Category: OS X

App-les and Oranges compared..

Posted by Martyn Drake – March 8, 2010

Having got a 64Gb iPod Touch as a forerunner to a fully fledged iPhone, I have to admit that the Apple Store is wonderful. But Apple have got a lot to learn from the Android Market. For example, if you purchase an App and you don’t like it, there is no automatic mechanism from within iTunes or the iPod/iPhone to uninstall and obtain a refund. With Android Market, you click Uninstall & Refund and it’s all done. For iTunes App Store, you’ll have to get in touch directly with Apple through a web form and request the refund from there. Messy.

I’m also at odds as to why if you download an App from the iTunes App Store via your iPod/iPhone that when you transfer it back to iTunes on your desktop computer, iTunes refers to it as a “purchased item” if the App you’ve downloaded is free. This has lead to me to accidentally nuking Spotify and other applications all the offline music at one point as I was attempting to sync with my MacBook at work. I’ve now disabled syncing with the MacBook and will just use the Mac as a charging point.

While I may have some reluctance with the Apple camp these days, there’ s no point denying their products are bloody good to look at and use (when they work). If the QA could improve slightly, I’d have no hesitation now to come back to the Mac side for good. Especially now that Portal 2 (and possibly Half-Life 2) are going Mac native (although it’d be nice to see a few Grand Theft Autos coming to the Mac as well – that said, there is Chinatown Wars for the iPod/iPhone so it’s a start)!

The love affair is over: Nexus One a big pile of unfinished business

Posted by Martyn Drake – March 4, 2010

When I first got my Nexus One back in January, I was over the moon. Here was the very latest in HTC hardware and Google Android OS in one neat package. We had a wonderful honeymoon period in which everything seemed to work, despite all the naysayers on Google’s Nexus One forums.

Then the symptoms started creeping in. Losing the 3G signal in an area where 3G works well, Wi-Fi connections at home wouldn’t automatically connect and had to manually be connected through Settings, touchscreen would lose calibration, forcing me to twist the phone around like a baton until the bloody thing accepted the correct input. Google eventually rolled an update back in February which fixed the 3G part, but Wi-Fi was still giving problems and the touchscreen still is causing problems.

The last straw came when I went on-call for work. I found that I’ve missed out on emergency SMSes due to delayed sound alerts. Due to the speaker being positioned where it is, I also found that the alert sounds are quite muffled in comparison to our four year old Sony Ericsson non-smartphone. In short: I don’t trust the Nexus One in it’s current state. I was also hacked off that photos taken didn’t show up in the Gallery after the most recent OTA update. I could access them through USB and through the Camera application itself, but not through the Gallery. A reboot of the phone seemed to have fixed it and the photos then turned up in Gallery. I shouldn’t have to do that, though.

Thus I’ve stopped using it and gone back to the SE. The battery life lasts well over a week, I can hear all incoming SMSes just fine, and as a phone only, it does what it says on the tin. The Nexus One tries to be too clever and fails. The AMOLED is also a complete arse to work with in strong daylight. My wife has also been complaining about the quality of calls recently and has kept asking if I’m on hands-free when I’m not.

I’ve decided to go running back to Apple despite my earlier grumblings about them. Love them or hate them, they do make exceptionally fine products. Which work. I’m starting off with an iPod Touch 64Gb and assuming that I’m able to switch my contract to Memset late next year (or after the T-Mobile/Orange merger allows the legal purchase of an iPhone on my existing contract with T-Mobile), I’ll go iPhone. I’m finding it hard to go back to the Android platform right now – especially how well I’m finding the iPhone/iPod App store and how well multi-touch and Apple’s capacitive display just works. The quality of the applications seem a lot more professional too.

The irony is that I had no problems with the HTC Hero. It was a little slow, but it worked well. I hope the HTC Desire works better than the Nexus One – I’d so hate it to turn out like the Nexus after Sense UI has been applied.

I now split my smartphone use between the Sony Ericsson and my iPod Touch. Phone for the phone related stuff, iPod for the apps, calendar and everything else.

Today’s the day: Apple to reveal iPad/iTablet/iSlate*

Posted by Martyn Drake – January 27, 2010

(* delete as applicable)

I’ll be bitterly disappointed if Steve Jobs doesn’t walk on stage in a toga, wearing a false white beard, holding an iPad/iTablet/iSlate tablet device under his arm and shouting to the crowd, “Behold! The 10 Commandments of Apple!” and recites things like, “Thy Shall Not Covert They Neighbours Macbook Pro – buy your own you cheapskates!” and “Thy Shall Worship The One True Computer Company”. You get the idea.

The cult of Apple comes full circle today, I think.

