maniacal rage

Macworld has a new feature story called Picking Our Favorite Leopard Features, wherein various staff rate their favorite new stuff in 10.5. Among the selection are the commonly-touted features like iChat screen sharing, Cover Flow in Finder, Spaces and Time Machine, but Rob Griffiths chose something no one else mentioned, and a feature I'm particularly thrilled with: AutoFS.

There hasn't been a lot said about AutoFS, but I consider it to be one of my most-requested features for OS X: Putting network mounting on separate threads. Griffiths defends his decision to include it in his list (at number two no less) and describes it thusly:

Why give up such a high draft pick for this seemingly obscure technology related to networked volumes? Because AutoFS in OS X 10.5 is, quite simply, a revolution. AutoFS is responsible for the mounting and dismounting of network shares, and in Leopard, it will uses separate “threads” for these tasks. What does that mean in English? It means the end of the spinning rainbow of doom you see when you, for instance, click on a network share in the Finder, only to remember that you put the shared computer to sleep earlier.

One of the most irritating issues with OS X is the Finder's inability to deal with network-mounted disks gracefully. I need an abacus to count how many times in the last week alone the Finder has hung for two minutes because my Airdisk became unavailable or Katia's iMac was sleeping when I tried to access it.

Since switching to the Mac in 2002, this has been one of my biggest (and most common) complaints with OS X and I'm absolutely thrilled it has finally been solved. While it's nice to have lots of shiny new GUI features in 10.5, I can't help but be even more excited by the simple core functionality updates like AutoFS.

CSSEdit 2 has been released! I had the pleasure of beta testing this version of the app and I must say that Jan Van Boghout is a truly talented developer. Not only is this released packed with new features, but it's a great example of doing one thing and doing it extremely well.

It's also worth mentioning that Jan might be one of the best designers I know of as well. The new design of the MacRabbit website, the icons, everything... it's all extremely jealousy inducing and I hate him for it. Hate, hate, hate.

Congrats to Jan and, frankly, to everyone who writes CSS on the Mac—CSSEdit 2 is about to become your new best friend.

I'm absolutely in love with my MacBook Pro. The power of a desktop in a portable that I can take with me anywhere is truly fantastic. I will say honestly that this is the best machine I've had to date.

The only problem I've had with the machine is related to Rosetta. For some unknown reason, Adobe Photoshop frequently causes Rosetta to malfunction, and afterward it's impossible to launch any app in Rosetta (the app will simply bounce in the dock once or twice and then die). I'm not sure why Photoshop does this, but it happens pretty regularly.

When this first started, I was restarting the machine whenever I needed to use Photoshop. Luckily, this wasn't a terribly frequent occurrence, but it was a pain none the less.

Finally, today, I took the time to look in to this more and realized that it is in fact Rosetta hanging, and a simple terminal command would fix the situation any time it happened:

sudo killall translated

Rosetta will die and then restart the next time it's needed. Hopefully in the future, Apple or Adobe will fix this issue, but in the mean time this is a lot better than having to restart.

You can also create an AppleScript to make this faster:

try
  do shell script ¬
    "killall translated" password ¬
    "YourPass" with administrator privileges
    --replace "YourPass" with your password
on error
  beep
end try

I've saved this as a run-only script and assigned a Quicksilver trigger to it, so I can run it quickly whenever I need to.

Since I'm heavily considering purchasing a new MacBook Pro, I've been keeping up with reviews and thoughts I've come across in the last few days.

After my initial post on the MacBook Pro, I received several emails from readers asking me to let them know what I learned, or at least post about it. Consider this that post, ongoing. Links to MacBook Pro-related news and information, as well as my periodic thoughts on the subject:

