John Topley’s Weblog

I just don’t understand Paul Thurrott. Although I now prefer Apple’s products, I occasionally visit his site because I’m still vaguely interested in the latest news from Microsoft. Much of what Paul writes is balanced and fair, but sometimes he comes out with some complete tosh! The latest being this gem from his preview of Apple’s new MobileMe service:

“I’m not interested in covering every single product that comes out of Redmond, and I am not a Microsoft fan-boy. What I’m interested is products and technologies that affect you, the Windows user. You’ve made a decision to use the world’s best operating system as the center of your computing experience, and I endorse and support that decision.”

—Does anybody seriously think that Windows is the world’s best operating system? It’s the world’s most commercially successful OS, certainly. It has the most number of applications available for it, granted. But the best? Get real, Paul! Mac OS X Leopard wipes the floor with Windows Vista or Windows XP, as more and more people are discovering. Sure, it doesn’t have the shear glut of software that Windows has, but the software is does have covers all the bases and is of a uniformly high quality.

I can only think of one version of Windows that might have been a contender for the title of the world’s best operating system and that was Windows 2000. It was mature and stable and its Windows NT architecture was far in advance of the tired old classic MacOS that was Apple’s offering at the time. I really liked it, even though it had a tendency of switching the focus away from the active window which sometimes drove me nuts.

Sadly Windows 2000 was so late that it barely had time to take off before its successor was announced. Windows XP was too rough around the edges for my liking. Although there was much to like, it did feel unfinished to me; it felt like it was rushed out of the door. Now here we are seven years later and Windows Vista is much the same. That’s quite an achievement considering that over five years elapsed between the two versions.

Going back to Windows after using Leopard is like a Windows 2000 user stepping back in time to Windows 95 or even Windows 3.1. It just doesn’t work as well and feels less polished. Perhaps Windows 7 will be a contender for the title of the world’s best operating system, but I doubt it somehow given Microsoft’s recent track record. Windows is crippled by the burden of its own past, whereas Apple are free to keep moving forward. Sorry Paul.

snob

[with adj.] a person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people.

The question is, does buying Apple gear turn you into a snob? It’s a question that I’ve been thinking about lately. It’s led to me examining my own attitudes and thinking about how they’ve changed over the years.

Anyone who has read my blog lately will know that I love Apple’s products. I’ve blogged often enough about why I like them. I’m now fortunate enough to own four Apple pieces—note the use of the term pieces as if describing art. In order of purchase they are:

• A 2004 20GB iPod with Click Wheel
• A 2005 PowerBook G4 12”
• A 2006 iMac Core 2 Duo 20”
• A 2007 16GB iPod touch

The Click Wheel iPod was the first Apple product I bought. It was the last iPod before they got colour screens and could display photos. It’s probably the last of that first wave of iPods in the sense that it came with elaborate packaging and lots of accessories, whereas nowadays the packaging is more environmentally friendly and you have to buy things like charging bricks separately. I love the ingenuity of the Click Wheel and the way the backlight fades in and out slowly rather than abruptly.

My 12” PowerBook looks amazing. There’s no clutter or extraneous detail and the underneath looks like something space-age built for NASA for mega bucks. In fact, I was watching the DVD of 2001: A Space Odyssey the other week and I don’t think my PowerBook would look out of place on board the Discovery One, such is the high level of clean detailing.

The iMac is my workhorse but with supermodel looks. There’s so much computer in such a small space. Not having to have a system tower on the floor is liberating. The engineering on the stand hinge that supports the whole computer is stunning.

All I have to say about my iPod touch is that it was sent back in time from the future.

As an exercise, let’s see what my thoughts would be when asked about a non-Apple product. I’ll imagine what they would have been prior to my owning Apple gear and then I’ll write down what they would be now.

