Apple

Apple iMac for a Windows Developer

Bill Tudor — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 01:11:16 GMT

New Apple iMac Arrives

The latest edition to the growing home computing center is an Apple iMac (Intel E7600 Core 2 Duo/8Gb RAM/1Tb HD/21.5"), which I promptly setup to use Boot Camp with Windows 7 as the default OS. This makes a great Family Room machine, in Windows or MacOS (despite missing HDMI port), and doubles as the iPhone development platform. What is more interesting is the purchase survey, which I took today.

Apple New Purchase Survey

Going though the questions it became clear that there were 3 main goals to the survey: canvass the effect of recent advertising campaigns; perform some basic market research; and make some decisions about Macs of the future. I answered the question about “who am I” correctly (software engineer), so I am sure they ignored everything I said with respect to advertising. Questions related to the second goal were interesting to me (do most people have wireless N or wireless G?), but the third goal – that’s the important one. We, as an industry and as consumers, have benefited from Apple’s presence in the market and I would like this role to continue. I want a say about Apple’s products of the future!

So, just in case my entire survey response ended up in the bit-bucket, I will reiterate some of my survey responses here in the vein hopes that they will actually be heard. . .

What Apple Did Right

Use Intel hardware

The use of industry standard hardware – not just Intel processors – saved Apple from death. This includes seamless operation with most peripherals (printers, etc.) and protocols in use today and not just processors, chipsets, and video cards. But most important is x86/x64, and the ability to run Windows on Mac hardware.

Build what people want

A few misses over the years, but mostly Apple builds what people want.

Provide Boot Camp (boot manager and drivers)

If your going to spend extra on a Mac, you might as well get something extra in return. Such as the ability to run Windows and MacOS on the same box. Nice.

Great hardware design. I mean, great hardware design.

What Apple Still Does not “Get”

The menu bar has got to go

So what if the original MacOS had a bar at the top. MultiFinder is gone; so get rid of the bar.

Secondary mouse click is critical (not to mention useful)

The new iMac comes with an excellent multi-touch wireless mouse that can detect if you click on its left side vs its right side. By default, however, the mouse control panel preferences are setup to ignore this feature. Although it was a simple change to enable what Apple calls secondary click, this should be the default.

Charge a little less. Please?

I wish I could have gotten an i5 (or i7) for the price, and adding $200 for 4Gb of DDR3/1066 RAM is double the price I paid from Crucial (which is where I got my second half). I won’t mention what an additional TB of disk space costs, but at least memory is user-replaceable.

No removable drive? Really?

Somebody tell Apple that (a) hard drives fail, (b) capacity requirements always go up over time, (c) costs always come down over time, and (d) new technology is just around the corner (SSD). Creating a computer without a user-replaceable drive is just stupid. In a year or so when I pry apart the glue in the beautiful glass display panel with a flat-blade screwdriver in order to access the drive, I’ll be cursing out loud. Drop the velvet lint cloth and add 2 screws and a tray.

Development Tools

There’s good and bad, here. XCode is free, and comes with the OS. The App Store is obviously popular (and effective) with consumers. But objective-C? Really? Didn’t even take the time to remove the “ns” (NextStep) from the framework names! Focusing on what’s important or too lazy . . .not sure.

But then there are all those users. Waiting for your app.

iPod Touch 3.0 Software Update

Bill Tudor — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 10:30:42 GMT

I finally installed the Apple iPod Touch 3.0 software update and, to my surprise, my iPod has been greatly improved. I chose the word surprise because Apple has disappointed me (and the rest of the world) twice in the past, and I made the assumption they would disappoint again.

You see, the iPod Touch is a nice little computer, disguised as a music player, with WiFi built-in. You would certainly expect it to be able to:

Sync music with no wires
Download audio and video podcasts from the internet (again, no wires)
Subscribe to internet calendars (again, no wires)
Sync contacts, email, calendars, etc. with the internet (no wires)

Unfortunately, since the day I purchased this device I have been plugging it into my computer and painfully watching my CPU usage pegged at 100% as iTunes eventually manages to start up and draw a ridiculously poor-performing UI on the screen while my processor fan switches to high speed. Ugh.