• From before the MacBook Pros shipped, Dan Frakes compared prices of a MacBook Pro and a Dell Inspiron 9400 for Macworld. The result? The MacBook Pro is accurately priced for its features.
• Also from Macworld, the Jason Snell's initial thoughts on the machine after a few days' use and his official review (4 out of 5 mice).
• Another review from Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica (8 out of 10).
• David Pogue's review from the New York Times (no rating, but Pogue writes in his conclusion, "Over all, the MacBook Pro is a beautifully engineered machine. If it's not the world's finest, it's darned close.")
• New LEDs in MacBook Pro seem brighter than before, according to ZDNet, but Daniel Jalkut disagrees. I think a lot of this is subjective, but either way—this doesn't seem to be a bad thing in either case.
• Quality issues with the right speaker of MacBook Pros? Chris Liscio (who writes acoustic measurement software) has a test case online. Seems that a decent amount of people are experiencing this, as evidenced by a thread on Apple Discussions. Sounds like (hah!) this might be a software issue, since people have noted that the volume control also seems wonky. Apparently, the distortion can be killed on some MBPs by turning the camera on (more at macosxhints.com).
• NotebookReview has a review and value proposition available.
• PC Magazine's review of the MBP (4 out of 5... uh, dots).
• DHH on the MacBook Pro. He ordered with the upgraded processor and HDD (which I'm considering)—has says it's fast. Very fast.
• Rob Williams on the MacBook Pro: "It's like having a G5 laptop. Apple says 4x over the G4. I was kind of skeptical about that. Not anymore."
• Matt Raible says his MBP is "faster than my dual-core AMD 64 desktop machine and that has 3GB of RAM." (Emphasis his.)
• Geekbench comparison of the MBP to a recent PowerBook G4.
• Ben Skelton complains about a bad fan in his MacBook Pro that's causing hissing and loud noise. He also complains that the MagSafe connector is too strong—that it doesn't release when tugged on—which is contrary to Jacqui Cheng's review at Ars Technica where she notes that the MagSafe connector is too weak.
• Walt Mossberg reviews the MacBook Pro. He's not entirely thrilled with the machine: "The MacBook Pro isn't revolutionary, but it's a promising start to the era of Intel-powered Apple laptops." He also complains that it's not as fast as it should be (which goes against most other reports).
• Personal Computer World review (4 out of 5 stars). Their biggest complaint is the wait for UniBinary versions of all software.
• Tim Pokorny says his MBP is hot, hotter than his 12-inch PowerBook used to be. He mentions that the MBP is much cooler when running on battery power, but that the Intel machines do not have a way to control processor performance levels ("highest", "automatic", "reduced"). Interesting. John Gruber told me that his PowerBook G4 doesn't have these options either, which is strange. When did Apple remove this? All of my machines, including my Quad and my PowerBook G4 have this option.
• CNet's review (6.9 out of 10), full of seemingly unreasonable complaints such as: "lacks media card reader" and "higher-end configurations are much more expensive than their PC equivalents." Frankly, I don't want a media card reader on my notebook computer—do you? And also, complaining about expenses for very high-end machines seems moot to me.
• OWC shows you how to take apart your MacBook Pro and swap out the optical drive, add RAM, etc. All in video form. Be careful!
• Pre-order your MacBook Pro from Amazon and you can save up to $189. There's a $150 mail-in rebate, and, with Amazon's new A9.com tie-in, by registering with and using A9.com "for a few days," you save an additional 1.57% (which on the MBP is about $39).
• As of March 6, the shipping estimate for a MacBook Pro has dropped from 3-4 weeks to 2-3 weeks.
• Further update on the MBP speaker problem from Chris Liscio: it's a hardware issue and it's not solvable.
• MagSafe connector not so safe after all? Maybe. I dunno. I've heard the reason this happened is that the connection got wet. Hopefully, this is a fluke.
• As of March 20, the shipping estimate for a MacBook Pro has dropped from 2-3 weeks to 7-10 business days. Wahoo!
• Run WindowsXP on your MacBook Pro.
• Seems like a lot of people are having CPU noise on their MacBook Pros. Daniel Jalkut wrote about it a few times, and Scott Stevenson detailed his thoughts on the issue. Not good. Although, I should mention that, until I got my Quad, I was having the same issue with my Dual-2GHz G5. Daniel mentions his experience with the same system in his first post, and says he used the CHUD tools to disable CPU napping (me too). It seems like Apple can't seem to get multi-processor or multi-core systems to stop making little chirping sounds. Very strange.
• As of March 27, the shipping estimate for a MacBook Pro has dropped from 7-10 business days to 1-2 business days. Looks like Apple has overcome the supply/demand issues. I assume in the near future that we'll see a 24-hour shipping timeframe.
• Some build timings of BBEdit on the MacBook Pro from Rich Siegel. Siegel notes that when the MBP has a full compliment of RAM, that sucker is fast.
• Bare Feats compares the two MBP hard drive options: 5,400 RPM versus 7,200 RMP. Interesting outcome—the 7,200 RPM drive isn't really any faster for average random reads (but is obviously better for large sustained reads like video, et cetera).
• As of April 12, the shipping estimate for a MacBook Pro is 24 hours.
• Apparently, Apple seems to have revised the MacBook Pro and is not shipping revisions, Daily Tech claims. Good news for future buyers, bad news for people who have the Rev A MBP with issues.
• Obviously, everyone has heard about Boot Camp (dual-boot XP), and Parallels Workstation (virtual XP) by now. Related to Boot Camp, check out Battlefield 2 running on a MBP and, of course, Half-Life 2 (HL2 running on an Intel iMac, but still). Oh, and someone got Windows Vista to load on a MBP as well.
• From Macworld, here are some XP-on-Mac benchmarks.