The Product: Dell Latitude D530 laptop

Pre-Apple

Wow! I cannot believe how inexpensive that is! It’s amazing how much bang for your buck you get now. I don’t know how Dell manage to do it. They’re practically giving them away. I’d feel really good if I’d bought that, knowing that I was getting that much power and the very latest version of Windows for so little outlay.

Now

My God, what an ugly laptop! That grey colour is horrible and it looks so utilitarian. I bet it’s got ports sprouting all over its exterior like warts. It’s bound to come with a huge power brick too. I see you can have it with Windows Vista, which in spite of the hardware will run like a dog and thrash the disk to death. Or you can have Windows XP, if you can live with the constant balloons popping up demanding attention and the sleep and resume issues.

It’s not just Dell computers that I now consider an affront to my eyes. Last week I was using an IBM Thinkpad on a training course that not only had a trackpad and a pointing nipple, but five buttons! Give me a multi-gesture trackpad with a large single button underneath anyday. Plus there were the usual assortment of slots, doors and ports. It even had a parallel printer port—has anyone used one of those since the mid-nineties? Worst of all was the dedicated Access IBM button. I mean, why would you want to?!

Lest anyone believe that I’ve completely lost my mind and am now a fully-paid up member of the Steve-one-button-is-all-you-need-Jobs brigade, I feel obliged to point out that I’ve never found Apple’s minimalist hardware aesthetic to be an issue. I simply don’t need any more bells and whistles than they give me. Everything else looks overdone by comparison. There’s no denying that something like an iPhone or an iPod touch does scream “look at me”, but that’s because
well-engineered elegant design is sadly rare in an age of constant product churn when the main differentiator is who can do it for the lowest cost.

I do think that like any cult Apple inspire fierce loyalty and a natural consequence of that is the rejection of non-Apple products. In answer to the original question of whether buying Apple gear turns you into a snob, I think that it probably amplifies any snobbish tendencies that you may already have, but perhaps more than anything it makes you aware of the deficiencies in other products through a heightened appreciation of good design. Is that so bad?

My partner recently wanted to download a track from HMV Digital. The following is a true account of the process we had to go through before we could play the purchased music. By the way, the HMV Digital website only works with IE 6 or greater, so Firefox, Safari or Opera wasn’t an option. I know, party like it’s 1999!

1. Click to download the purchased track.
2. Tell IE to enable popups for the site.
3. The HMV Download Manager opens.
4. Tell IE to enable ActiveX controls for this window.
5. The download starts but craps out after a few seconds with an obscure “DispInfo” error. I know that this sounds like COM-speak, but what’s a non-programmer to think?
6. Switch to my clean installation of Windows XP running under Parallels on the Mac.
7. Close the Desktop Cleanup Wizard balloon.
8. Log in to the HMV Digital site. Click to download the purchased track.
9. Close the Desktop Cleanup Wizard balloon again.
10. Tell IE to enable popups for the site.
11. The HMV Download Manager opens.
12. Tell IE to enable ActiveX controls for this window.
13. The download starts but craps out after a few seconds. It’s a different error this time: “The client does not have the DRM security update”.
14. Do a Google search on the error text. End up at a Virgin Digital Music Help page. Follow the link to Microsoft to upgrade the security component.
15. Click to download the purchased track. It works this time but is really slow because in the meantime Windows has decided to download this week’s updates.
16. Click to install the updates.
17. Click the balloon to see what updates Windows is installing.
18. Windows Update prompts for a reboot. Ignore it because you haven’t transferred the downloaded track out of the virtual machine yet.
19. Reboot Windows to finish installing the updates.
20. Copy the track to the PC. Double-click it to play it.
21. Windows Media Player 10 warns that some security components are missing. Click to install them.
22. The installation fails.
23. Double-click the file again. Nothing happens. Windows Media Player doesn’t start.
24. Check for updates from within Windows Media Player. Update to the latest version.
25. Windows Media Player can’t play the track because the licence is missing.
26. Re-download the licence file from HMV.

