"We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know?" - Steve Jobs, in an interview with Fortune magazine this month. Great words from a great man.

Labels: Apple, Genius, iPhone

Edward Tufte, information design master, has released an insightful and educational video review of the iPhone on his website. It's a large movie shot in clear, Apple style black background with Tufte talking through his observations as he goes. Delivered in calm, soothing tones are such wonderful phrases such as "To clarify, add detail" and "Clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are a failure of design".

Tufte has a high regard for the iPhone's high resolution (163dpi) screen as well as how Apple have removed "computer administrative debris" to ensure "the information is the interface" with direct interactions by humans on the content, not via buttons - or at least with transparent controls where necessary. Where he's not so impressed is with the "strong colours and zebra stripes, but not much information" on the stocks page - suggesting that instead of the "cartoon/Excel resolution" Apple could employ their "image level resolution" to let people zoom in and out of complex, informative displays. Similarly for the weather page shown above.

Aside from these few suggestions for information design improvement Tufte seems to like the iPhone - to quote; "If the information is in chaos don't start throwing out information, instead fix the design - and that is exactly what the iPhone has done." Go watch the video and learn from a master.

Labels: Apple, Design, guru, Information Design, interaction device, iPhone

My MacBook Pro is lovely, but even Macs have problems. Yes, it's true. Recently I was traveling in England and stayed at a lovely B & B in Edinburgh (The Sandaig which I highly recommend!). There was free wi-fi, always a bonus, but unfortunately I could rarely seem to get on it for more than a few seconds before it booted me off. My partner's laptop, a MacBook, seemed to connect just fine with rapid connection speeds even with only two bars of signal. This situation was highly frustrating - as we're both excessive Internet users, so only having one active laptop was a pain. I mean, what were we going to do instead? Visit Edinburgh's beautiful sights? Pah.

The solution turned out to be a non-solution, but rather a clarification of how MacBook Pros work. It turns out from a bit of research that the beautiful aluminium case that surrounds the MacBook Pro forms a Faraday cage - which is relatively impervious to radio waves such as wireless internet connections. Ah. Apple's solution to this was to leave a 'hole' in this cage, where the laptop is not made of aluminium, and that is the rubbery looking strip you see just underneath the laptop screen. That strip is your wireless antenna.

Now compared to a normal MacBook, which can pick up un-impeded signal from all directions, this means your new MacBook Pro not only has a very small area through which to receive signals, it is also highly directional. Ah hah. So now you have the following options to improve your wireless reception when you have a weak signal:

1. Plug in your MacBook Pro: When you have a power supply connected the wireless power ramps up and you'll see a huge improvement in reception. Unfortunately you can't seem to configure this manually when you don't have a power supply to hand, so I guess it sucks battery super fast.
2. Point your MacBook Pro in different directions: Use your laptop like a divining rod to find the direction of strongest signal. Given the small window available this can yield good enough results but it is a pain to move around.
3. Move closer to the wireless source so you get a stronger signal. Obviously not the most useful solution but sometimes the only one. In my case moving outside of our room, past a solid brick wall, gave four bars of signal and perfect internet.

Come on Apple - next generation of MacBook Pros admit your short fallings and add a nice external connector for an antenna or similar. I'm sure your legions of product eco-system partners will jump on the opportunity to create many beautiful and functional designs, something this time you omitted to do.

Labels: Apple, MacBook, MacBook Issue

Thanks to a handy little XCode application, Mac users can now watch your movies in wonderful ASCII-Vision (TM). It's not the most straightforward process unfortunately, so perhaps someone will add a filter to youTube sometime in the future. Till then follow these steps to create ASCII movie joy at home:

1. You'll need Apple's development environment, XCode, to be installed first. You can get XCode here.
2. Visit Apple's Developer site to pick up the ASCII Code Demo.
3. Deploy the package into a local folder, then open the Xcode project. You can now simply select the project and click 'Build' at the top of the pane. An executable will be created under <your project folder>/build/Development - assuming you don't get any errors.
4. Now find a demo movie - I found it worked well with .AVI files created from my Canon G7 - and put that in the same folder as the executable.
5. Open a Terminal window, navigate to your folder then run: ./ASCIIMoviePlayer <your movie file>; and you should see a movie running in the terminal window. You may need to adjust the size of your window to see it properly.

