Alex Muller

I’ve been thinking quite a lot recently about contingency plans, I think partially spurred on by (re-)finding Alex Payne’s rules for computing happiness. His rules have encouraged me to try and keep things as simple as possible, and to not to rely too much on anything that’s far outside my control.

So, I present a few scenarios that could easily happen over the next few years. While I hope none of them do, thinking about it in advance can’t hurt.

What if Apple stopped making the best OS?

This is becoming more of a worry with news dripping out about OS X Lion – Apple seem to be moving towards a simpler, iOS-like experience on the desktop. And while I hope they never abandon the nerds who love using OS X for development, I’ve got a horrible feeling we might wake up one day and find the command line gone.

I’d still keep using Apple hardware (it’s the best, see below), but I’d probably move to a Linux distribution. I’ve thought about this a bit recently, and I reckon the reason I’m such a fan of OS X is because it’s much more closely related to a LAMP server than Windows 7; making web development and testing that bit easier. Moving to from OS X to Linux would make more sense than moving from OS X to Windows.

Perhaps Ubuntu to start with, and then another distribution if I my needs changed or I felt a little more adventurous. Depending on how easily they installed on Apple hardware, of course, I’ve not looked in to that.

What if Apple stopped making the best hardware?

It’s really hard to imagine a world in which the quality of MacBook Pros drops so far that they’re no longer appealing. Given what I’ve seen recently at work I wouldn’t ever touch a Dell. I think a souped-up Lenovo ThinkPad might do the job quite nicely. An IBM ThinkPad T21 was my first laptop back the early 2000s, don’t cha know?

They seem like they make decent quality, not-beautiful-but-not-ugly laptops. A cursory glance at their online store suggests something like a ThinkPad X220 might work. £1100 for a 12.5 inch 1366×768, Core i3, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD is comparable to a MacBook Pro on price though; the argument that “Apple is more expensive” seems to have been well and truly eroded.

A couple of months ago, Engadget called it “arguably one of the best laptops [they’ve] ever tested”. That’ll do.

What if Twitter shut up shop?

This would be really tough. Twitter is a few things to me:

1. It’s a place to meet new people with similar interests. I suppose I’d have to spend more time using Convore, Reddit, IRC? I’ve met quite a few people because of Twitter, and even got a few freelance web development jobs that turned out really well.
2. It’s a place to socialise with friends; Facebook would probably get that traffic.
3. It’s a place to find out the latest news that I’m interested in. At a few job interviews the interviewer has asked me how I keep up to date with the latest web goings-on. I haven’t been able to think of a better answer than Twitter and RSS.

I’d start blogging a lot more, and probably investigate installing my own service that would allow me to keep posting brief updates.

What if Spotify closed down?

Simply put, I’d have to find somewhere else to get my music. I’ve recently started paying £5/month for Spotify, and I’m sure there’s another service that would do suitably well as a replacement, though probably not with the same huge catalog. Last.fm (especially the radio) would probably get a lot more use from me.

What if Dropbox turned (more) evil?

I’d head over to Amazon and buy the smallest, cheapest USB flash drive they had going, and put it on my keys. We’ve got a few Sandisk Cruzer Blades at work; they’re currently under £14 for 16GB, and the price of flash memory drops every day. And Verbatim do 16GB in fingernail-size for £24, so that’d be another to go for.

I don’t think there’s a service currently available that offers the same convenience as Dropbox. And if the only file-syncing solutions are stupidly tough to use, I’d rather go back to carrying round my data with me.

What if the iPhone stopped being so damn attractive?

I’d probably go the route of webOS first – there’s something fundamental about the lack of attention to detail of Android that really bothers me.

I’d try the latest HP/Palm Pre in an O2 store, and see whether that works for me. And if not, probably whatever the latest HTC Desire S or Google Nexus S type thing is.

And on, and on, and on

What’s the one service that you completely rely on? And what would you do without it?

Like Adam, I’d been waiting forever for the recent MacBook Pro update from Apple. The waiting had even got so bad that we discussed switching back and giving Windows 7 a chance.

Personally, I’m so glad I held out. The computer I owned before this one was a January 2007 white plastic MacBook, and the difference is more than incredible.

The Obvious vs. the Subtle

This new notebook is obviously an improvement, you don’t need anybody to tell you that. The specification speaks for itself: 2.4GHz (up from 2.26), a solid state drive providing blisteringly fast boot times and application launches, and an NVIDIA GeForce 320M instead of the very tired Intel X3100.

It’s got an SD card slot, Firewire 800, a multitouch buttonless trackpad. The battery life lasts for a whole day of light use now, where it would have buckled by lunch before. I’ve had five hours of train journeys today where I’ve been watching movies and listening to music (brightness ~50%, no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth), and it’s still 40% remaining. The build-quality and how solid the machine feels is second-to-none.

This is all great. But where Apple really shines is taking the smallest things they could possibly change, and improving them to provide the best user experience they can. Here’s a few examples:

• This model has a backlit keyboard, and with it an ambient light sensor. Which means they dim the screen and activate the keyboard backlight whenever, for example, this train goes into a tunnel, and brighten it again when the clouds reappear.
• Speaking of the screen brightness, it now fades between different brightness levels instead of obvious, staccato changes. And the LED backlight allows for great flexibility; it can go even brighter than previously when needed, but also dimmer for stealthy night-time web browsing.
• The speakers sound significantly better. They’re still tinny, laptop speakers, but a vast improvement.
• The headphone/line-in jacks have been replaced with one for both audio in and out. This change brings with it support for iPhone microphones and in-line remote controls when using iTunes.
• The MagSafe connector has been changed to be more like the MacBook Air, so it’s now much harder to knock out accidentally.