Update: So it is going to be called the iPad. Looks good, I’ll admit, and I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on one for review, but Apple isn’t exactly in my good books at the moment and I’ll wait until the iPad 2 before even remotely thinking of asking for or buying one. Not until I see how the uptake of this device goes.

Cloudy with a chance of falling files..

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 16, 2009

I’ve recently been testing a variety of products for storage in Amazon’s S3 service.  I first came to get to know S3 through Rackspace’s Jungle Disk service which provides a Windows, Mac or Linux client that can backup all your files to the “cloud” either using S3 or Rackspace’s own “cloud” offering.

While I am very impressed with Jungle Disk’s Windows server backup solution, I’m not so convinced on the Windows or Mac desktop service.  Timeouts at both Amazon and Rackspace’s Jungle Disk gateway as well as numerous other little problems has not convinced me I want to entrust to it my 17Gb of well earned music, film and TV collection on iTunes.  I’m fine with the Windows backup since (a) Memset backs up the MDaemon directory nightly anyway, and (b) I’ve not seen any errors.

But something with Amazon S3 (particularly their Europe service) made me think that if I could find a utility that allows me to upload and download stuff as easily as an FTP client, or even offer full sync capabilities, I would still have a use for it.  Sadly, the options are very limited and I have to say I’m not at all impressed.

On the Mac, there is Cyberduck.  This is an FTP, SFTP, SCP,S3, WebDAV, Rackspace Cloud, MobileMe file transfer client.  It’s literally the Swiss army knife of file transfer clients and the very best thing I’ve seen for any platform.  Ever.  I can create S3 buckets easily in Amazon’s EU datacentres and upload/download and even mirror entire directories.  If I interrupt the transfer, I can resume the next time without any fuss.  Very confident my data is safe with Cyberduck.  And Cyberduck is freeware/donation-ware in that it’s free to use, but a donation to the author is appreciated.

I then tried Time Warp for OS X.  This is currently in beta and is free to use while this is so.  Unfortunately Time Warp did not offer me the choice of Amazon datacentre and seems to default to the US.  No good.

Next up was Atomic Drive.  This is a cross-platform client, but like Jungle Disk, requires that you sign-up to them and pay them a small monthly fee for the privilege of using the client (fair enough) as well as the S3 transfer/storage fees.  Unfortunately the client only allows US datacentre use, and does not resume transfers if you’re in the middle of transferring gigabytes of data and need to interrupt for whatever reason you may have.  This is not good.

After that was S3 Bucket Explorer, but found the user interface unwelcoming and cluttered (and the queue system I found to be too fussy).  It also takes an age to load on the Mac.

Thus the winner on the Mac is: Cyberduck.  By far the friendliest and most feature packed S3 client I ever come across.

In terms of Windows clients, I was even more disappointed with the choice available.  Cloudberry Lab appears to the be leading developer of S3 clients.  They have a dedicated backup product (CloudBerry Backup) as well as a general S3 bucket explorer-cum-FTP client called CloudBerry S3 Explorer PRO.  I liked CloudBerry Backup very much, apart from one problem.  The bandwidth and usability was sufficiently uncontrollable that my wife and I argued over it’s use!  I was forced, to keep the peace, to uninstall the product, even after limiting the bandwidth used by CBB, since stopping the manual backup saw the backup resume again after a minute.  Pausing the backup still seemed to  do the job, but activity was still present.  Thus, with regret, I had to walk away from this product which when I saw it working, seems to be one of the best I’ve seen.

Cloudberry S3 Explorer PRO is another product which I like, but seems to suffer from a problem whereby if I’m uploading a lot of files and then close the program, restart it, and kick off the queue again, just get errors upon errors and cannot resume the transfer for the files still in the queue.  I’ll need to look at the debug/log files to figure why that is.  Haven’t had the time to do so as yet.  The user interface is clean, crisp – everything I like in an FTP client and is very straight forward.  If I can get around the queue issue, I think this would be the best product for S3 bucket management for Windows.

I have yet to look at Cross FTP for Windows (or Mac), or CloudBuddy (Windows).  Everything else out there seems to be in perpetual development (alpha or beta).

It’s a Chrome away from Chrome.. I’ve switched from Firefox on two platforms!

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 15, 2009

While I have given up Google Apps (no, it’s not because I fear the Google and it’s tight grip on my data – I’ll write a blog post about why I left Google Apps a bit later), Google still gets used an awful lot here at Drake Towers.  Google the Search Engine is the de facto here.  Then there’s Google Maps, Google Reader, Feedburner, Google Webmaster Tools,  Google Analytics, Google AdSense, YouTube, and so on.

