13 posts tagged “apple”

Last week Safari 3.2 was released, with the usual minimal release notes: "This update includes stability improvements and is recommended for all Safari users." The security notes were somewhat more forthcoming, but even there, not everything is covered, for as well as bug fixes, 3.2 quietly added support for two big security features: EV SSL, and Google Safe Browsing.

Neither of these changes, obviously, is covered in the release information, but since the (very good) MacJournals writeup of details of the anti-phishing features was reposted at Macworld, there's been a small whirl of further commentary, especially as the latter includes data collection for Google. Most of the (sensible*) concern has been raised because Apple's terms and conditions, unlike those of Firefox (who also use the Google Safe Browsing API), allow Google to make use of the data sent as a result of surfing using this plugin for any purpose, not merely enhancing that particular service. This might not be so bad if it wasn't also for the fact that the Safe Browsing checks fetch and send data by default.

Personally, though, I can't say I'm bothered by either of these. I'm sure Google get far more useful information from searches and opt-in service usage than they get from partial hashes returned when browsing to potentially hacked sites. As for defaulting to using the service, well, both Chrome and Mozilla also do that, and as with Firefox, Safari offers a preference to disable phishing detection.

What is more surprising to me is that so few people have connected the release of 3.2, and its emphasis on security over features, to the removal of Safari as a "safe" browser from Paypal's list in February:

"Apple, unfortunately, is lagging behind what they need to do, to protect their customers," [PayPal security chief] Barrett said in an interview.

I have little doubt that there's been behind-the-scenes back and forth between PayPal, and similar organisations pushing these changes, led Apple to release this sooner rather than later, in the 3.0 branch (rather than waiting for Mac OS X 10.6 and Safari 4.) Perhaps a more sensible place for people to raise questions is whether EV-SSL and Safe Browsing are actually useful, or if they're merely security theatre? Now there's a well-researched comment piece I'd like to see.

* There's also a lot of kneejerk "OMG Google haz my datorz!" nonsense, but reading the article makes it clear that only hashes of URLs are checked, and even that's only when a partial hash is matched against a hash of your current URL.

I really should have posted this months ago, when it was first news (and I'd thought that I had, but I can't find a trace of it). Anyway. Apple now offer US keyboards in the UK, as a build to order option. For example, here's the page for customising a black MacBook, and look at what's in the Keyboard section:

Anyway, this was great news when I joined Six to Start, as I was able to get a US keyboard layout. Why do I care? Well, all Apple keyboards used to be US layout: my Wallstreet and Pismo G3 Powerbooks both had the same layout as a US laptop would have. It was only some time into the life of the Titanium PowerBook G4s that Apple started using the ISO layout, with UK mappings, on British laptops. (Fortunately for me, I've been able to buy laptops in the US since then, but now, as mentioned above, I don't have to.)

So, what's the difference and why do I care? Firstly, and probably most importantly, I really don't like the narrow, two-row return key on UK keyboards. It seems far easier for me to deal with the long, single-row return that US laptops have. Secondly, `~ is at the top left of a US keyboard, whereas it's next to a (narrower) left shift key in the UK. This is a big deal because I use the command ~ shortcut to flip around an application's windows a great deal. Thirdly, while most people probably don't notice the other keys - like / and \ - moving around, for a programmer those are a really big deal. Fourthly, and by far least importantly, the US keyboard has names on the meta keys: option, command and tab are labelled, rather than having symbols on them.

There is a rather odd postscript, though: I use a logical UK layout (ie, the UK key mapping) on my US keyboard. This means that to type # I use option 3, while £ is shift 3. I'll admit this is a bit odd, but it dates from the time when, as I said above, UK keyboards shared a physical layout with their US counterparts. My behaviour for using # is so ingrained that to break myself of the habit and move would be almost as annoying as moving to a physical UK layout.

As you can probably tell from my previous post, Apple's iPod event has meant this evening has devolved into kicking the tyres of the latest release of iTunes. As usual, there are shiny new features. Unfortunately, as usual, there's also a problem with me testing them.

