew!

The iBook had been running Leopard for about 6 months at this point. I knew that I had to back up my wife’s data, and wasn’t relishing using some third party tool to accomplish this. I decided to do something completely out of character: trust Time Machine. I *know* that there are FANTASTIC backup solutions for OS X out there, but I wanted to go completely native and put Time Machine to the test. Seven hours (and 50 GB’s) later, the backup process was complete. Onto the reinstall of the operating system.

Unfortunately, the optical drive on her iBook was DOA, so I threw my MacBook into target disk mode, inserted the installation CD’s, and started the process to resurrect her laptop one more time. Rather than going with the Leopard installation (which always ran slow on her machine) , I opted to reinstall Tiger, and manually moved elements from her Time Machine backup through my MacBook back onto her iBook. What a nightmare. 18 hours later, and she had her laptop back. And I had to admit – the third time definitely seemed like the charm. It WAS running better.

The next morning, I gave the laptop back to my mutant of a wife, wincing as I did. I had high hopes that this was it. Boy, was I WRONG. She called me at work later that morning to let me know that her iBook was up to its old tricks. I was furious. I had clocked over 35 hours (over the course of several months) fixing this damn thing, and every time I thought that I had it, it blew up again. Well, suffice to say, drastic times call for drastic measures.

We found someone locally selling a Gen1 Intel iMac that had fantastic specs. I talked the guy selling it down a hundred bucks, paid him cash, and came home with a “new” computer for my wife. The guy selling it had said that he erased the drive, but being the IT guy that I am, I felt the need to format the drive and start from scratch. This machine is so fast (and I know what to exclude from the OS X installation) that it only took 15 minutes to reinstall the OS. And then I remembered that I had to restore all of my wife’s data. I thought that I had HOURS of work ahead of me. Thankfully, I was wrong.

It came to me that I still had that Time Machine backup on an external hard drive. After installing the OS, Apple has a nice movie that plays (warming you up for that wonderful OS X experience), and then you’re presented with the initial setup steps that you have to complete before entering the GUI. One of the options is to transfer your data from an existing Mac, or to restore it from an existing Time Machine backup. I attached the FireWire drive containing my wife’s backup, lit it up, and watched as OS X recognized her backup. It seemed to locate the data effortlessly, and after verifying that the data was in good shape, the restore process began. And just a short 45 minutes later, my wife’s iMac had ALL of her personal settings, documents, applications, mail data – literally everything – right back where it should be. From start to finish, it was only an hour before her new machine was ready to deploy. And that’s a beautiful thing.

Apple has been taking some serious heat lately over various dropped balls (the MobileMe launch, iPhone 3G issues that still plague a lot of users, and App Store weirdness), one thing remains unchanged: OS X is still a dependable, professional, superior operating system that outclasses its competitors on many of those things that users depend on daily. Apple is still a company that has cornered the market on making applications and hardware that just work.

Ever had the need to quickly convert one of your AAC audio files to another format? I was asked today for a down and dirty way to quickly convert an M4A file to an MP3 file. The assumption was that we were going to have to look for an application to handle the conversion, or try some screwy import/export thing in GarageBand. But there’s an easier way, and once you’ve used it once, you’ll be singing the blues no more!

Assuming that your audio track exists in your iTunes library, open up the iTunes Preference window. From there, click on Advanced. You’ll see an area about midway through the window labeled “Import Using”. Unless you’ve changed this setting previously, this is most likely set to AAC Encoder. Click on the drop-down menu, and select MP3 Encoder. You can also adjust your settings based on the bitrate that you prefer your files encoded as. Now click on OK.

Back in your iTunes library, select the track that you’d like to convert. Control-click the track and select “Convert Selection to MP3″. By making this selection, you’ll create a secondary version of your selected track in the MP3 format – this DOES NOT overwrite your source file.

And you’re done! Now you can Control-click the newly created MP3 file and select “Show in Finder” and do with it what you will. Enjoy!

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One of the more common complaints that I’ve been hearing about the Macbook Air (and I’m not referring to its slower processor, lack of optical drive, lack of additional USB ports, or wired ethernet ports!) is that Apple, in doing the computing public a “favor” is making solid state drives available as an option over traditional 2.5″ hard disk drives. This is supposedly in a move to make the laptop even lighter than its waif-ish 3 lbs., and to increase the efficiency of the laptop, as boot times are increased, and battery consumption is decreased when driving a device with no moving parts.