Purchasing Music Online, Apple Style

1. Open iTunes.
2. Click the iTunes Store.
3. Browse or search for what you want.
4. Click Buy Song.

One of the toughest tests of an operating system is how well it copes when disaster strikes and you have to somehow get your data back. Last weekend I found myself in this situation for the first time since I switched to using Mac OS X. I thought it worth recording the experience here simply for the selfish reason of having a note of what I did should the situation arise again.

The troubles started when I ran Apple’s Software Update application to upgrade my iMac to version 10.4.11 of Mac OS X Tiger. I foolishly assumed that this would be a no brainer since I’d already taken the big step of doing a clean install of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on my PowerBook. Incidentally, I’m conservatively holding off installing Leopard on the iMac until a Leopard-compatible version of the SuperDuper! system recovery software is available. Expect some views from me on Leopard once I’ve had a bit longer to live with it.

Unfortunately Software Update chose an operating system update as the moment to go wrong for me for the first time. Up until this point I’d never had the slightest whiff of trouble from it. It ran most of the update and then told me that it couldn’t complete and had put the installer package in the Trash. I did think that this was quite amusing, as if my Mac was telling me that the update I’d downloaded was rubbish and deserved to be filed accordingly! I retrieved the installer and ran it as a standalone update and got the same error. I think I rebooted at this point and was surprised to see that I did in fact appear to be running 10.4.11, complete with Safari 3.0 and its draggable tabs. I checked in the Software Update log but there was no mention of the update, so I guessed that it had merely crashed before it had chance to write to the log and do a general tidy up that left my operating system looking presentable and ready for use again.

Next I noticed that the rather important mach_kernel file was visible in the Finder in the root of my system disk. After a Google search I fixed that by doing:

sudo /Developer/Tools/SetFile -a V /mach_kernel

—And restarting the Finder. All appeared to be well until I plugged in my iPod and nothing happened apart from it starting charging. I knew that it needed charging so I wondered whether it simply didn’t have enough juice to sync. Unfortunately I was wrong and there then followed several resets and the forcing of FireWire Transfer Mode, all of which were to no avail. By now I was starting to get worried. At this point in the story I must admit that I did entertain guilty thoughts about how this could be a sign that I should replace my faithful but aging fourth generation iPod with a brand new iPod touch, but with a great effort of will I banished such thoughts. Beware the Reality Distortion Field!

As I couldn’t get the iPod to do anything I came to the conclusion that the only path open to me was to roll back my Mac to its last known good state, so I powered up my external hard disk and was somewhat alarmed to find that it wouldn’t mount. That was when I launched System Profiler and discovered that according to my Mac it didn’t have a FireWire bus. *#^% indeed!

The situation was getting quite serious now so I needed a plan. Fortunately I had two things on my side. Firstly, I had on my external hard disk a complete SuperDuper! copy of my iMac’s working 10.4.10 installation from only a few days before. The second thing I had going for me was that I had a Mac, which makes it really easy to start up from other disks or generally shuffle the entire OS about.

I swapped the connection to the external drive from FireWire to USB and booted from my Tiger install DVD. Next I fired up Disk Utility and dragged the external drive icon to the source field and the icon for my system disk to the destination field. I clicked the Restore button and waited rather a long time as over 120 GB was copied across. There was one heart-stopping moment as I got an obscure error code right at the very end of the restore process. There was nothing to lose by now so I ejected the DVD and rebooted. My iMac took longer than usual to start but it did come back up and I logged in and to my absolute joy found that I was back to using 10.4.10.

However, it wasn’t all plain sailing as I discovered when I started Safari. Although it was back to Safari 2.0, all of my bookmarks were missing and the Import Bookmarks menu item was permanently disabled. I’d had enough by now, so I decided to run Software Update to get 10.4.11 again, with a vow that if that didn’t work then I’d wipe the disk and install Leopard from scratch. Happily, Software Update worked perfectly this time and the upgrade to Safari magically restored all my bookmarks.

