It's Been A Long Time

I haven't posted in a long time because I have been consumed with all the capabilities of my new iMac (digital video with iMovie) and have played too much World of WarCraft. This game is all consuming and I haven't been this addicted to a game since maybe Legend of Zelda on the original NES. I tried Star Wars Galaxies, it doesn't even compare. WoW feels like a revolution in gaming, SWG was just crap by comparison, which is really hard to say for a Star Wars fanboy that relished the idea of being a character permanently in that galaxy far, far away. Now if they only had a client for the Mac, I would probably give it another try since Jump to Lightspeed finally added space combat to the game.

iMac G5...First Impressions

When Apple announced the iMac G5, I was immediately in love. This machine looks like one of Wired's artifacts from the future. The iMac G4 hit my usage pattern right now in the sweet-spot. I have limited space to put a machine, but I wanted more than iBook power for less than PowerBook or PowerMac money. The new iMac was perfect. I picked mine up in at the Apple Store in Corte Madera, CA. This is the middle of the road model, which means: - 17" widescreen - 1.8 GHz G5 - 256 MB RAM - 80 GB HD - I added an Airport Extreme card In Short: The machine is fantastic. Out Of Box Experience One of the most impressive parts of the iPod experience is opening the box, you know you are getting quality, the box is meticulous. The iMac G5 also has an excellent out of box experience. After getting all the pieces out, first thing I did was open the back panel and install the Airport Extreme card. This is amazingly simple, and I just had to stare at the interior of machine for a few minutes, everything is so incredibly put together. Installing the card is a snap, even a little easier than in the iBook. I set the iMac on my desk and I again marvel at how well the unit balances. I plug the power cable in, mouse and keyboard (I use the Microsoft Intellimouse Optical, more on this bit later), and away I go. First Boot I can immediately see the iMac is a lot faster than my iBook G4. The system starts and launches into the new Setup Assistant. I had read about this and really wanted to use the Setup Assistant, but I have no Firewire cable, or so I think. I forget that the iSight uses a regular Firewire cable to connect to the Mac, so I actually don't run the Setup Assistant until after the system is up and I have moved some files over from the iBook using WiFi. Once the system is up, I run some apps and again I am really impressed by how fast the system is compared to the iBook. I love it. And After A Couple Days of Usage I finally realize I can use the iSight firewire cable and start Setup Assistant to copy all my stuff off the iBook onto the iMac. This process is tremendously easy, with a few minor unexpected results. First, there is an option to move Network settings from the old machine to the new machine, but no explanation as to what this means. It turns out it copies the machine name over from the old machine, so I have to rename the new machine back to the name I had given it, no biggie. Since I was on the iBook before, I had the battery meter in the menubar. The iMac has no battery, but the meter is still in the menubar. The Energy System Preferences don't contain an option to show or not the battery meter on a system without a battery. I command-drag the meter out of the menubar, no problem.

Star Wars Battlefront...On Second Thought

I blogged 9/23/04 (click on this post title) about Star Wars Battlefront on the Xbox. I finished the single player over the weekend, and I had a great time. But as I said, I got the game for the Xbox Live battles, and that has been a thorough disappointment. LucasArts released a patch about a week after the game came out which supposedly fixed some problems, but in the successive times I have played the game, Xbox Live plays just sucks. Servers can't be found, after you find a server you get dropped, if you actually get in a game, performance is atrocious. I might give it a few more shots, but with Halo 2 fast approaching, this one might find itself on eBay mighty quick.

Could the iPhoto Picture Store be far off?

