rh3toric

Yesterday Apple started shipping Time Capsules. At six something this morning my shipment notification came through. FedEx picked up in Shanghai.

Having lost the ability to do wireless on my old router, I am eagerly awaiting its arrival.

All the press and hubbub since January’s MacWorld Conference has been about the MacBook Air. All the love and hate banter about it. I will admit the Air is slick and there is come techno-lust, but the real gem of that show in my opinion was the Time Capsule.

This little device is what many folks have been waiting for and it is very possible that it may be the first in a line of similar products (I hope). Before the announcement I constantly debated the purchase of a Network Area Storage (NAS). This solution has two big problems, cost and compatibility. With the Time Capsule you may lose some scalability, but add in the wireless router and that Apple reliability/simplicity.

Well, it will arrive this coming Tuesday. We shall see then if I made the right decision.

At the end of June my old Apple 21″ CRT passed along. After many attempts at trying to resuscitate it, I had to face the facts and admit it had left this world. One part of me squealed with the excitement of being able to get a new LCD and all its crisp picture glory and desk space minimalism. The other (my inner CFO) did not want to spend the cash.

It used to be 21″ monitors with similar specs were all priced fairly close, with Apple’s always costing just a little more. I had the realization that 24″ and above was not in the calling for me. The 20 inch was the direction I was heading and definitely widescreen. At the time Apple was around 700 something and Dell was offering one for 350 (the Dell has jumped to 460 while the Apple is down to 700). It turned out that the actual screen was the same (made by LG) and the only big difference was the light that made the screen glow (I need to find that link again). Without a doubt the Apple looked better, and hey I am an Apple advocate, but that Dell it was cheap and it had a three year warranty vs. Apple’s 1 year.

Damn good thing it has the warranty. Until last week all was good, then after a weekend away its USB hub would not work. A week of fiddling and hoping it will just work, and no luck. Call the warranty center. Now, I have had to use Dell’s tech support and as long as your machine has a service tag you are in luck. Displays do not have service tags. This scenario makes all of Dell’s online services impossible and all their phone menu options useless (press 0 a couple of times and wait).

After a short discussion, I am told I will be receiving a new display. It arrives yesterday in a box marked “refurbished”. I am not happy and I place another call. It appears that If I had called within the first 21 days, I would have received a new display. Ok, I will deal with that. I open it today and plug it in and the DVI connection doesn’t work.

I have actually spec’d this display for some clients and friends. Luckily they have had no issues.

Update
Well the second replacement worked. Put original and first replacement in their respective boxes and sent them back. All in all, just another little annoyance to make a chaotic week a little more so.

After suffering thru using my Belkin piece o’… for several years, I may have found refuge in the wireless/bluetooth Mighty Mouse. If it performs as well as their bluetooth keyboards in regards to battery usage and responsiveness, I will be very happy.

Adobe developer Scott Byer points the finger at Apple as why Adobe will be late with CS3 (the Intel version). After talking about previous shortcut’s Adobe has used to switch Photoshop to PPC, etc. he comes straight to the punch with:

Doing that this time around was just not possible for a variety of reasons. It means is that this time, there’s no limited-cost option for getting most of the performance available on the platform for Photoshop in a short amount of time. In other words, no shortcuts.

Wait a sec, here is the spin:

That leaves doing the work for real - taking the whole application over into XCode and recompiling as a Universal Binary. And that’s no small task. You see, as software has matured so have the development environments we’ve used - Visual Studio and Metrowerks - they’ve adapted to handle the ever-growing applications using them. From having projects with large numbers of files that open quickly, to having compact debugging information, to having stable project formats that are text-merge-able in a source control system. These are things XCode is playing catch-up on. Now, Apple is doing an amazing job at catching up rapidly, but the truth is we don’t yet have a shipping XCode in hand that handles a large application well. And switching compilers always involves more work than you would think in a codebase of this size.

So, in short using low-cost shortcuts all these years has finally caught up. Why blame Apple for your lack of foresight?

Now I am in no way a software developer and may be putting my foot in my mouth, but all I can see in his post is a smoke screen.

Resurfacing in Mac news circles is the “Open Safe Files” issue in Safari. Well if you slept thru it before, go into your Safari preferences and disable “Open Safe Files”. It is that simple.

Read more at MacMerc.com