I now use Google Public DNS on the Dell laptop at home and as a secondary DNS server for my MDaemon mail server.  And now I’ve converted to Google Chrome, Google’s efforts to produce a fast web browser designed for simplicity.  And it works exceptionally well on Windows.  And now OS X.  Despite Chrome being beta on my work Mac, I now use it as my primary browser despite a few kinks (the main one being the passwords are not saved if you’re browsing a site that uses an expired or self-signed certificate – I’ve filed the bug with the Chromium bug report system).

My dependence on Google will not end there either.  While I have no intention of running the Chrome OS on this PC (although if I had a netbook I would probably consider it), I am still very tempted by the T-Mobile G2 Touch which runs the Android 1.5 (at the time of writing) platform.  I’ll be carrying Google in my pocket too.

I’m a Mac AND a PC. Yet I’m not complacent.

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 2, 2009

Interesting article over at the Mail Online about the so-called Windows 7 “black screen of death”.  Even more interesting is the comments where the forever OS snobbery war continues.

People saying “Get a Mac”, or “My Mac has never seen a virus” are far too complacement for my liking.  In the six years of working in an industry where Macs are the dominant platform for creatives (followed behind by Linux – yaaboosucks to Microsoft!), I’ve seen Macs become infected by trojans – installed by users who have unwittingly given the trojan access to their system by giving it their admin user password (which is usually only required for major system operations, such as installing kernel extensions or amending system configs).  This has resulted in an compromised system – and this is because the users have usually downloaded something from a dodgy (warez, illegal torrent, etc.) web site and believed their Macs were invulnerable to viruses, etc.

The same can be said of some Windows users.  Despite the almost universal paranoia of Windows systems getting viruses, I’ve also seen some Windows think along the same lines of the smug Mac owners in that “I’m careful – I’ve never caught a virus before and therefore do not need anti-virus software”.  Subsequently their machines have been compromised and it’s re-install time.  NEVER think you will be affected because one day you’ll most likely be kicking yourself.

Regardless of whatever platform you use – it’s always worth having some form of anti-virus/anti-malware software installed (free or otherwise) to ensure that you’ve got some warning about the new application you’ve just aquired will do.  Never willingly grant strange applications access to your system and always verify their source first.

Mac users – I highly recommend Sophos Anti-Virus.  Despite a few wibbly moments which have since been ironed out, Sophos is one of the most trusted and respected security vendors for all the major OS platforms.  Certainly, I’ve been very impressed with their Windows products in the past when I’ve used them.  For Windows users, I do not hestiate to recommend ESET NOD32 Anti-Virus.

Another thing that bugs me are people who do not take care of their system backups.  It’s now so incredibly cheap to buy an external hard drive, CDs, DVDs or Blu-Ray rewritables to back up all of your sensitive data.  And add to this the numerous onlne backup services (my favourite being SquirrelSave – but then again I provide the majority of support for this as I work for Memset who own and run it!) and you’ve got no excuse for losing data.

Pride and Prejudice and Operating Systems

Posted by Martyn Drake – November 5, 2009

This will sound hypocritical of me, but I really dislike OS snobbery.  I've unsubscribed from the Greater London Linux Group (GLLUG)  a number of times due to the general bitchiness of some subscribers over their hatred for all things Microsoft, OS X, or any number of other operating systems that are not Linux.

I also hate to say this, but much of this snobbery seems to stem from Linux zealots.  I continually hear how crap Windows is and that Linux is so much better than every other operating system.  Similar things from the FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD camps too – although they tend to put their OSes above Linux.  As for the hard core Windows user, they bitch about Linux being unfriendly and complicated.  OS X users come into the fray and say their computers/OS is better than Windows, Linux and all other *ixes put together.

I have news for you.  No one operating system is any better than the other.  And it also all boils down to personal choice.  I've seen Windows, Linux and OS X systems compromised[*] (and I should note: none were any of mine!).  I've not been around FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD to say the same.  But certainly one cannot be smug about any operating system when it comes to security. 

In terms of usability, I've always found Linux desktops to be terribly inconsistent and fiddly – and not a little ugly.  But that's just my personal preference.  Windows has generally been a bit more consistent (although I am still getting used to some of the changes in Windows 7 where Microsoft have moved some regular options I used to the Control Panel), but it provides the biggest choice in terms of software and compatibility.  OS X has been the most consistent interface of all, and provides a very friendly and wonderful approach to user friendly computing.  But I'm not liking much the software availability and quality of some of the software that's available for the Mac.  Apple's own software products are, for the most part, wonderful, but there are still some issues that prevent me from loving Apple completely.

