At this very moment Apple is down for updates, rumored for laptop upgrades. They do this purely for the hype; not like an online store really needs to go offline for product changes. Everyone gets all excited when the store goes down. (Yes, Apple fanatics are happy when they can’t buy anything. Such is the Power of Steve.)

This made me wonder… the Fifth Ave. store in NYC is open 24-hours… How do they generate this kind of excitement there? I did some digging and found out:

Now that’s amazing! :-)

Technorati Tags: Macintosh

This is a stream-of-research-and-consciousness posting, so beware…

I’m a full-time laptop user, always looking for a bit more disk space. I’ve got a 200GB drive in my 15″ MBP which is never enough. 320GB drives are now under $200. Tempting, but two issues. One, larger drives are always around the corner, and two, if I buy a new laptop (possible this Spring) I’d end up tossing aside one drive or another.

With the niftyneatokeen new MacBook Air, solid state (SSD) drives are coming to reality. In five years or so, I think they’ll become the standard in laptops. Not yet - the prices are too high, and capacities too low. But flash memory prices drop like crazy. A few years ago a 1GB CompactFlash card was in the hundreds of dollars. In March 2006 I bought one (SanDisk Extreme III) for $75 from B&H Photo. I just checked - the same card today is $30. But $60 will buy me a 4GB CF card. $80 will buy me a 8GB SDHC card, with a $20 USB reader to as a freebie. All of those are of the same Extreme III variety, from the same vendor. So for argument’s sake, the same money will buy me four times as much storage about two years later.

If we follow the above silly math, we’re looking at name-brand premium 32GB cards for $75 in two years. But I think it’ll be a faster move than that. I think we’ll have 64GB in the $100 range in 18-24 months. Just a gut feeling. We’re then getting close to “real” storage.

So anyway, I got to thinking - how about putting an ExpressCard SDHC adapter into my MBP, and using it as a drive? Delkin has an adapter for $45. A quick look online finds a no-name (A-Data) 16GB SDHC card for $65. So for $110 I could have a 16GB SSD drive, removable and expandable to boot. Spacewise that’s not all that much, but getting there.

How would this be speedwise? Delkin claims 15MB/s for their adapter. I found a user who tested this card at 20MB/s. So let’s take Delkin’s claim of 15MB/s as real for a moment. That doesn’t sound super-fast, but not horrible if it were a real-life speed. Sandisk and Apiotek have similar adapters, but I couldn’t find speed claims.

I then ran Aja’s System Test, a decent and free hard drive speed test utility. On my laptop drive’s FileVault volume, I get 14.1MB/s write and 15.1MB/s read. On the drive root (non-FileVault), 36.5MB/s write and 20.3MB/s read. This also tells me something I was curious about, the speed hit of FileVault. Nasty, especially on write. But necessary for security in my case.

So in theory, the ExpressCard solution would get me the same speed as my FileVault user volume. Which I find acceptable for everything except video editing. Now I haven’t seen a test of the adapter yet, so no promises. To balance this, Flash storage has no seek speed issues, super-low power draw, and no moving parts.

Things will get better. Delkin (not to pick on them) has announced a set of Express Card solid state drives, shipping in March. They claim 46MB/s read and 35MB/s write - faster than my informal hard drive test. And I just ran across a similar Lexar card, 16GB for $179. Not as fast though. Hmmm, Transcend (not a premium brand, and very poor reviews) has a 16GB for $99, and a 32GB for $275. So we’re getting there. My complaint about these is they’re non-upgradable. The speed is likely a result of RAIDing together two internal cards, or the electronic version thereof, so I don’t expect single adapters to be quite as fast.

Arghh, I just read that SDHC tops out at 32MB. If true, my generic adapter idea becomes less interesting. There will be more I say, more! Actually what I think is possible is an adapter that holds two (possibly more) SDHC cards in the same form factor. Rather than sliding in long-edge, they could snap into the flat surface. Hmmm….

So will I buy my $110 16GB Delkin/Cheapie combo setup? Maybe. It would be nice to have 16GB swappable SDHC cards, and they’re certain to get cheaper. Perhaps when the pair drops under $100 I’ll give it a try.