My iMac was now back to rude health apart from a niggling little problem of some UNIX-y folders such as /etc, /var and /tmp being visible in the Finder. Perhaps they should have been made invisible right at the end of the restore process when it crashed. I was able to resolve that issue with another Google search followed by entering the next line into a Terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles NO

—Relaunch the Finder by Option-right-clicking on its Dock icon and the job’s a good ‘un.

Overall I’d have to rate the Mac disaster recovery experience as being on a par with the rest of the Mac experience i.e. generally well thought-out and pretty painless. Certainly I’d say that SuperDuper! is a must.

Incidentally, the hairiest disaster recovery experience I ever had was a few years ago when my installation of Windows 2000 went badly wrong and wouldn’t let me log on, because the driver letters had got mixed up. I fixed that one by installing a parallel copy of Windows 2000 and then using regedt32.exe to load the registry of the broken installation. I was then able to edit the GUIDs that Windows uses internally to represent drives and partitions. At the time it felt like the task required a similar level of concentration and calm that you would imagine for dismantling a bomb! Fortunately I didn’t break into a sweat this time around.

Emergency Button photo credit: Matt Davis.

In Mac OS X you can slow down some of the animation effects by holding down the Shift key whilst activating them. For example, minimising a window or activating Exposé. I just tried it with the Front Row keyboard shortcut of Command + Escape but it didn’t work. However, it does work if using the key combination again to return to the Desktop. Weird!

After nearly six months of waiting, the day is finally here. All across the United States people are getting ready to put down at least five hundred Dollars in an Apple or AT&T store for the privilege of owning an Apple iPhone. Some of those people are so eager to get one that they’ve been waiting in lines since Monday. Are they mad? Quite probably. Are there more important things in the world than a new mobile phone, even if it is the first one Designed by Apple in California? Definitely. However, to dismiss the iPhone phenomenon as calculated and viral hyperbole is to miss the opportunity to revel in its glorious design and detailing. The iPhone is the finest expression yet of Steve Jobs’ great taste and Apple’s talented team of industrial designers led by Jonathan Ive.

People are excited by this phone. I’m excited by this phone dammit, even though mobile phones are one of the few gadgets that usually leave me cold, and even though I can’t even buy one in the continent where I live! The level of interest that’s been shown towards the iPhone just shows how inspired people get when someone finally goes to the trouble of doing things properly. The hardware and software fit together beautifully in a way that’s definitely not been seen before on a mobile phone.

Over the past few weeks, those of us who have been watching have learned more and more about the iPhone. Delicious little details have been revealed through adverts and informational videos posted on Apple’s website. Earlier this week, the first reviews came in and have more or less confirmed that the facts Apple have presented to us about the iPhone are all true. Undoubtedly AT&T’s EDGE network is hopeless for data transfer and everyone seems to be agreed that this is the most serious shortcoming of the iPhone. Hey, I never said it was perfect! It seems inconceivable that Apple won’t bring out a future version of the phone with 3G and that they won’t address the other shortcomings that have been widely mentioned, such as the lack of a proper SDK. Remember, this is version one of an entirely new product in an entirely new market for Apple, one that’s been years in development. They had to stop work and get it out of the door at some point.

I recently bought a Motorola RAZR which is a fine phone in many ways, deservedly popular and undoubtedly the best out of the three mobile phones that I’ve ever owned. I love the slimness of it and the one-piece keyboard that looks like it’s been machined out of metal. The battery goes on and on and on. The phone’s software is where it falls down though. It’s not terrible, I’ve found my way around it easily enough and can do everything I need to do. There are lots of little quirks though and features that I just don’t really understand. That means that I don’t feel entirely in control of it, which is not good for something I’ve paid money to own.