The basis for the complaint has been two-fold: 1) 64 GB is NOT enough for the modern user, and 2) the read/write capacity on solid state drives (which I’ll refer to as SSD’s for the remainder of this post) is limited – there is some magic number that you can potentially hit with a SSD that will cause it to fail. Though the focus of this post is primarily on the second point, I’ll briefly mention that Samsung has already begun production of 128 GB SSD drives that debuted IN devices (laptops, etc.) at this year’s CES. 64 GB on the Air will not be the standard. The technological times are a-changing; the usual question is how cost prohibitive the component is. That said, I would expect a refresh in the Air lineup by WWDC this June.

Though every gadget and gizmo blog has put the Air through the rigors, I often wonder who their core audience is, because I think that there is a broad difference between the core audience of technology blog readers and the intended audience (and eventual owners) of the Air. The Air is a direct competitor to the ultra-thin/ultra-portable single usage machines that are pumped out by the Sony’s and Dell’s of the world. As I stated in an unrelated post, Apple is starting to take a position that the average person never expected – with the Air and the iPhone, they are making a break into the enterprise. That said, the Air is not an every-user Mac laptop. I know that as much I think that it’s a cool factor type of device, it would never work as the video editing, Photoshopping, podcast recording workaholic that is my MacBook Pro. But… for my Mom, who reads email and goes to recipe sites, and just wants something light to use while she’s sipping afternoon tea, this is the perfect machine. (As a caveat, the Air is not priced for my Mom. It still is an expensive piece of tech for its’ limited functionality.) This is the same mindset of the executive business professional. For the most part, people in positions like this are not the producers of content, but the managers of it – and hence, a device that can be used to write email and spreadsheets is the prime tech of upper enterprise. And between iWork and its’ support of the additional XML data attached to the Office 2007 file formats, or even Office 2008 for Mac, there is plenty that the executive can do on a MacBook Air.

But let’s get back on point.

How limited really is SSD as a storage media? Is there a truly limited amount of reads and writes before the device fails? Well, about that. There are a few blogs dedicating space to smashing through the “myth” of limited read/write capacities, but I’d rather go to a manufacturer. MTron is a solid state drive manufacturer in Korea, and has made some pretty robust claims about SSD technology. If you read on down to the bottom, the claim is that if the user wrote AND erased 50 GB’s of data per day, the SSD would only last 140 years. Only. You might want to plan on upgrading in that timeframe. You know how great 14o year-old tech is, you know? Even taking their example of standard SSD’s, the device still lasts over 5.5 years, with a 50 GB read/write cycle per day! Who traffics in that many Word documents or emails DAILY? Not the average executive. That kind of read/write usage is more in line with a videographer editing in Final Cut, or an engineer working on an album in Pro Tools, and those types of users wouldn’t gravitate towards a MacBook Air.

I think that the writing is clearly on the wall: Apple is making headway into the enterprise. And as I’ve said before, Dell, Sony, and all the big box retailers ought to be shaking in their boots. Those same execs that said Apple should have shuttered its’ operations years ago (and given money back to the shareholders – you know who you are), are the same execs that are watching Apple’s market share increase substantively every quarter, while their own continues to shrink. This only means good things for both Apple AND PC users. Competition is the soul of innovation. Gone are the days of being able to sit on your tech laurels – everyone (Apple included) has to stay fresh to keep the attention span of the Twitter army.

If there is any application out there that would make a windows user more comfortable using Leopard Todos would be it. But instead of me babbling about it I’m going to let the screencast  do all the talking.

As excited as I am about all of the cool stuff that will soon be available because of what the iPhone SDK has to offer to developers, I’m even more excited about the proliferation of the iPhone that is about to happen in the enterprise arena. Let me explain:

Bringing the Microsoft ActiveSync licensing to the iPhone offers something RIM (the makers of the BlackBerry) can only dream about – a convergence device in the enterprise, and this without the hassle of a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). Many corporations manage their mail utilizing Microsoft Exchange. And while Exchange has its’ benefits, it takes something like BES to integrate smartphones onto a corporate network, unless the user community is wed to (YUCK!!!) Windows Mobile devices. The workaround for a user who has to interact with an Exchange server on their iPhone is to beg their systems administrator to enable the IMAP protocol. While this is an OK workaround, it’s really only mediocre at best, as this is not a “push” from the mail server, but a phone-initiated “pull”. IMAP also will not synchronize calendars and contacts.

