alex.mullr.net/blog

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.

So Pleased Snow Leopard Isn’t Buggy from Alex Muller on Vimeo.

Check what happens when window focus is changed.
Gosh, releasing a buggy OS. That would’ve been a mistake.

Rumour (well, the YSTV quotes board) has it that I once said, when asking for confirmation on something television-related: “I have the attention span of a raccoon!” I think I've started to have problems with the tiny length of time I can keep focused on a task…

Something that I've been noticing increasingly lately is that the more “stuff” that gets thrown at me, the more I’ve reduced the amount to which it can bother me. When I started out with a Mac Mini and 4:3 display a couple of years ago, I had Google Notifier set up to make an obscene noise, show me my unread email count and display an overlay with the new message summary. I had system wide notifications set up for IMs, tweets, iTunes changing. In short, my computer was really annoying.

Since then, I've switched off pretty much everything. Tweets appear in the background, and I'll read them if I want. New instant message conversations show a tiny exclamation mark in the menu bar. Google Notifier… well, I actually just quit Google Notifier. I want to see how long I can do without it, but hope this is the start of something productive. Honestly, didn't realise how much all that stuff pained me until I got rid of it, and I don't think I'll be going back.

So consider this a poke for you to do something about your pain-in-the-arse computer; the revelation that the world won't implode if I don't reply to email just hit me, and it feels good.

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?

Here’s hoping Tweetie for Mac fills the void.

I’d known this for ages, but only just consciously realised that there was a way to get rid of those tweets that make me sigh painfully to myself. These regex expressions are what I’ve put into Twitterrific’s built in tweet filter.

New blog post.*http

I hate these notifications of blog updates on Twitter. This is exactly what RSS is for, and it works just fine. If I might like your blog, put a link to it somewhere (ooh, how about that section on Twitter that’s handily labelled More Info URL?) and I’ll check it out in my own time and decide if I want to subscribe to it.

^@.*http.*twitterfall

I absolutely love Twitterfall as a product and use it whenever there’s breaking news or events, but following the two developers means a whole load of replies to people I’ve never met advertising their service. Using this is an easy way to keep up with the interesting stuff they post, while getting rid of the links I don’t want to see.

twizmaster and [mM]ac[hH]eist

These two annoy me. The former is an account that’s used as a Twitter quiz service which people reply to with their answers (and reply to all too much). The latter? Search it using search.twitter.com and see for yourself.

And how to implement them…?

The easiest way is to use Secrets.prefpane and add them to the Filter Tweettext option (separated using the pipe character, as they’re regular expressions.