Let me give you an example of one of these quirks. When I’m sending a text message I press the soft key under Send To and get a list of my contacts. So far so good. Next, I scroll to the contact I want and press the same soft key which now represents Send. Only it doesn’t work because I first have to click the button in the centre of the cursor keys to select the contact before I can send them my message. In other words, the user interface for sending text messages is optimised for the send to multiple contacts use case. It works great for this, only that’s something I never do. In fact, I can’t think of a single occasion when I’ve sent a text message to more than one person at the same time.

There are some features on my RAZR whereby I haven’t a clue what they are, or if I do have an idea then I don’t know how to use them, and that means I’m afraid to find out in case I can’t undo whatever it is I just did. I’ve even looked in the instruction booklet, but that just gives you the steps needed to access the feature without telling you what it actually is. Here’s a brief list of bafflers:

• Show ID/Hide ID - whose ID?
• Add Digits - what digits am I adding and to what?
• Talk then Fax - how?
• Notepad - something to do with phone numbers
• Info Services
• Cleanup Messages - how does it choose which messages to clean up?
• DTMF: Long

—It’s enough to turn even the most ardent technophile into a technophobe! The difference with the iPhone is that if I were to somehow find one lying about then I know that I could pick it up and use all of its features straight away. Based on watching Apple’s videos, there’s not a single aspect to the phone that looks awkward or difficult to use. Everything seems obvious and natural and as it should be.

As I said before, there are no dark crevices. You get to this happy position by obsessing over the details again and again and again until they’re right and until they make sense. Sadly, only Apple seem to be doing that at the moment. They’ve even thought about the experience of buying the iPhone. You pick one up, pay for it, take it home and then activate it on your computer through iTunes. What you don’t have to do is spend twenty minutes sat with some dodgy acne-ridden youth who was the first to accost you as you stepped over the threshold and into the store. Sat bored whilst he takes you through the phone’s features and sets it up, all whilst smearing your new purchase with his sweaty fingerprints! Seriously, everyone has to earn a living but it’s great that Apple have eliminated another completely unnecessary part of the mobile phone experience along with crap usability.

Happy iPhone Day everyone. The Mobile Phone for the Rest of Us is here. Regardless of whether you’ve been queuing for days to be amongst the first to buy one, or if you’ve vowed never to go anywhere near one, its impact will be felt across the industry. Now we can all look forward to better mobile phones.

I was recently extolling the virtues of the Mac in a guest post on my friend John’s blog and I mentioned that you can buy a five-user Mac OS X family pack for the good-value price of £139. Well blow me if Apple haven’t gone and put the price right up. From Amazon UK:

—That’s a bit steep even for the Apple faithful who are used to reaching deep into their wallets. At that price even Windows Vista Ultimate starts to look like good value!

I’m no mobile phone expert. My current phone is a Sony Ericsson Z200 which is a few years old and doesn’t have a camera, FM radio or MP3 player. I bought it because you can make calls with it and because it’s very small and quite robust. I don’t even use it enough to justify having a contract—it’s Pay-As-You-Go all the way with me. So I’m hardly qualified to comment on Apple’s glorious new iPhone, but I’m going to anyway.

