techno.blog("Dion")

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.

iCal is a nice simple and clean program. However, it restricts me in a way that drives me nuts.

iCal seems to think that you can either publish a calendar for others, or subscribe to one, but not both.

This is frustrating as I have shared calendars that I really wish could be updated by multiple people. iCal doesn’t like that.

This leaves you with work arounds:

• Just use Sunbird, as that use case works just fine
• Have separate calendars for each person, and use the same colors so it LOOKS the same on the calendar

Come on Apple! :)

I had to visit the Apple Genius Bar for the first time today. The reason was that my left shift key on the MacBook Pro wasn’t working well. I was dreading having to mail in the machine, so I was worried that the guy behind the desk would be able to do jack.

After setting up a time via the “concierge” they managed to bypass me, although I was there in the store. I wasn’t allowed to sit at the bar when my name was #1 because that wasn’t done:

“Take a step away sir. We will call you later”

The experience was a little like seeing the IT guy from the british version of The Office. Man they thought they were important. Geniuses.

SIDENOTE: I still laugh at the word genius. A well known Java speaker told me that he was fantastic at Trivial Pursuit and had never lost a game of the “Genius” edition ;)

The good news was that they could take the macbook pro backstage (this was the first they had seen from the public) and were able to take apart the new keys and fix a broken bit of plastic that was causing the problems.

One of the non-geniuses had a great service ethic, and I ended up heading out with a 30″. Finally, I can power it. Finally, I have my ideal dev environment.

• Left side of screen: development
• Right side of screen: testing (e.g. testing in a browser, running the Swing app, whatever)

Mmmm

So far I have been pretty happy with the MacBook Pro. I have been waiting a long time to have an OSX laptop that matches my PC laptop speed.

It isn’t all honey though. I have run into a few issues:

• Left shift key was a bit sticky at first (I really don’t want to have to send this back!)
• Of course, a lot of software hasn’t been updated to Universal Binary yet. E.g. fink
• A few strange errors. For example, when running % svn checkouts I sometimes get IO errors which is very annoying

I was expecting a few tough times, yet over time it will only get better.

I am just happy to be able to run IntelliJ IDEA with snappiness.

And iPhoto does scroll like butter.

There is talk of a new Video iPod that will have the touch screen from the pattents.

This is what I want for my phone.

I want an entire side of the phone to just be a touchscreen display.

I want to be able to touch a button and the screen can look like a phone, or have a keyboard, or …

This is the convergence device that I have been holding out for. Up until now I keep chosing “just a damn phone” rather than a bulky thing that I am not sure about.

The iPod Video came… and everyone is talking about it.

At first I thought “yeah! I want one!”, but I am trying to work out the use case when I would use the 320×240 screen to watch video.

So, I automatically get video from er er my Tivo lets say… and can watch anything I want…. but would I?

Steve Jobs in action

Front row was very cool. It could be another kick for vidcasting, and when everyone is asking “what about the content” our vid bloggers are getting a new way to send us their content.

We subscribe, and there it is on on TV. TiVo really need to get into RSS reading.

Microsoft has gotten into the Widget/Gadget DHTML component game.

We have the players:

• Yahoo! Widgets (formerly Konfabulator)
• Apple Dashboard
• Microsoft Gadgets

You want to write a cool dhtml widget for your desktop, what do you choose? Partly it will depend on your OS of course, but what about cross platform via Yahoo! Widgets?

Imagine if we had ONE standard, so you could write one widget that worked in all docks and platforms?

Sure, this would mean that you couldn’t tie into the OS specific side of things…

It is cool to see there is an Apple developer who spent his 20% time on a Mac OS X app: Gmail Helper:

Greg Miller: I am a Mac user. Most of my friends are Mac users. After a little coaxing, most of my family are now Mac users. So I decided to spend 20% of my time here on a small application that may help all of the Mac users in my life: a Gmail Notifier for Mac OS X.

The app is small and nonintrusive, but hopefully still has all the features a Mac user would want. With it you can:

- view messages without opening a browser
- open Gmail in your browser without forcing you to log in again
- make Gmail your default email program
- even more…

Though this is the first, it won’t be the last native Mac application that Google delivers. So please, Mac users, stay tuned!

How about just plugging into Growl?

Ben sent this as the most obviously photoshopped picture :)