With rumors of a 60GB iPod with Photo features already in production for release before the holidays and an update to iPhoto to enable synching capabailities just like iTunes, I started thinking about the big picture on what Apple could do with iPhoto. iPhoto is currently all about storing and sharing pictures you take with friends and family. iTunes is all about storing and listening to music you have purchased. What if Apple created an iPhoto Picture Store? I am thinking of iTunes Music Store but with "digital prints" from professional artists. I am a huge fan of Digital Blasphemy. The site contains both free desktop wallpaper and also members content. Members is a subscription based thing, and I don't need Yet Another Subscription™. If I could buy individual pictures for decent prices, lets just say, $0.99, I would have bought a bunch of pictures already. Another example is the Roger Dean Store. I don't know if $9.95 is worth it for a pack of wallpaper, but I surely would have bought a few wallpapers already at $0.99. Just think of all the prints in college book stores, print shops, and framing shops that could be rebuilt for desktop wallpaper use. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. The iPhoto Picture Store could also provide print to canvas or poster services. Apple already has a photo book ordering service, they could put high-quality framing services available in the store. For the consumer, you buy rights to the print, and you can always get another size digital print. I think you probably need a different file format because artists will want DRM, though this is debatable because artists like the examples I mentioned already sell their work without DRMed files. Licensing art for sale through the iPhoto Picture Store must be easier for Apple than licensing music. As a regular end-user, I could also upload my own photos to sell. Think of iMixes, but I think Apple has to approve you picts for sale to avoid the pornography issue. Effectively Apple becomes your gallery, so maybe it's like the iTunes Affiliate program, not everyone can try and sell their own photos. You also can provide subscriptions, perhaps to unlimited numbers of photos, but also to individual artists. Two different price points would obviously make sense here. You could then set your screen saver to the iPhoto Picture Store subscription and get constantly updated pictures. Can Apple make money doing this? I think they can because the licensing fees have to be smaller than licensing music. Will this help sell PhotoPods? This is more difficult to say, but it takes buying art in all forms to an innovative new level that opens up to just about anyone. Storing and sharing digital art with the PhotoPod would be a breeze, so I think it increases the value of the device. If Apple does launch a PhotoPod, I think it pretty much means that iPhoto gets ported to Windows XP. That by itself is pretty intriguing because that's almost half the iLife suite. I wonder if this counts as Prior Art when contesting a patent.... :')

Rumored PhotoPod vs. Portable Media Center

Paul Thurrott asks Apple fans if we think the rummored photo iPod is "just right" compared to MS Portable Media Center based devices. Here is my response. It's obvious that viewing photos on a 1.8" (digital cameras) or 2" screen (iPod 4G) is too small to see detail. The 3.8" screen of the Creative Zen Portable Media Center is large enough for viewing some photo detail, but you are giving up a lot on the form factor. Here is a picture of the device: This beast is designed to be held with 2 hands. The iPod is designed to be held and all controls usable with just one hand. The Zen is far larger than even the speculated dimensions on the PhotoPod, which is designed to fit in a pocket, not a backpack. The Zen only has a 20GB HD, the PhotoPod is going to have a 60GB HD. The Zen has between 7-22 hours battery life, the iPod 4G has a 12 hour battery, I think it's likely that the PhotoPod has the same, but you never know, Apple may have a trick up its sleeve. No question the iPod is not going to do video or TV shows, but I question the usefulness of these features in such a small form factor. Everyone has music and pictures, taking video or recorded TV is still not as commonly done as listening to music and viewing photos with friends and family. I am curious what the sales are like on the whole Portable Media Center category.

iSight and iChat AV...First Impressions

I have been using the video and audio chat features of MSN Messenger on Windows for 4-5 years to keep in touch with remote relatives. My experience with the software has always been mixed. Sometimes it would work perfectly, other times I would see it be unable to make connections, dropped connections, poor audio, dropped video, etc. etc. I don't totally blame MSN Messenger for this, this stuff was definitely bleeding edge, but my expectations were always low for the user experience. And then I tried iChat AV and a friend's iSight. Wow! The video quality was phenominal, my first reaction was: "That is getting close to TV quality". The other truly surprising thing was that audio just worked and was in sync with the picture. MSN Messenger always makes you run through some calibration wizard, boy did my parents hate that! But this stuff would be totally useless if iChat AV didn't interoprate with AIM. Let's face it, an IM network is most valuable when you have a lot of people on, you get the network effect. If iChat was Mac to Mac only, the iSight would never have come home. So my complete smoke test was iChat AV to AIM on Windows, and I thought this was a good enough experience for the relatives. Since I recently completed elimination of all PC hardware from my home computing experience, I had to acquire a webcam for the Mac, and my positive experience with the iSight test made the decision easy. After I got the relatives setup on AIM, we just start making connections and it just works. Using iChat and iSight does consume all my outbound DSL bandwidth, so I might need an outbound bandwidth upgrade. Getting this whole rig setup was really done to keep the grandparents of my 4 month old son happy, one set is in FL and the other in PA, I am in CA. And I may just have started the ball rolling on another switcher. My mother-in-law using the AIM client only gets a small window of incoming video. When I told here that iChat can go Full Screen and the video if you have an iSight looks great, she is definitely enticed. This would be where my other suggestion that Apple needs a headless sub-$1000 machine makes so much sense, my son's grandparents would have already replaced their PC towers with Macs.