Shawn:

So I assume you made it through the Apple event without buying anything?

How well I'm known. This recent Apple event wasn't anything special, but in the past, keynotes have been very dangerous to me and my money. I didn't buy anything announced yesterday, and I don't plan to (a Mac mini would be fun for a media server, but it just isn't necessary for me right now).

I am, however, planning on buying a MacBook Pro in the near future, to replace my two-year-old PowerBook G4. I have a 1GHz model and it's starting to feel a little slow. I've been waiting to read more reviews and see how people like them—buying a revision A product from Apple is usually dangerous (and I do it frequently)—especially people who have upgraded the hard drive to 7200 RPM and people who have opted for the processor upgrades.

When I asked Shawn if it sounded silly to buy a new notebook, he said:

Once you bought the Quad, you sort of set the precident of no longer needing to justify any computer spending.

I guess I would agree with that. While purchasing a new MacBook Pro to replace a two-year-old PowerBook G4 is less insane than buying a Quad to replace a Dual-2GHz G5, I have sort of set a bar that will be hard to raise.

If you have a MacBook Pro, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the machine. Oh, and in case you're wondering—I still hate the name MacBook Pro.

Looking at the comments of this post about Geekbench, a benchmarking tool currently in beta (for both Windows and the Mac), it's apparent that, regardless of Apple's move to Intel chips, Mac and PC users will just never get along. I don't know why I thought the Intel switch would make a difference, but at least, I thought, we'll all be using the same chip so we can stop arguing about which machines are faster—there would be no more gigahertz arguments. But from those comments I would say I was living in a fantasy world.

I get into at least three Mac versus PC arguments at work every week. Most of them stem from really silly comments made by co-workers who are anti-Apple, to which I respond with (usually) legitimate arguments. My arguments are almost always met with sentiments like, "Oh, whatever, Apple sucks." It's hard to argue with someone when that's the entire basis of their opinion. A week or two ago, a co-worker of mine was complaining about having to download iTunes to get Quicktime for Windows. I told him he could click an alternate link to get just QT, but he said that was too much work. Then someone else started talking about how it was "absolutely ridiculous" that Apple would "bundle iTunes with Quicktime" and make you "install both to get one." I asked him why this bothered him so much and yet, on his Windows machine, he has Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, et cetera, most of which cannot be uninstalled at all, all bundled, no choice, installed by default, and he has no problem there. He said he could uninstall Internet Explorer if he really wanted to. I dared him to try.

The truth is, there's just no bridging certain gaps. Regardless of the chips, the hardware, the software—there will still be a divide. I'm trying to be better about not responding to bait at work. Trying to avoid getting into arguments on the subject because, really, it's just not worth it. I love my computers. In reality, that's all that matters to me. If you want to use a PC, use a PC. Want to use a Mac? Great, that's fine too (and we'll have more to talk about). The kind of back-and-forth in that post is the very definition of a useless argument.