I’m currently using IMAP at my office, just for the purposes of having my work-related email on my phone. I have to use a plug-in called GSyncIt  to synchronize my Outlook calendar with my iPhone. It’s a massive pain, mostly due to the fact that I didn’t want my personal events from my main calendar to cross-pollinate with my work events. So I setup a secondary GMail account, which Outlook syncs to using GSyncIt, and then sync it to iCal by subscribing to an RSS feed of my calendar. What sucks about that as a solution is that those “sync’d” items are unable to be edited and are stripped of their alerts and reminders. So I have a less than productive PDA calendaring device using this method. To get my work contacts sync’d to my iPhone, I utilize Plaxo (with loathing, I might add) on my work PC’s Outlook contacts, and in my Address Book.app on my Macbook Pro. This way I get my contacts updated in both areas. Be aware – both of these solutions are über-geeky, and NOT efficient. In other words, they work, but they aren’t pretty.

Since I’ve gone in detail to describe my little workarounds, here’s how cool ActiveSync is going to make life: ActiveSync integrates directly with an Exchange server, which hosts not only mail, but calendars, contacts, and public folders. An appointment made on your iPhone is synchronized to Outlook over the air (also known as OTA). The reverse is true as well. The same goes for contact creations or edits. And lastly, mail that has been read in one place, moved to another, responded to, etc. is synchronized to the server as well. This includes the response itself, which would in essence invalidate the default “Sent from my iPhone” message at the bottom of  mail sent from the iPhone.

Now, you might be saying to yourself, “Eh. Big deal. Who cares about how iPhones integrate into a business environment?” My answer is pointed. You should care. The iPhone is now strategically placed to be the BlackBerry killer that we hoped it would be. Talk about silencing every critic that has ever said that Macs (as a general rule) aren’t business-class machines, and that Apple (as a whole) isn’t interested in the enterprise. Right now, Dell and RIM should be shaking in their boots, as this move by Apple represents a major change in the tone and tenor of their party line. This gets Apple one step closer to becoming one of the largest smartphone makers in the world, and makes them a viable alternative as a computer vendor in the enterprise.

I’ve not even mentioned some of the remote administrative features (the “wipe”) of this change to iPhone 2.0 or the fact that Cisco is developing a native IPSec VPN client for it either. These also are steps that propel Apple – and we fanboys! – from niche computing to an operational standard. The game has officially changed, ladies and gents.

As I said in my introductory post, I live (proudly) as a Mac user in a Microsoft OS build and support center. And try as I might to convince the powers-that-be that it’s time to “switch”, I’m not getting a ton of traction on that front. So, I’m unfortunately left with having to live between two worlds.

One of the ways that I’ve had to cross-integrate those two worlds is in office suites. Now, I’ve quite painfully run Office 2004 for Mac, and I don’t suggest that office “solution” to anyone. Even people I hate. Vigorously hate. However, this was one of the first steps that I took in my efforts to find something cross-platform/compatible with the larger market share of Windows users.

Earlier this year, I invested in iLife 08, and thus far it’s been a great experience. One of the better features of each of the included apps are the “Inspectors” that format anything from text, pictures, effects, and more. This feature is most obvious in Keynote. Keynote is a fantastic application, but the point of this post is to provide a word to the wise…

Formatting between Office 2007/2003 and iLife 08 is, for most of the applications, a fairly seamless process. Aside from the usual issues with font support and spacing, or as with Numbers, it’s the fact that there isn’t support for macros. Keynote is a little different in that while you can export your presentation to PowerPoint, I don’t suggest it. Let me explain:

I had to build a presentation for work. Something nice and corporate. And rather than use PowerPoint (hey, I’ve gotta get a dig in somewhere at work, don’t I???), I used Keynote, knowing that I could eventually export it to PowerPoint. Wow. Was I in the wrong on that one… Exports to PowerPoint get completely hosed in the process. Now, your expectation is that things like transitions would obviously be different, but it goes a little deeper than that. JPG’s got blown out, trashed, moved, shat upon, you name it. Timing became an issue on every slide. And of course, fonts that were specific to my Mac got lost in translation on the move to PowerPoint. You can also export to Quicktime, Flash, PDF, an image, and the iPod. Strangely, going in the other direction (from PowerPoint to Keynote) seems to preserve most of the formatting, so if you’ve got something that you’re working on at the office that you need to finish (and finesse!), you can pull out your Mac and perform some Keynote voodoo. Maybe even impress your friends and co-workers!

Even with its’ limitations, I firmly believe that Keynote is (on its’ own) a great presentation app. Just save yourself some frustration and play in your own sandbox on this one.

Excelsior!