Most of my music is on an external hard drive, and usually that's shared through the house from either a Linux box. I also tend to install things like iTunes on a machine where I use it less, in case I want to back out the upgrade (as I feared I might before I started grepping strings for defaults hacks). Combining these means I rarely get to look at features on a local library, but instead use the iTunes shared library facility. Tonight, that's worked out fine for some of the new features, like the bundling of Magnetosphere (which is lovely to see).

However, it's utterly failed me on three of the others. Genius playlists and store recommendations are completely disabled for shared libraries. I can see why playlists might have to be lost - should the recommendations be drawn from the local or the remote machine? - but the store stuff? Surely that's doable too? Even more annoyingly, Apple still don't allow you to use any album artwork features (grid view, or the reworked album view (check out View > Show Artwork Column) remotely except for the artwork of the currently playing track.

As Tom Insam notes, this is particularly galling because Apple's iPod touch / iPhone Remote does show album cover thumbnails, at least, showing that somewhere in the guts of one of Apple's remote music protocols (and I suspect there is actually only one) the ability to work with artwork is there. However, I'm not holding my breath. Apple don't seem to care about the fact that iTunes supports a genuinely useful method of sharing music, and so it'll quietly wither as the user experience for a shared library continues to pale next to that of locally stored music.

Another September, another iTunes release. This doesn't really feel like one that entirely requires a major version, but with the last release already up to point seven, I suppose it's not a big shock.

The preferences window has seen a bit of an overhaul, which is probably a good thing, as it was getting horribly unwieldy. (I'm hoping that Sven-S. Porst will provide his usual exhaustive review in a day or three.) However, it's also lost one of my pet choices, namely the ability to switch off the genre browser. (That's the thing that comes up when you hit Command B. Once upon a time, it even had a button in the toolbar, but that's years ago now.)

Thankfully, there's still a hidden preference. Just open a new Terminal window and type the following:

defaults write com.apple.itunes show-genre-when-browsing  -bool FALSE

Lo and behold, your browser window is usefully wide again, and those nonsense genres are banished from your sight.

One of the reasons I bought an iPod touch in November, as opposed to a cheaper, vaster iPod classic that I could use to store all of my music, was that it held out the promise of being an interesting device to fit into Apple's slowly-expanding range of devices that hang off iTunes. I don't just mean in the obvious "iTunes organises your music" sense, either, but by using iTunes library sharing and the music streaming that the AirPort Express enables.

It took months, and the release of the App Store, but one of Apple's two apps - and the only one that's free - is Remote. As Apple put it,

With Remote, you can control the music on your computer or Apple TV from your iPod touch or iPhone. Play, pause, skip, shuffle. See your songs, playlists, and album art on your iPod touch or iPhone as if you were right in front of your computer.

Better writers than me have outlined some of the ways that Remote actually improves on the user interface of "Mobile iTunes", the native interface to the music stored on an iPod touch. (In short, it provides much more contextual information within the space provided.) However, I used it and saw three things that it could do, but doesn't, although I readily admit each might have issues that stand in the way of an implementation.

No Cover Flow

Mobile iTunes uses the iPod's orientation sensor to swap from a list view to the Cover Flow view, which lets you see lots of artwork and scroll through it. Remote doesn't do anything with the orientation sensor at all, and certainly doesn't use full-size artwork.

There are two explanations I can think of. The trivial is that Cover Flow might be getting out of favour in Cupertino, just like metal windows did before it. The more sensible is that the demands on a network - even a wireless network - of downloading all the images are too high. Heck, even when copying from the "disk", my iPod can't refresh the entire list at once. Nonetheless, a man can dream, and it would be nice if the app had some sort of horizontal mode.