Have fun - and let me know if you create the next ASCII Star Wars. [From Dysturb.net]

Labels: Animation, Apple, Fun

I got a new printer the other day, which works fine but for some reason I can't print from Firefox. With any page I hit command-P, the Print dialog comes up but nothing got to the printer. Pressing 'Preview' instead of print meant a progress dialog appeared but no preview turned up. Great. The temporary solution was to cut and paste the link into Safari which printed just fine.

Well after a bit of digging I've found the solution. Following some hints from the Firefox forums I closed down Firefox and restarted it from the terminal in safe mode, you have to be in the Firefox.app folder:

./firefox -safe-mode

On running this Firefox starts up as usual. I then tried printing again, and on hitting 'Preview' the following error message appeared in the terminal window:

WARNING: Font "Times" with style 0 can't be handled by the imaging system. This document can't be drawn/printed with this font.

Ah hah! A clue. So based on this I found a handy hint at MacRumors, that simply suggests going into Firefox Preferences - Content and changing your default font, I choose Arial 16pt. As if by magic, hitting Print then Preview opened up a preview PDF. Hoorah, all solved. So now I can just open Firefox as usual (not in safe mode) and everything prints just fine. Phew.

UPDATE: 2007-12-02

Recently I've been finding this solution has not been working for all pages, and over-riding the fonts for pages is not the best solution. It now turns out the issue may have been to do with me disabling the wrong 'Times' font family in font book - I'd disabled 'Times' and left 'Times New Roman' active. So in running firefox in safe mood I had the following error:

WARNING: Font "Times" with style 0 can't be handled by the imaging system. This document can't be drawn/printed with this font.

Going into Font book and enabling Times, this error went away and the page printed.

Obviously this isn't a great solution, and having to close Firefox to restart in safe-mode just to find out what font you're missing is a bit stupid to say the least. Why can't we get a nice dialog box warning, or be allowed to replace problematic fonts? And why do fonts render fine on-screen, but then fail to print?

Versions pertaining to this issue:

• MacBook Pro 2.2GHz
• OS X 10.4
• Firefox 2.0.0.6

Labels: Apple, Bug Fix, FIrefox

While I'm still loving my new MacBook Pro there are definitely moments of pain that I could do without. One of those recurring pains has been from Firefox, in that every time I want to drag a link into one of file bookmark folders a really long and annoying tooltip pops up saying; "Drag and drop this icon to create a link to this page". This tooltip fades after three seconds, but often the folder I want to drag the link into is underneath the tip.

Well thanks to a tip from PK you can now rid yourself of this interloper. Simply type about:config into the address bar at the top of Firefox, this will make a list of configuration properties show up. Then find the one that says browser.chrome.toolbar_tips and double click it to set it to false. Bingo. No more tooltips, and no more obstructions to bookmarking.

One thing to note about this solution is that it disables all tool tips, not just the one we don't like, but for me that's a liveable solution. It's also a reminder to everyone developing UI to keep your tool tips short!

Labels: Apple, bad ui, FIrefox, MacBook, Making Life Better

This morning I had a mild heart attack as my new MacBook Pro decided not to come back up from sleep mode. It had been sitting on my desk all night, plugged into the power having being put to sleep. I opened it and heard the fans whirring away, but nothing happened on screen. After a few minutes I held down the power key to re-boot it - on starting back up though I just had the grey apple logo and spinning wheel, but no visible progress!

I rebooted the machine a few times, and once it got through to the login screen, but in the background the 'OS X Booting' dialog box stayed on the screen. So I rebooted again, thinking that would clear it down - but then it wouldn't come back up at all. Great.