What I really want is about 1TB in my MBP. But by the time there’s a 1TB drive, I’ll want 4TB. Sad, but true. This leads into my theory Apple could squeeze a second hard drive into the 17″ MBP, but that’s another story…

Technorati Tags: Macintosh

I ran across an interesting post regarding the font used in Woody Allen’s film titles. I briefly perused the blogger’s site, where he asked folks to post (on their own blog) the answer to the question:

How old is the oldest e-mail message stored on your computer?

For this I’m using the rule of email actually stored on my computer. I began using email in 1980, and started an old dialup BBS in (roughly) 1983. I certainly have emails from that vintage on old 5-1/4″ disks in the basement. Whether or not I could retrieve them is another question, but they’re not actually on my computer so they don’t count. It’s also likely some of these old messages are on hard copy, but again that doesn’t count.

The answer in my case is May 5, 1986. This is the oldest email stored in my small archive of VAXmail from college. It was an email from someone who worked at the college computer center, and who I helped with a student-produced play (I was on the stage crew, and at the last minute was asked to played a guy lost in the woods, a long story).

The oldest email from someone I’m still regularly in touch with is from January 27, 1987.

The oldest email that I sent which is still on my computer is from December 3, 1986.

The oldest email in my current email database (accessible via searching within mail.app) appears to be December 8, 1996. It appears this is when I began using Claris Emailer and moved away from pine or elm on my first ISP unix account. I’m not quite sure this is definitely the oldest as I have dozens of old folders organized by purpose, not date, and have no easy way to show all messages by date. But from memory, that’s a reasonable date for such a transition.

An interesting search.

I have filed bug 5405311 relating to what I consider a security problem with the new iPhoto/dotMac Web Gallery feature (which I otherwise consider to be excellent!). More thoughts on iLife ‘08 to come.

When using the new Web Gallery feature of iPhoto 7 and .Mac, it is extremely simple for others to add unauthorized photos to your web gallery if the email-add feature is enabled.

I expect image spam to become a problem for .Mac/Gallery users very quickly.

In general, the most likely configuration should allow the account owner should be able to add photos to their own account (such as via an iPhone), but others should be rejected.

The general problems are:

-No review of added photos
-No notification that photos have been added to your web gallery
-Moderately simple to machine-guess email address if not public (username + 4 characters)

Suggested changes:

-Option to allow photos to be added only from specified addresses. If the .Mac email is included, you should reject any fake emails not submitted through your SMTP server (since the .Mac email address is trivial to guess from the URL). For simplicity, iPhoto could pre-select addresses in mail.app for inclusion.

-Automatic notification (via email) of photos being added via email. This should be on by default, and difficult or impossible to disable.

-Email address to add photos should be much longer - suggest a 16-digit code, instead of a 4-digit code. In addition suggest removing the username from the address when email address is not visible, so that mail robots would be unable to connect addresses with URLs.

Thank you.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Macintosh

I’m growing a gripe about the iPhone’s lack of ability to sync wirelessly. This could be a stellar feature if done right - much better than USB syncing.

First, a note about my setup. My main Mac is a MacBook Pro. It lives everywhere - office, family room, kitchen, hammock…usually wherever I am when at home. I’m not a big cell phone (voice) user, so it isn’t strapped to my belt while at home. I don’t give the number out often, and my voicemail says firmly “I do not check the messages on this cell phone.” Yes, I’m wasting the excellent Visual Voicemail feature. Shoot me. When I’m at home, my cell phone (now iPhone) has always lived on the kitchen counter. That’s where the charger is. So a unique task is required to get my iPhone, USB cable, and MBP in the same place to sync. Bottom line, I don’t sync as often as I should because it’s inconvenient.

My recently-retired Treo 650 sync’d with Bluetooth, courtesy of the excellent Missing Sync software. That let me skip the USB cable. I’d use USB now and then to get a full backup, but Bluetooth was great for syncing contacts and calendar info. I’d usually bring the phone to my laptop when it was in the family room (adjacent to the kitchen), sit them together and sync while making dinner.