No streaming

In an ideal world, I'd have speakers in every room, connected to an AirPort Express, and I'd be able to wander around the house with the same music playing out of every speaker. (Actually, ideally, something would know where I was and switch the speakers on and off as required, but let's stick with what we have, shall we?) However, I can't afford that many wireless routers, so instead I'd be quite happy to wear the iPod and listen to it instead. Apple don't let you do that, despite the fact that's how shared iTunes libraries work.

There is, once again, a possible technical reason for this. The iPod might not be up to decoding all the different formats in your iTunes library; in particular, Apple Lossless might be a problem. However, it can play local lossless files, and I can't see that shifting the data is that much harder. I'm hoping this shows up as an option in a new release.

Since I first thought about writing this, two things have happened. Firstly, the tech press noticed an Apple patent filing discussing the "Remote access of media items", which goes beyond the capabilities of shared libraries at present (as it mentions syncing metadata). Secondly, Simplify Media released their client for iPods with the 2.0 software. However, I'm unhappy about having to run a second application just to cater for the chance I'd like to stream. (Interestingly, a recent blog post notes issues with cover art and bandwidth, so there may be something to the technical issues after all.)

No shared libraries

This is the biggest problem for me personally, and it could be the easiest to fix. It's straightforward: there's no way to use Remote to connect to a shared library. There are reasons you'd want this: an office server that doesn't have music of its own, but instead which plays from lots of other people's machines, or perhaps a laptop which relies on an iMac as the source of a home's entire music. While you could argue that you should connect Remote to the server in the latter case, that's not going to work out if you're using mt-daapd, and it doesn't work in the first case either, since the music won't come out of the server's speakers.

This does of course raise a few issues with the user interface, but Steve Jobs employs some very smart people, and I'm sure there's a way to deal with it. So there's my wishlist for a future version. Shared libraries, streaming to the iPod, complete with a Cover Flow view. Sure, it's tricky, but then, don't fanboys always demand the near-impossible of Apple?

I've never been one of the people who's seen a need to use any terminal application in Mac OS X other than the one supplied by Apple in Utilities. It does the job, uses Monaco 9, doesn't anti-alias (or at least, can be made not to). It starts up in Mac-ish black on white, and generally Just Works.

10.5 saw a bit of an overhaul, with a much saner configuration interface (all in Preferences, rather than hidden in a rather baffling out-of-the-way inspector) and tabbed browsing. Now, I still don't use tabs on the Mac OS, personally; I like the established app/window split and don't see the need to bring a third level of indirection into play, especially when it doesn't even have consistent shortcuts. (Tabs on Windows? Now that's a different story.) In fact, for years I'd quite happily got by with a bunch of scripts in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Terminal/ that would neatly stack all the windows.

Sadly, the new version of Terminal also introduced an annoying AppleScript bug which renders these scripts less than useful. When positioning a window, the vertical positions aren't honoured correctly: instead, the window ends up 320 pixels up the screen from the desired location - OK if you want a window at the top, but certainly not if it's meant to be at the bottom right, which is my usual position. I mention this now because the bug in Terminal that broke my window arrangers will also affect a script to centre windows that TALlama (no really) posted in response to a lazytwitter invocation by John Siracusa. If you try to centre a Terminal window, it ends up jammed at the top of the screen, for no apparent reason.

Now, I'm not down with the cool kids who post radr:// URLs, so if anyone who's reading this is, it's really easy to replicate the error: get a Terminal window towards the bottom of the screen, run this script - which should do nothing, as it's merely putting the window back where it started - and watch your window shift around. Do that, report it, and hopefully eventually I'll be able to retire my "set voffset to 320 -- work around AppleScript bug" line.

tell application "Terminal"

    set b to bounds of window 1

    set bounds of window 1 to b

end tell

Anyway, thanks for listening, and here's hoping for a better Terminal AppleScript interface in 10.5.3.

When I first thought about writing a translation of the Apple's Windows Invasion piece by Joe Wilcox, it was Thursday morning, and nobody else seemed to be overly bothered about the details of the updater; John Gruber, for example, where I first saw the piece, merely linked to it saying, effectively, "well, that's interesting". However, on Friday morning, there was a bit more commentary, so I decided to put something out; well, it was a bank holiday, and it was quiet; why not?