Take the screen brightness fading up and down. It might seem like a trivial point, but together with everything else, it adds up to what I believe to be the best laptop experience you can buy today. Don’t get me wrong, they’re expensive. You can get something for £400 from Acer, or £600 from Dell. And while they might look the same when you’re comparing gigahertz and revolutions-per-minute, I can assure you that they’re vastly different.

I can’t be bothered to actually write about the iPad; too many incredibly intelligent people have done that already, you can read what they have to say. If you’re looking for something to listen to, Leo Laporte’s MacBreak Weekly 177 had a load of clever folks.

However, I would love you to read this MacRumors thread:

iPoop… iCry. I was so hoping for something more.
Great just what the world needs, another freaking MP3 player. Go Steve! Where’s the Newton?!
Why oh why would they do this?! It’s so wrong! It’s so stupid!
gee! an mp3 player with a HD! how original! kinda reminds me of a JUKEBOX i once knew..

People got pissed off, angry and felt disappointed when Apple first introduced the iPod in 2001. You know, the iPod? That shitty little thing that currently holds the majority market share of MP3 players?

MacRumors link credit: notes, Andre Torrez

I recently got a 23″ Samsung monitor, my first LED-backlit display. I hadn’t noticed there being a big difference before, but my MacBook display now looks dim and hard to read.

Here’s one I’ve never seen before, never even seen it mentioned, and it was pretty cool to happen upon. If you right click on a user in System Preferences » Accounts, you get a sheet that looks a little like this:

Is it just me, or is that big red WARNING: one of the least Apple-esque things on the Mac?

And now, something I’ve wanted to try for about two weeks now: installing Mac OS X Leopard on the Samsung NC10 Netbook. I followed a guide from Wired to try and get me through the process. On the "things you need" list, we have:

• A Samsung NC10 (or similar)
• A USB drive of some description
• A copy of OSX86 courtesy of The Pirate Bay
• The OSX86 tools from Wired

Format the USB drive as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) with "Master Boot Record" selected from the options drop-down.

Choose to restore the OSX86 ISO that you’ve downloaded via BitTorrent to the newly formatted USB drive.

Use the OSX86Tools application to set up the USB drive: click Install EFI/Run FDISK, and then choose "Run Script". Enter your password in the terminal window that appears, then choose 4 to run Chameleon EFI. You’ll have to select which disk and partition you want it installed on. This is the part I had a little issue with – I had to use the exact version that Wired provides (don’t update if it prompts you to).

Eject the drive from your Mac, connect it to the NC10. Boot from the drive, and go through the fairly mundane install process (hint: it’s just like every other install of OS X, pretty much). Reboot, and you have a copy of Leopard running on non-Apple hardware.

This is another place where I had a problem. Because I’ve got Ubuntu installed on the same machine, I’m using Grub to choose which partition to boot to. In Ubuntu, you can cd /boot/grub/ and edit the file called menu.lst. Copy the layout of one of the existing ones (down the bottom), replacing the location of that partition with the location of your OS X partition.

And there you have it. A lot works out the box, including Bluetooth; not included is support for USB and Airport, but that may be forthcoming. One thing I was concerned about was that the USB ports might not work in Windows after installing Leopard either (the Wired article is ambiguous) but they do. This video’s a little crummy, but I needed something to make this post interesting (and distract me from the fact that I’ve been in my room revising for a few days):

Hackintosh from Alex Muller on Vimeo.

This is hardly complicated, but it’s something that’s been bugging me. A few minutes later, tada: a script that will open the Last.fm page of the currently playing iTunes track.

Copy and paste the above into Script Editor (Applications > AppleScript) on the Mac, and hit compile. As the comment in the code says, this is hardly my finest piece of work (at least, I hope it isn’t), so I’m not too bothered what you do with it. Enjoy it, whatever happens…

Nope, I couldn’t think of a more descriptive title. Michael and I headed along to the Apple Store, Regent Street this afternoon to have a look at the latest (fourth generation) iPod nanos and new iPod touches. Here’s us having a quick go:

New iPod Nanos from Alex Muller on Vimeo. Also on YouTube.

Thoughts on the nano: gorgeous, slim, easily the best looking one they’ve made yet. "Shake to shuffle" is fun, the accelerometer is a nice touch, and it’s much more responsive than the classic has always been. While the screen is incredibly high resolution, it’s still not big enough to watch videos comfortably. Folks were worried about glare from the slightly curved screen; would like to point out that while reflection looks like it might be an issue in the video above, it’s really not bad when you’re looking at it straight on.

As for the touch: volume controls on the side are nice, but Apple have gone and made it too thin. We agreed that it felt slippery in the hand because of the size coupled with the curved steel case, and I almost dropped it the first time I picked one up. The software feels (and upon testing, actually is) faster than my iPhone 3G, significantly so. It’s running the latest version which hasn’t been shipped for iPhone yet, and that might have something to do with it.

Also, a quick note on the new Genius feature in iTunes 8. Shockingly, it does actually work as confirmed by Adam, Samarth [protected], burgesg, Will and now me. The thing it does really well is to grab music you like that would otherwise get ‘lost’ in the thousands of songs the majority of us have these days. Apple have absolutely hit the nail on the head with the way they’re describing it:

Genius playlists help you discover songs in your library you never knew you had — and rediscover forgotten favorites.

The overall hardware verdict is: save yourself £60 and get a nano in your favourite colour. Who needs a touch screen anyway?