I was a bit upset when I learned the iPhone wouldn’t sync via Bluetooth. I suspect Apple’s thinking is that the iPhone syncs lots of sizable stuff - music and videos - that would take forever and a day over Bluetooth. So I don’t see Apple offering sync over Bluetooth.

Then it struck me - WiFi sync makes much more sense. It’s many times faster, and operates at significantly greater distance than Bluetooth. Rendezvous self-discovery would make setup a breeze. Long videos might take a while but otherwise this would be perfect. Sync could be started at either the iPhone or the Mac. Setup could be done anytime the iPhone was on the same subnet as the host Mac.

Then something else struck me - Automatic WiFi syncing. Why have to even start a sync manually? When there’s data to be synced, just do it. Perhaps poll periodically in the background, just a quick ping to check for new data before doing any real syncing. Or when joining a pre-determined home network. Or just when charging. Or maybe just small items (contact/calendar) when running on battery, then music/video/photos when charging. Imagine the convenience.

And there’s no reason iTunes needs to be open (a general annoyance already, plus we should be able to choose movies/podcasts to sync without the iPhone connected, but that’s another rant). Think of it like .Mac syncing, but locally and with fewer bugs…

Other nice things could happen too. Pretend for a minute there was a real RSS reader on the iPhone - I’m sure there will be someday. Viewed articles could be marked as such on both readers. This would be nice between Macs too.

Or how about syncing across multiple Macs? I don’t store my music/video/photos on my MBP. They’re on my Mac Mini, dedicated as a media server with gobs of storage. Adding this stuff to my iPhone now is a real chore. Why not sync my calendar/contact info with my MBP, and my music/video/photos with my Mini?

So think happy thoughts about WiFi syncing, and maybe it’ll happen!

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Macintosh

Brief kudos to iPhone’s tiny little speaker. I mean for iTunes use. Nobody will claim it’s of audiophile quality (or even stereo for that matter!). But I never thought about how handy a speaker on an iPod would be.

Tonight I was playing with Ariella on her playmat, winding her down for bedtime. She likes The Beatles. I grabbed the iPhone and played Yellow Submarine, all without leaving the floor. She loved it.

The speaker has also been handy when watching video podcasts or stupid YouTube videos. No reason to go find the headphones when I’m alone in a room.

By the way, does anyone else find themselves using YouTube just as an excuse to play with the iPhone? Most videos really are as dumb as they say…

Technorati Tags: Ariella, Baby, iPhone

I’ve done further editing of the site’s main CSS, and created my own header. The header is quite gothic, not my intent. I’ll let it sit for a day and review. I’m happy to rid myself of the near-default xblog header, and reduce the header height by half. Further changes to be made I’m sure. I’m thinking the green text may go. Hover text in the top menu will change. Possibly rounded corners on the main body. Kudos to CSSEdit for making the style sheet editing (possibly too) easy. Photos are my own, shot on a Canon 10D using an IR filter. Bulbs are heat lamps. Eyes are mine.

The iPhone CSS is unchanged; I like it as-is, odd bottom menu excluded. I don’t anticipate that menu being a high priority for iPhone visitors, considering there is little in the archive at this point.

Technorati Tags: Macintosh

I have no idea if anyone’s done this yet. But I’m a curious guy. I’ve optimized my WordPress blog for the iPhone. Making it compatible wasn’t an issue; the built-in Safari browser is pretty good. But I wanted iPhone users to find the blog immediately readable without the need to zoom in.

I didn’t want a new CSS for other web visitors, just something unique for iPhone users. I’m posting my methodology so others can hack it to bits take advantage of my solution.

First, I created an iPhone-specific CSS variant of my standard theme. First I got rid of the (admittedly ugly) graphic header. Then I made everything a max of 320px wide, the narrow width of the iPhone’s screen. Then I shoved the navigation menu to the bottom, just to get it out of the way (this could certainly be done better). Ok, that gave me an iPhone-optimized CSS. I named it style-iphone.css, and dropped it into my theme folder. You can view the CSS (far from beautiful, based on the xblog theme).