As the day went on, there actually seemed to be a bit of a storm (admittedly, one in a small teacup, sized about the same as the overlap between iTunes and Windows users) growing about the feature. A fisking is more set out to tear down than to build up, and I've had time to think about it, so here's some further thoughts on the subject.

Were you trying to make any points with that post?

Firstly: Microsoft, and others, either push software through their updaters, or have updaters that are otherwise rubbish. Secondly: I just boggled at the line "Apple one-ups Microsoft with a presumably more standards-compliant browser than the Internet Explorer 8 beta" - has Wilcox never seen an acid test? However, even that was nothing compared to the arguments that Safari may be insecure, when IE 6 certainly was.

Generally, I thought the piece was far more alarmist than it needed to be.

Do you actually approve of Apple having their own software updater?

Not really. In an ideal fluffy happy kitten world, Windows and Mac OS X would have an open infrastucture for software updates, where applications could all use the system's libraries to pull down upgrades when needed. Nobody would have an excuse for an updater like Adobe's, which can't seem to manage what Apple call "combo updates" (want to take Acrobat from 7.0.1 to 7.0.9? Well, please install 7.0.5, reboot, 7.0.8, reboot...), and Mac users wouldn't have fifteen applications bundling (sometimes outdated) copies of Sparkle.

Of course, this could go horribly wrong (see the proposed iPhone app store), and as Mark Pilgrim points out, Linux has this sorted out already. Also, note I said "open infrastructure" - I'm not exactly keen to have every app have to pass through Apple or Microsoft before you were able to distribute it.

As it is, we do not live in an ideal world, and I'd rather have apps that were up to date than ones that weren't.

Would it make a difference is the checkbox for Safari were off by default instead?

I'd already installed Safari 3 betas on my Windows machine, so I didn't realise that the 3.1 update I was being offered was either being pimped to people who only had iTunes, nor that it was enabled by default. I don't have a problem with the first: I know that real people don't know about software releases the way the Twitterati do.

However, I think I do agree with the critics of the decision to install Safari by default, even if, as Tom said in the comment on my piece, it makes Apple just like everyone else in the Windows world. Boot Camp doesn't install crapware, for example (although apparently it does install the software updater we're all talking about), and Macs don't come with Intel Inside stickers. It would be nice for Apple to be able to take the moral high ground on updaters, too.

Anyway, for all the hullabaloo about Google search kickbacks, what good are they if nobody ever uses your app? There's a saying to do with honey and bees - or is it bears - which, if I could remember it, would be appropriate here.

So the iTunes+QuickTime bundling is bad, too?

Actually, no, I don't think it is. If you don't have QuickTime installed, video previews, and more importantly, video downloads, don't work. I think Apple is justified in bundling the two to a single download. The same goes for the background processes that make the iPod work on Windows; not installing those would be lead to an incredibly bad user experience.

One thing I've seen mentioned that also annoys me, though, is the way the stupid tray icon for QuickTime is reinstalled every damned time you update the library. There's no good reason for it to overwrite its preferences every time, and I wish it would stop doing so.

Did you realise that comments on your translation post were disabled?

Not until I posted this, and double-checked the sharing settings, no. I imagine this post means that there's not much more that people want to say, but you never know. Comments are now fixed for Vox members on both this and the previous post. (Oops.)

When is Easter next year?

Sunday 12th April, which should at least mean it isn't snowing outside.

Does this mean you're done wittering?

Yes. Shoo.

1. On footprints and forms.

Debate about whether or not the MacBook Air is, or deserves to be called, a subnotebook or ultramobile PC exposes some of the philosophy of Apple. Steve Jobs said himself in the keynote: "there's too much compromising on less than a full size display, less than a full-size keyboard". The upshot is that the footprint of the Air is no smaller than that of the other MacBooks¹. However, a lot of people would like a machine that was less wide and deep, no matter how thick it is. The Eee, of course, is the current poster-boy for such people, being the size of a DVD case.