The reason I'm now rooting for the Windows/PC camp is that it suits my needs now.  I may well head back to Macs later down the road, but for now, the PC and Windows does what I want it to do.  I could even go to Linux as a desktop if the interface was right (Ubuntu comes very close to my ideal, but it still needs work).  In terms of hardware support, Linux has never had it so good.  And the same can be said about Windows.

I certainly grumble about OSes and hardware myself, but I *do* try to bear in mind about having an objective outlook on things rather than simply dismissing something simply because it comes from Apple, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, or whoever.  Each and every operating system has advantages and disadvantages over each other and I believe it is quite wrong to start slanging matches for the sake of doing so. 

[*] I'm seeing more people running obsolete versions of Fedora Core and even Red Hat Linux operating systems.  A few years ago I noticed a film distribution company running Red Hat 9 with telnet (not SSH!) and all available default services running (and all versions of those services were available for all to see) – and this was a server running the web site for a Terry Gilliam film.  I had to write to the systems team and advise them that this was putting their site (and reputation) in jeopardy.  Thankfully they then firewalled off the machine and fixed the problems.  The stupid thing is, this is still a common problem!

Snow Leopard shows it’s spots..

Posted by Martyn Drake – September 3, 2009

On Tuesday I received my copy of Mac OS X Snow Leopard at the office and was itching to give it a whirl.

Having backed up all my valuable data to the external hard drive (still using the Iomega drive I bought with my Apple Store gift voucher given to me by MPC back in 2007 when I left), I did a complete clean install of Snow Leopard which took just over 42 minutes to install having opted to go for the default installation.  On reflection, if I had chosen not to install the additional languages and printer drivers, things would have gone much quicker.  As it is, the default install took up 11Gb of hard drive space.

Once install was complete, a reboot got me into the familiar Welcome animation, which is EXACTLY the same as with the original Leopard.  After going through the final bits of setting up, I then started copying back data from the hard drive.  I should mention that I would normally use Time Machine to restore my Mac data – but having recently moved over to using File Vault in order to comply with ISO security accreditation in the office, Time Machine's functionality is somewhat more restricted than for non-File Vault volumes.

Installed Office 2008 for Mac which initially failed to install properly and required a subsequent re-install.   Not quite sure why it failed the first time around, but given it's a Microsoft product, one can hardly be surprised at this sort of thing.  When Office was installed, ran the updater and all went well.

Installed Final Cut Express 4.0 which went without a hitch.

Everything else (Adium, CyberDuck beta, Firefox, Remote Desktop for PC, Parallels Desktop, VMWare Fusion, etc.) all installed and work just fine.

Snow Leopard is somewhat speedier in some operations.  Apple Mail, for example, is noticeably speedier when accessing large mail folders.  It opens much faster too.  Safari is a seriously nippy little bugger, but unfortunately I much prefer Firefox and therefore use that as my primary browser instead.

The downsides have been the inability to compile a few open source projects that worked just fine with Leopard, but I'm sure I can get around that with a bit of perseverance.  Likewise, I'm having to wait on a few developers to release Snow Leopard compatible binaries to ensure that any kinks don't crop up in day to day work (Growl is one such example).  Time Machine can still not backup File Vault volumes without having to log out first.  As such, I recommend an online backup service or third party backup software to perform as-you-go backups until Apple figure something out.  It's most annoying.

Oh, and OpenCL doesn't work on Intel GMAX3100 GPUs.  Grrr.

Snow Leopard won't set the world on fire, but it does what it says on the box and sets up the Mac nicely for a 64-bit filled, high performance future.

Why can’t Microsoft keep current pre-order Windows 7 pricing for the duration of the OS’s life?

Posted by Martyn Drake – July 17, 2009

As soon as Windows 7 came available for pre-order on the 15th July, Jennifer and I secured our copies.  We have now pre-ordered two FULL copies of Windows 7 Home Premium (E) for £65 through Amazon.co.uk – £32.50 per copy.  Okay, we used a free gift voucher from Be to claim more money off, but nonetheless it's still a bargain.

The demand for Windows 7 has been such that the pre-order price has now gone up to £80 for the Home Premium edition.  When Windows 7 is finally released, it'll go up again.  But why?  Why have Microsoft's operating systems always been so damn expensive (especially the Ultimate editions of Vista and 7)?  In comparison, Apple's OS X have been cheaper, have no activation restriction (with the one exception being OS X Server).  You're forking out a fortune even before you've added any useful applications other than the media players, gimmicky games, and web browser (and even then, Microsoft have taken that out of the European edition of Windows leaving the user to use another computer or magazine cover disc to install one – they didn't have to do this, but Microsoft seem to be sticking fingers up at the EC commission at the expense of their customers).

If I had my way, Windows 7 would be completely free for existing users of Vista who have had to endure a very long time for an operating system which now promises to live up to being a good one.