techno.blog("Dion")

At first it seemed obvious that I would get an iPhone. It is the phone I have wanted for years.

Yet, over the last couple of weeks as details come out about it, I am souring on it.

The biggest issue is that it may not allow any third party applications.

I expected the opposite Java, Objective-C, and even Ajax apps. A huge ecosystem would come about as you could now develop for the coolest phone (as well as others).

To hear Steve b.s. about third party apps not being worthy (killing the phone? hammering the network????) is painful and FUD.

I love my Apple products, but although I enjoy their software, it is third party software that really makes my Mac’s hum. Would I be on an Apple if I didn’t have Quicksilver, NetNewsWire, Textmate, insert the rest of this list?

No. There are always going to be better applications built outside of your company. Let the platform lose and see what amazing things people build Steve. If not, the iPhone will be eclipsed by copy cats that do.

I was just caught out by an apparant long standing bug with apple display calibration and fast user switching.

On a new laptop the colors looks all bleached and crappy. I went into the Display prefs and generic RGB was selected instead of the usual ‘Color LCD’.

I hope they fix this one. Painful.

The migration assistant that comes with OS X is too good. It makes life so tempting when you get a new machine. Hmm, “I could be right back where I was if I just migrate everything”.

The .app applications and plist files make life easy for that application to do its work of course. No registry fluff to try to merge here.

There are items that you will miss though. Did you tweak /etc/hosts on your machine? Change the lookupd order?

There are many little things like this that you will find over time.

I used to look forward to getting a new computer as a forced spring cleaning. It would take me awhile to custom migrate applications over, but it felt like life was cleaner because of it.

So, to migrate or not to migrate….

As someone who has to take screenshots for blogs all the time, I have often wondered if there was a better solution to do the simple tweaks to the images that I do.

The Mac makes it trivial to grab the shots themselves, but Photoshop is too heavy for most ot the tweaks, GraphicConverter doesn’t quite do enough, so I think that Skitch may have the right combination.

Small, simple, does something you need a little better.

How long until Billy G comes out with a 2 button iPhone? :)

• I have wanted a phone that is basically all screen forever. They did it
• Running OS X (Cocoa developer rejoice)
• Will Flash/Apollo run on that bad boy soon?
• How many iPods will be on eBay today?
• I would hate to be in the room w/ Bill G watching this. Nice try Zune :)

We get 2 hours of Steve Jobs next week.

Everyone is talking iTV and iPhone, but I am more keen to get surprised by something wacky like the GPS rumour. Sure, these surprises may not be as practical, but they are fun.

I hope that Steve is back on form next week, and we are left saying “bravo”.

Oh, and a 50″ monitor would be nice too.

I was watching a friend working on her Mac. She was cursing as a ton of spam snuck right through the default junk filter that you get with Mail.app.

In the Apple software list that I published in the past, Spam Sieve was there with the comment “Waiting to see if needed”.

When I first started to use Mail.app, it was pretty good at coping with spam. It caught all but a few. However, a few months ago it couldn’t handle it anymore. A set of spam such as the darn stock images would get right through. This is when I jumped in to get Spam Sieve and it has taken care of the issue.

At this point I don’t know how you can cope with the normal filter as it just doesn’t work. I hope that Apple has put in some time on that for future Mail versions. Spam is such as PITA that you need to update your barriers regularly, so to do a good job you need the mail app provider, or plugin provider, to release constant updates that take into account the newest baddie.

What a shame.

The OS X team seems to be moving away from 3d-ish stuff in Leopard and iApps.

Why wait for Leopard when you can use a simple utility called UNO to unify your look and feel (and tweak it for various components).

(Updated shared list of Mac OS X applications)

Ben has been talking about OS X sleepage on the MacBook Pros.

By default, sleeping causes hibernation (save to disk). This has caused one issue for me when the machine didn’t come back happy. It is also a lot slower than my powerbook that keeps things in memory.

Ben had the problem that since the MBP does have the backup battery, when he turned off his computer it all went away.

This is why I flip on hibernate mode before I take out the battery:

alias hibernateon=’sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 1′
alias hibernateoff=’sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0′

• on == it will save to disk (slower but safer-ish)
• off == keep in memory baybee (fast but don’t lose power)

Update

It turns out that option 3 can give you the best of both worlds. It will save to disk but use RAM if possible. If you lose power you are not dead in the water, but if you are powered up it is still fast.

Although I am still enjoying the MacBook Pro, that doesn’t mean that it and Mac OS X are perfect.

Today I will pick on Apple Mail.

• Apple likes nice widescreen monitors so you would assume that Apple Mail would have support for widescreen mode (a la NewNewsWire, Outlook, etc). I want 3 vertical panes, not a horizontal split pane!
• Labels: I don’t want to have to install MailTags to get tagging. I want it to be builtin and part of the UI
• Let me toggle threading with a simple keystroke (without making me set one up)
• The spam filter is poor. You need spam sieve
• Roll up, Roll up: I want to be able to set parent folders to show me all of the mail in siblings (a la NNW). Inbox does it.

It is a nice simple client, but it lacks the advanced tools that I really want.

However, I know that Apple keeps updating its tools, so here is to v3.