Will Apple ever make a notebook for the people who would otherwise buy an Eee? Probably not, but I don't rule out them making a bigger touch-screen tablet, an iPod touch for the kitchen, if you will. It won't be a Mac, won't have a keyboard, and like the iPhone and touch, it'll be more geared to reading than to creating content (although if you're very lucky, it'll pair with a Bluetooth keyboard)². It also won't be released this year (maybe next?)

Are Apple right to ignore this market? A year ago I'd have said yes. Now, I still think they'll sell plenty of thin, stylish, relatively powerful (but expensive) machines. On the other hand, the cheap, Linux-based small laptops (we really need a category name for these gadgets, and one better than Eee-esque) will probably carve out quite the niche in the next year. Shuttle-based PCs heralded to move to the Mac mini from the Cube, so there'll maybe be a subnotebook to compete with the Eee's successors some years hence.

2. On secondaries and syncing.

John Gruber:

The MacBook Air is undeniably beautiful and clever, but clearly designed as a secondary machine, not a main machine. I like using a notebook as my sole machine, which means I'm almost certain to stick with the Pros.

and I think he's right, and, like him, it's one of the reasons I don't want one. Indeed, the fact is that, for at least five years, it's been perfectly fine to use a laptop as your primary computer. This is handy, because in the decade before that, there was a big problem with laptops: getting them to co-exist with desktops.

Way back in the early 1990s, Douglas Adams wrote about his desire to sync data between his Macintoshes³, and while we now have the option of .Mac (only $99/year, go on), I still don't think syncing is anywhere near a solved problem⁴. Perhaps that's OK, and we'll all end up storing our data in "the cloud", with Google, Flickr, Facebook and so on, but I don't quite know if the world's ready for that yet⁵.

I was intrigued to see that Wil Shipley is keen to get a MacBook Air. I wondered if compiling apps would be slow, and suddenly remembered the existence of Xgrid. I have no idea how well it works (it's not really something I've used in anger), but perhaps that's another part of the secondary machine puzzle, as are photo library management schemes like Fraser Speirs is considering.

All in all, perhaps a secondary machine isn't so much of a problem now, but I'm still not convinced I'd be happy splitting my life in two.

3. On phones and portable data.

Paul Boutin, in a piece entitled MacBook Err:

why has Apple failed to make foolproof, always-on Internet access—the iPhone's killer feature—a standard component of its next generation of computers?

Technically, putting a phone's 3G or better data connection into a computer isn't that hard. Sony did it over two years ago⁶. The problems are economic. Who's the data connection with, and how is it paid for? How do you do deals with providers worldwide⁷? (Remember, the iPhone is only available in four countries, the Kindle⁸ in one.)

Anyway, there are already ways to get online via mobile data connections. Boutin mentions 3G dongles (available in the UK for free, plus £10/month for 1GB of data), but doesn't mention a much more elegant way to go online: Bluetooth to a phone. Nokia's N810 internet tablet, for example, doesn't have 3G, but it does make pairing to (and using the data from) a phone very easy, and Mac OS X isn't exactly hard to configure either. As Tom Insam pointed out, you can even configure it to dial up when needed.

There are, admittedly, two problems here. Firstly, it seems that some (predominantly American?) carriers don't like letting you use your phone like this. The solution there, naturally, is to change carriers, and if you can't, lobby them until they change. Secondly, and more fundamentally, some phones doesn't support the right Bluetooth commands. Bafflingly, one such device is Apple's own iPhone. However, there are far more smartphonese that do Bluetooth dial-up networking than those that don't.

Personally, I'm still not convinced that truly always-on connections are either a good nor profitable idea. I'd find myself distracted and prone to looking up facts rather than debating the more interesting ideas around them, while I wonder if "normal people"⁹ want it? I admit that the same things were said about always-on wired Internet merely a decade ago, but this time perhaps there's a point in resisting technology for its own sake, if only for a few years.

