Macintosh

I just upgraded to MarsEdit 2, which I’m using to make the post. The new user interface looks much cleaner and the Flickr integration is wonderful.

I think I figured out NBC’s twisted logic when they claimed that most content on iPods is stolen: If you import your own legally purchased DVD or CD rather than buying that content in their DRM-crippled format, they consider it stolen.

I tried to sell my old MacBook Pro on eBay. I got one bid, for my original asking price, but when I sent the invoice, the buyer sent me the following email:

i am sorry,i dont wanna buy your laptop because it is old macbookpro.i supposed to new one.

I think I made it very clear here that it’s an old MacBook Pro, not a new one.

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This is why I hate eBay. I use it about once a year or less when I have some old equipment to sell. Most of my old Macs I traded in at PowerMax, but since they don’t do BTO, I had to buy my new one directly from Apple.

My new MacBook Pro included iLife 08, which I had an opportunity to use extensively today.

Last night we had a big birthday party (including a stripper) for someone who turned 80. I took lots of pictures and video of her reaction to the stripper. I had already used iPhoto 08, which works more or less the same as iPhoto 06 other than events. The only thing I miss is pressing CTRL after enhancing a photo to see the original. Unless they added a different keystroke, I don’t see any way to compare the enhanced & unenhanced photo other than undoing.

iMovie 08, on the other hand, I found to be a big step backwards from iMovie HD. I was able to import DV video easily from my Canon ZR600, but assembling a movie from the clippings without a time line was less convenient than using iMovie HD’s editing mode. Before I could use the movie anywhere else I had to share to media browser. It would only allow me to share to medium or smaller sizes, not large size.

The first time I launched iDVD 08 it quit immediately with no crash reporter log. After I removed the preferences, it would quit only after I chose an option from the splash screen. Finally, I removed the old themes from ~/Library/Application Support/iDVD which cured the problem. Magic DVD was very easy. After sharing the movie from iDVD, I was able to drop it into Magic DVD, choose a theme, and add a slideshow from iPhoto. The event feature of iPhoto 08 made this even easier. When I view events, I simply dropped the single event rather than selecting all of the photos in that roll or event. Finally, I was able to add music by simply dragging a track from the media browser to the slide show.

I haven’t had a chance to try iWeb (and I probably won’t, since I don’t use .Mac web hosting). I briefly played with GarageBand’s “Magic GarageBand” feature. It’s a lot of fun, but doesn’t really seem useful. I didn’t connect my USB MIDI keyboard, so I couldn’t do too much with it.

With my old MacBook Pro, doing ‘make all’ to build several projects totaling around 200,000 lines of code took about 3 minutes. With my new MacBook Pro it now takes 2 minutes.

I got a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with a 200G drive to replace my old one, which was starting to run out of disk space (despite the 150G drive) thanks to having multiple operating systems installed including several VMware images of Windows & Linux.

The difference between the old screen and the new LED backlit screen is quite striking. The new screen is much brighter and the white looks much purer. This picture can’t really convey the difference.

It came with iLife 08 installed, plus trial copies of Aperture & iWork 08. The speed difference is quite noticeable, especially running Windows under VMware. With the new one, Unity mode is usable. It was too slow on my old MacBook Pro.

Even with yesterday’s update, .Mac is still not very useful. The only thing I use my .Mac account for is iSync and as my Apple Store account.

I don’t use my iDisk because it’s too slow. I don’t use .Mac backup; I back up to my Buffalo TeraStation every night using Synk Pro (I formerly used Deja Vu). The server itself is a lot faster than an iDisk.

I don’t use .Mac’s web space since their server doesn’t support PHP or MySQL. I use a Dreamhost account instead, which lets me host multiple domains and gives me a lot more space and bandwidth than even the upgraded .Mac.

I don’t use .Mac email since their lack of good spam filtering makes it useless. I have my .Mac email forwarded to my Dreamhost IMAP mailbox so I can filter it with SpamAssassin & Procmail. I don’t believe in using client-side filtering. Once the spam reaches your mailbox it’s already too late. I’d rather have good server-side filtering that gets rid of the spam before it even reaches my computer. Gmail’s spam filter is much better than .Mac, but I prefer using SpamAssassin on my Dreamhost account, with the rules tweaked to catch almost all spam and whitelists for legitimate mail, and Procmail to trash the detected spam completely. With the high volume of spam, I don’t even bother checking for false positives since I used to get maybe 2-3 a month among several thousand spams.

I arrived at the AT&T Store at Cypress Creek & Andrews Ave. in Fort Lauderdale at around noon. There were already 6 people ahead of me in line. Unfortunately I didn’t come prepared with a chair like a lot of people did, so it was pretty uncomfortable waiting there for 6 hours.

More people started arriving around 3PM, and by the time they reopened there were about 40 people waiting.

At 4PM they pulled down the shades and locked the door. Finally at 6PM they raised the shades and opened the door. They let in 15 people at a time and the crowd was very orderly.

It took me less than 10 minutes to buy the iPhone, since I’m already a Cingular customer. The salesman just looked up my account and gave me an unopened box. Unlike most other phones, they didn’t have to activate it in the store.

When I got it home, I simply connected it to my MacBook Pro and iTunes launched and asked me to activate my iPhone.

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The phone was activated in less than 5 minutes while it synced my music, videos, contacts, calendars, photos, and bookmarks. The phone was fully charged when I got it, unlike most phones which need to charge for several hours, so I was able to use it right away.

I found the onscreen keyboard fairly easy to use, although I occasionally miss some letters near the edges. The sound quality is very clear, even with a weak signal.

I’ve posted a full gallery of both the waiting and unboxing here.