Which browser to use on the Mac: Safari or Firefox?

I have been using Mozilla Firefox on both Windows XP and Mac OS X since the 1.0 Preview Release came out. On Windows, I wholeheartedly recommend Firefox over IE 6.0 SP2. I have one caveat though. If you have to work routinely with a lot of Microsoft specific properties (SharePoint, Microsoft.com), you are probably better off leaving IE as your default and manually choosing Firefox whenever you can. For non-work browsing on Windows, I always recommend Firefox and it's the reason I have the button on the bottom right hand bar of this blog. On the Mac, the browser recommendation is not so cut and dry. I almost always use Safari for a few reasons: - I like the elegance of the interface - All my bookmarks are already defined in Safari - I want sites to know that I am on the Mac, in case they don't break out Firefox for different platforms - Safari performs better for me. I do however have to use Firefox from time to time, mostly because some sites work on Firefox (www.citibank.com) that don't work in Safari. The reverse is also true, www.sharebuilder.com was an example I ran into the other day. I love the idea of having the same browser on both platforms, but it seems like I will be using 3 browser for the forseeable future.

World of Warcraft Open Beta

I blogged about the World of Warcraft Stress Test Beta here Just checked out the beta website, www.worldofwarcraft.com, and the Open Beta is going to start soon!!! I can't wait.

Why Apple needs a "headless" Mac

Chris Seibold on AppleMatters recently wrote why we won't see a "headless" Mac. I recently posted why I Apple needs a sub-$1000 Mac. I expand on that a bit in the comment, reproduced here, that I posted on AppleMatters in response to how unlikely they view the "headless" Mac:

But I disagree with your conclusions. The point of a low cost Mac is not to maintain profit margins, those will have to be sacrified somewhat, but to grow market share at the expense of profits. Growing share diffuses one of the main criticisms from PC partisans, and it's also a defensive strategy as Linux desktop share grows. If Apple can get their share above 5%, the positive feedback loop of share driving software development decision efforts will guarantee the continued existance of the Mac platform. Apple needs to maintain existing app develeopers and expand the pool. A large percentage of growth in the PC market is coming from the low-end, and though a $1299 iMac is close, sub-$1000 is the magic number. I am not saying Apple is doomed if they don't get into the low-end market with a more PC-like headless machine, but I don't see them achieveing significant share gains without it.

GDI+ Detection Tool...Horrible

MS04-028 is perhaps one of the worst security vulnerabilites discovered in the recent past. Windows XP SP2 fixes the hole in Windows, but it seems like the afflicted DLL, gdiplus.dll, is everywhere. On Sans.org, there is an open letter to Microsoft about how poor an implementation the GDI+ detection tool his. I just ran this tool and told my system is vulnerable, here is a UI fragment: When you click on the "Yes" button, the user expects they will see what they have to do to cleanup the latest security mess. Which takes you to this page: How to Update Your Computer with the JPEG Processing (GDI+) Security Update Step 1 on the page above is to run Office Update Office Update tells me I have no patches to install, so I go back to the GDI+ Security Update page and I read it again. I have nothing left to do because I am on Windows XP. Quick recap: I patched everything up, and the GDI+ Detection Tool still tells me I am vulnerable, but I am left with no instructions on how to fix it. Good Job Microsoft! I am not the only one, I am starting to get questions from users on this too.