I restarted the machine in verbose mode (press Command + V on startup) and watched the output, all good until a SATA disk drive error (something about block 0 missing) came up repeatedly on screen. OK. So a hard drive problem, my worst nightmare. This time I rebooted into single user mode (Command + S) and ran fsck - 'File System Check' - it turns out that most of my hard drive settings were out by a few blocks at all levels, and some parts were completely missing. Ug.

Luckily fsck repaired the drive successfully, and after entering reboot at the command line the machine came back up without apparent problems. Phew. I then backed up my recent files to DVD just in case and had a coffee.

Of course now I want to know what caused this. A few posts online indicate similar problems - my machine was super hot, even though it was off and recharging - had that upset the hard drive? In which case it's something that could easily happen again. Or is this something to do with installing MacFuse recently so I could try and write to my PC shared NTFS drives? A lot of the posts with the same problem had been running Parallels, a Windows exection package. If anyone has any ideas please let me know!

Labels: Apple, MacBook Issue

Yesterday I got my first chance to play with Apple's new iPhone at their 5th Avenue Store. First impressions, it's cute, feels great in the hand, has many genius ideas but some annoying niggles still came up even in a short time.

The first thing that strikes you is the quality and clarity of the display - the background is a really dark black, and the icons really pop out. The glass in front of the screen also feels very smooth and cool to the touch, and even with my greasy, sweaty fingers it didn't seem to pick up any fingerprints - that alone is an amazing development that I wish all of my handheld devices had. The iPhone is a comfortable size in the hand, and surprisingly thing - akin to the latest generation of iPod but with rounded edges on the front.

Using the iPhone is relatively intuitive. The icons are obvious, bold & easily clickable - plus they have small text descriptions below to guide you. Though small, the text descriptions are incredibly clear and easy to read, another facet of the excellent display. There is a slight learning curve when you read a web page, using two fingers slide apart or together to either zoom in or out of the page, then using a single finger to drag the screen apart (as opposed to the MacBook's two finger drag). Reading or viewing anything is aided by the in-built orientation sensor, that tells at what angle you have the screen and rotates the display accordingly, although in youTube mode it sensibly forces you into landscape orientation for best viewing. Yes, youTube is a front menu option, it's just a shame that the download times are a little slow over the phone network, but not so slow that they are unusable.

Zooming in and out of web pages to read is not as easy as I'd thought it could be. My website rendered correctly, unsurprisingly given the Safari engine embedded in the iPhone, but having to zoom in/out to get posts to the correct scale to read was a bit frustrating. Once you're at the best zoom level scrolling with your fingers is easy and fun. I wonder how many sites have already started iPhone optimisation looking at the iPhone's user agent in the header?

For entering text Apple has plumped for an onscreen keyboard, as opposed to the defunct Newton's 'written' text. The keys are much smaller than the average finger tip, but Apple has developed a method that works out which key you meant to press by looking at the center of your finger. This works pretty well, except at the edges of the keypad. I found myself pressing 'P' instead of 'O' regularly. Like most touch keypads it is most likely something you learn to do better with time, but that initial usage was mildly frustrating. I wonder if offering a larger button keypad as well would help, time will tell.

There are many other interesting features to look through, I didn't get a chance to make an actual phone call for example! Nice little touches such as a one click, highly visible airplane mode, are present all through the device. That said I'm not convinced enough to splash out $500 for the cheapest model, with only 4Gig of unexpandable (what!) memory and a lock in to an AT&T contract. Roll on iPhone v2 - I'm sure that will be even more perfect.

Footnote: Originally I had hoped to do this blog post from the iPhone, spelling mistakes and all, but for some reason I could not log into Blogger. I'm sure that was just something I'd have to work out, but given it also took me a good three minutes to even get my username & password entered it was a task left for another day.

Labels: Apple, iPhone, Review