What good is an IP address if you’re not going to use it!

Original Firmware (1.0)

On the original iPod touch, firmware 1.0, you could sync with Microsoft Outlook’s calendars and contacts. The inconvenience of getting Outlook involved aside, this feature is of no use to me (despite the fact that I use Outlook daily) since my calendar information in Outlook is pulled from various internet “iCalendar” feeds (as well as a local intranet iCalendar feed, i.e., “the family calendar”). The iPod Touch would not sync with most of that information, even when it was present/pulled into Outlook. The iPod could only sync with Outlook’s “main” calendar (which is blank, in my case). Nice try.

Update Firmware (2.0)

Firmware update 2.0 provided some relief for contacts/mail and also vaguely promised improved calendar sync support – multiple Outlook calendars was even mentioned as a new feature. It also came with a charge – yep, Apple actually wanted money for the firmware update (reminds me why I stopped buying Macs some years back – tired of being nickel and dimed). I installed it on my iPod Touch. The new firmware did work with multiple Outlook calendars, however, it only worked with Outlook’s built-in calendars (or Exchange calendars, I assume) – not with Outlook’s calendar subscriptions and not with feeds from internet sources. I was out of luck again of the calendar front. And still physically plugging the darn iPod into the computer every day.

All the while I’m wondering why Apple would have a device with built-in WI-FI sync with a program like Outlook, anyway. We should be able to sync with internet calendars (iCalendar, Caldav, Google Calendar, etc.), and other internet data.

What good is an IP address if you’re not going to use it!

Latest Firmware (3.0)

In comes the latest software (along with the obligatory nickels and dimes), which promised better calendar support. This time Apple was not so vague, promising things like Caldav and iCalendar subscription support. Accordingly (and to my surprise), this little device with built-in Wi-Fi can finally subscribe to calendar data from one or more URLs, and update the calendar data just by accessing the internet.

It’s about time.

Note: Now, if I can just get our school district to publish an iCalendar based feed of school and sports events instead of being so proud of their new PDF-based calendar generator… but that’s another story.

iTunes Software

I still cannot sync music without physically plugging in the unit and painfully watching the iTunes Software Monster take over my machine, but I no longer have to do this every day! In fact, I only have to do this when there’s a change to my music library. Not so often. That’s probably the best part of the firmware upgrade. Maybe that will make up for one of those nickels (or dimes).

How can Apple Programmers be This Bad?

Bill Tudor — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 07:00:00 GMT

The Apple IPod is a great device. So good, that there are no less than 8 of them in my house (3 iPod touch, 1 old nano, 2 new nanos, a shuffle, and a mini).

Apple iTunes software really stinks.

It takes a quite a bit of bad network programming code to use up 41% of my CPUs while downloading two podcasts over a mere 1Mb/s internet connection. Each morning when I fire up iTunes, nearly half of my computer power is sucked up doing what? Waiting for the remote server to send more bytes? Drawing progress bars on the screen? Come on, Apple, do something about this! Go green, save the planet, stop sucking up my CPU.

Put you Money Where Your Mouth Is

Can I do better? I sure hope so …

In much less time than it takes to write this posting, I put together a simple application that downloads the two latest “This Week In Tech” podcasts (Leo Laporte), displaying a simple progress UI.

The CPU usage clocked in at 7%, which is still larger than I expected (oh well) yet many times better than the engineers at Apple Computer have done. [Note that the total download time is roughly the same.]

Just what is Apple doing with those CPU cycles?

I do not know.

If I worked for Apple, I would be embarrassed. They obviously can do better. Much better. I hope they do.

What about IE7

Just for fun, let’s see what IE7 does downloading two TWIT files.

Right around 7%. Surprise, surprise.