1. The iPhone name seems to have caught everyone by surprise, not least because it’s currently owned by Cisco.
2. You’re not going to be able to use an iPhone with a Pay-As-You-Go contract like I have. If you’re not using the device’s Internet features then you’re not getting value from it.
3. The screen lock slider is classic Apple design: eminently practical yet a bit flashy.
4. The user interface is almost entirely software, which means that it’s really easy for Apple to change and enhance.
5. I remember reading about Apple’s patent on the pinch gesture used in the touch screen interface a few years ago. It’s great that it’s finally seen the light of day.
6. The Visual Voicemail feature is really neat. Serial access (i.e. having to scroll through stuff to get to what you want) is so unsatisfying, whether it be voicemail or videotape.
7. I remember watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and seeing crew members walking around with little black tablets with a software interface in their hands. Now we can have them too!
8. People say that $599 is a lot of money for a phone. It is a lot of money, but think of it as a new top-end video iPod—albeit currently without the top-end storage capacity—along with a mobile Internet device that you can also make phone calls with.
9. It’s hard to see how the next iPod can continue with the same form factor now the iPhone has been revealed. People are going to want that flippable screen on their iPod. Software scroll wheel anyone?
10. Can you run OS X’s Terminal.app on it? If you can’t, then someone will find a way.
11. Can you have a message engraved on the back like you can with an iPod?
12. Will the casing be more scratch-resistant than the iPod’s?
13. Hopefully Apple have invented a new type of plastic for the screen that really will be fingerprint resistant and easy to clean. Yeah right. We haven’t even got suction cups that don’t come off the surface they’re supposed to be attached to yet.
14. Expect an open-source project/competition to be announced in June with a prize going to the first person to get Linux running on an iPhone.
15. Expect Amit Singh to write an article about how to make phone calls by typing commands directly into the iPhone’s fireware interface. The commands will be surprisingly intuitive like:
    fs0:\> call 1-800-my-apple
16. The on-screen keyboard looks quite cramped and might be hard to use without any tactile feedback.
17. The iPhone looks too big to fit in a trouser pocket, which is a major problem for me as that’s where I like to keep my phone in the summer when I don’t wear a coat.
18. Expect a galaxy of third-party cases/pouchs/screen protectors, all of which make you look like a dork.
19. There’s no mention of what CPU the iPhone uses.
20. I don’t know anything about mobile phone networks, but from reading people’s reactions to the device, lots of Americans really don’t like Cingular.
21. Expect a plethora of music videos filled with gangsta rappers flashing their iPhones into the camera. Bling!
22. Is the battery replaceable?
23. Every phone I’ve ever used is full of undocumented features that are hidden away in dark crevices of the UI. For example, on my current phone, there’s one called Minute Minder and I have no idea what it is. The iPhone won’t be like that. No dark crevices.
24. How long before the first mugging where the victim was attacked for their iPhone? How long before the first murder?

I just checked the Apple Store and noticed that it’s down for updating. They always do this just before a Steve Jobs keynote when he announces lots of new goodies for Apple fanboys like me to spend our hard-earned cash on. I’m excited, particularly if the long-rumoured Apple phone is going to be announced. It’s about time there was a properly designed mobile phone.

UPDATE: Looks like I’m not going to be disappointed!—

You may have read recently that Dell have had to recall four million laptop batteries made by Sony because a few of them exploded. Well it turns out that Apple have been affected too and have initiated their own recall programme. As soon as a heard this news I knew straight away that my PowerBook would have the problem. After all, it’s only been six months since I sent its original battery back as part of the last recall. Lo and behold, a visit to the website confirmed that my suspicions were right:

I like the way they show you nice friendly green ticks, as if it’s somehow a good thing that your computer contains a battery that could blow up at any minute! Also—in true Apple style—they don’t apologise for the inconvenience or the worry. Sorry is often the hardest word to say, especially if you’re in Cupertino it seems.

I know that lots of PowerBook owners are quite thrilled at the prospect of getting a brand new battery free from Apple, but I’m not. It means that I have take a day’s leave from work so that I can be at home when the courier arrives with the replacement battery (I can’t have parcels delivered to my work). Apple use DHL in the U.K. and DHL don’t deliver on Saturdays (you know, when most people aren’t at work), nor are they able to give you even a morning/afternoon hint as to when your parcel will be delivered. The whole experience seems to be weighted against the customer. I’m convinced that someone could make a killing if they launched a delivery service that was actually geared around when most people are at home i.e. weekday evenings.

I also want to know why laptop batteries are so crap. I can accept that they don’t last that long, because I’m waiting for superconductors that work across a temperature range to completely change the world. What I find hard to swallow is having to send my battery back every six months because a tiny percentage of units have manufacturing defects, which means that all the batteries have to be replaced because the manufacturers haven’t got a clue which ones are affected. Talk about belt and braces!