Ok, that part was easy. Now I wanted to get the iPhone to use it. So in the theme’s header.php I added:

<?php
$iphone_stylesheet = str_replace(”.css”, “_iphone.css”, get_bloginfo(’stylesheet_url’));
?>
<link media=”only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)” href=”<?php echo $iphone_stylesheet; ?>” type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet” />

So that basically changes style.css to style_iphone.css, and uses the new Apple-defined media type. In other words, this tells the iPhone to use this stylesheet, and everything else to ignore it. I put this after the normal stylesheet line, not sure if that was required or not.

Worked great, but I wanted the iPhone to zoom right into my blog instead of forcing the user to double-tap. That’s where the Viewport meta tag comes in. I wasn’t sure what Viewport might do to non-iPhone browsers, so I wrapped that in a PHP test:

<?php
if (strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], “iPhone”))
{
echo ‘<meta name=”viewport” content=”width = 320″ />’;
}
?>

So my header.php now looked like this:

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_url’); ?>” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />

<?php
$iphone_stylesheet = str_replace(”.css”, “_iphone.css”, get_bloginfo(’stylesheet_url’));
?>

<link media=”only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)” href=”<?php echo $iphone_stylesheet; ?>” type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet” />
<?php
if (strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], “iPhone”))
{
echo ‘<meta name=”viewport” content=”width = 320″ />’;
}
?>

(That first stylesheet line is unchanged, as a frame of reference.)

And voila. iPhone users now see a very readable, optimized blog. Users from anything else don’t see any difference.

I’m using a somewhat old WordPress (2.0.6); I’m not sure if the header in 2.2 is any different, but the solution shouldn’t be different.

I’m very curious what others think of this implementation.

Technorati Tags: iPhone

Ok, my first unhappy surprise.

There is no option to not “Display Remote Images in HTML Messages” as there is in mail.app. When you bring up an HTML email, remote images are automatically retrieved.

I’ve always viewed that as a security problem, since those images nearly always contain unique ID’s tying your email address to the message. I might go file a radar bug report on this right now…

Filed: Problem ID: 5305779

The iPhone is very easy to use. The WiFi works great. The EDGE is what I expected, nothing to complain about. I don’t live in a 3G area anyway. Keyboard is really nice - getting used to it fast. I’m already typing at least as well as I did on my Treo 650, and I suspect it’ll get better.

Some thoughts on minor feature improvements - I’ll use this blog as a scratchpad. I’m going to limit my thoughts to items that can easily be updated via software.

Safari - need an option “Automatically download images” like Safari for the Mac has. Make this service-specific, so I can turn this on for WiFi, off for EDGE. This would make EDGE much faster for web browsing. When images have not been downloaded, have a button when in Safari to do so. Again, just like Safari Mac.

Mail - I’d like a way to flag messages (just like mail.app and other mail clients). There is a “mark as unread” button which is nice, but a flag would be an added bonus. This is for email that comes in while on the road, but you don’t want to deal with until later.

Mail - Automatic email check needs an “every five minute” option. Yes this will drain the battery faster, but for me that’s worth it. Every 15 minutes isn’t quite enough.

Mail - Automatic email checking within specified time block. My Treo 650 had this. I set it to only auto-check email from 7am to 9pm. This was nice, as it wouldn’t beep late at night, or waste the battery if I’d forgotten to plug it in.

Mail - is IMAP/SMTP connecting over SSL or not? In mail.app you can see that in preferences. There’s no explicit option for this. I really, really only want to use SSL - especially in public WiFi areas. So this is a question, and if SSL isn’t there, please add it quickly. Update: SSL is there, just in Advanced and not during the setup prompts. Also, if you want to use a specific port, use address:port syntax. No separate port field, which is fine.

Phone - need a way to quickly search by name using the QWERTY keypad. This is an odd omission. I have 956 address book entries, so scrolling to find the name is too slow.

Well that’s what I’ve got so far. I’m going to look for a theme I like, that also works well with the iPhone. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone’s already written a decent WordPress theme…