¹ The weight isn't the same, of course, and apparently that's enough for some people. Personally it's never been a great concern.

² People have managed to put Mac OS X on an Eee, and if I had a couple of hundred pounds and some time spare I might be tempted to try it, but to be honest, I think it'd be painful. Apple don't support the latest release of Mac OS X on a machine with a screen smaller than 1024x768, and I think there's a good reason for that. Try setting your Mac to 800x600 and see if you can use iPhoto.

³ He also wrote about the pain of multiple power supplies. Sven-S. Porst touches on the idea of the Mac mini, Time Capsule and so on sharing a single power connector design, and more, in his post about the Macworld announcments.

⁴ Whatever happened to the Windows "Briefcase" feature anyway?

⁵ Having said that, gOS do.

⁶ Well, actually, it was EDGE, which is 2.5G, but you get the idea.

⁷ I still think the chances of a tuner in the Apple TV are basically zero, not just because of the iTunes Store, but also because there's no longer anything like a dominant standard for broadcast television within a given country, let alone worldwide.

⁸ The Kindle, of course, has a built-in EVDO modem. Amazon managed to get away without a service charge for the Kindle, but I doubt that Apple are going to subsidise the sort of use you'd see from a computer as opposed to a specialist device.

⁹ Geeks really need a better way of saying that.

Over a million iPhones have been sold.  Have you: bought one, considered it, or decided it's not for you?

I'm still undecided on whether I'm interested in an iPhone or not. At the moment, my music player is still the second generation iPod, with 10GB of disk space, that I bought over five years ago, and while it's no longer exactly huge, I'm quite fond of its physical buttons, heft and shape. (Is it just me that finds new iPods to seem rather too thin?)

On the other hand, I've never really been taken with any of the phones I've owned since the T610, way back when. If I'd timed the upgrade to hit the K750 or N73 when they were new, it might have been a different story, but I didn't. I'm currently wavering between upgrading to a K850 - I hate cameras without rotation sensors, so that is a nice feature - or just going down to PAYG on the Nokia 6230 I'm still borrowing from candace.

Of course, the iPhone is a third option, but to be honest, I'm waiting for 3G (just like half of Europe, perhaps), and I'd love to see how useful the promised API is before I get one with the idea that I'd hack on it. I'm also not yet sure if there's room for a device like the iPhone, or iPod touch or N810, in my life. I'm on my laptop at home or desktop at work so much of the time, do I really need mobile data? I'm sure once I have it I'll find it impossible to do without, just as it's now inconceivable to be without a mobile phone at all, so maybe putting off that day is a good idea.

So, to answer the QotD: I'm considering the iPhone, but I'm good at procrastinating, so I haven't really decided either way yet.

Mac OS X 10.5 is out today, and as usual I'm waiting for a while to see how it shakes out before installing it. In fact, I think I'm looking forward to the usual review by John Siracusa on Ars Technica more than I'm looking forward to the OS itself.

Nonetheless, with the release providing fodder for commentators and reviewers everywhere, I have picked up on a few of the new features of Leopard that I'm looking forward to. The thing is, I have a long memory, so some of them are actually old. In fact, they date back to System 7 or Mac OS 8.

• Grid Spacing - an old Finder feature, which Pogue accepts is a rerun
  
• File Sharing - as with the old Mac OS, you can now share folders other than just ~/Public
• Sharp Corners - again, Mac OS 9 didn't draw rounded corners on an LCD. Bafflingly, people have got so used to something that was originally a workaround for CRTs that a hack is apparently on its way to restore them
• Apple Data Detectors - a strange little feature that I've covered before on the 2lmc spool
  

All in all, it sometimes seems that bits of Apple have a reverse gear. Mind you, given how much of the baby got junked with the bathwater of the old Mac OS, it's not exactly unwelcome. Roll on a decent spatial Finder in 10.6! (Well, you've got to have a dream, haven't you?)