Posts in the Mac Category

So there was a big deal made out of the fact that iChat AV 2.1 and AIM 5.5 can do videoconferencing.  Apple’s iChat page and a press release from AOL both proudly announce how the two can interoperate.  For example, here’s an excerpt from the AOL press release:

The new live video instant messaging feature in AIM 5.5 is fully compatible with iChat AV 2.1, Apple’s breakthrough video conferencing technology. Now AOL users from a PC can tap into the worldwide community of iChat AV users on Macs. iChat AV 2.1, the latest version of iChat AV was released by Apple today…

This would be ideal for me, as my father has AOL and the latest version of AIM for Windows XP.  He’s also moving to Florida, where he’ll have broadband.  So I view this as the perfect way for him to keep in closer touch with us, and to be able to see Carolyn as she grows, even though he’ll be living a thousand or so miles away.  When she gets older, it will be a way for her to keep in touch with him as well.

Now, neither Dad nor I own a camera yet, but we do both have microphones, so I thought I’d test out the audio chat capability.  So far, zippo.  He and I have both made sure we have the right versions of our client software.  We can’t establish an audio connection.

So, has anyone gotten this to actually work, and if so, how?  I’ve opened up all the ports I can find that even seem to be halfway relevant, as per an Apple KB article I found, and have checked my router to be sure it’s allowing traffic on those ports, but I still can’t establish an audio connection with AIM users.  Text chatting, no problem, but I don’t even get an audio-chat icon in my Buddy List.  I do get one for all the iChat users in my List, and have audio-chatted with a number of them.  Do we both have to own a camera for this to work?  I had figured, you know, if video conferencing was supported then audio conferencing must be supported, but perhaps that would be expecting things to make too much sense.

If anyone out there has a solution, or even a pointer to information about it, comments are most welcome.

• Chat Lunatique was published on Saturday, May 1st, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Mac category.
• There have been fifteen replies.

I’d just like to say that Mac OS X Hints is one of my favorite Web sites.  That’s where I found out how to hack the OS to fix the New Folder/New Finder Window keystroke combinations, for example.  Just a couple of days ago, I was wondering if there was a way to get the function keys to be actual function keys, instead of requiring use of the “fn” key to make them work.  As it turns out, there’s a new preference setting in 10.3.3, and I’ve already toggled mine.  Now I can play Myth again!  Not that I have any time to do so… and if I did, I’d be more likely to keep working toward the end of Metal Arms: Glitch in the System anyway.

• Functional Changes was published on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Mac category.
• There have been no replies.

CSS seems to be the theme of late, so I’ll keep running with it and bring back the meyerweb themes of old (as several people had e-mailed to ask if I could do).  They won’t be available for the general site; instead, I’ve set up an example page where you can play with them for yourself.  As noted, some images used in the themes are copyrighted, while others are not.  The thematic styles themselves are now explicitly under a Creative Commons license, so do as you please with the styles, assuming you stay within the license terms.  Which shouldn’t be difficult; it’s a straight NonCommercial license.

Two of my favorite movie-and-music moments happen in the same film: The Matrix (which itself inspired one of the old meyerweb themes).  The first is the sparring program scene, where the upbeat video-game-like music goes along perfectly with the video-game flow of the sequence.  The second is the lobby shootout scene, where the video-game-like music goes along… you know.  The music used for the lobby scene is “Spybreak!” by The Propellerheads, albeit an edited version.  In fact, the version on The Matrix‘s soundtrack CD is edited down from the original Propellerheads version, which is almost twice as long, off of the album “Decksanddrumsandrockandroll”.  A while back, I assembled a personal mix called “Der Funkengrüven”, and it ended with the soundtrack version of “Spybreak!”, the only one I had available.

I’ve always wanted to use the album version instead, but I was never sure if it was worth it to buy the CD just for that song.  So I dropped into the iTunes store, called up the album, listened to the high-quality half-minute excerpts available there, and have decided to buy the album.  My only real dilemma now is whether to buy it via the iTunes store for $9.99, or to spring for a couple of extra bucks to get the physical disc in a jewel case and everything at Buy.com.  It’s my first real experience with the iTunes store, and I have to echo what everyone else has been saying: Apple got it right.  The store just works.  I wish the excerpts were a little longer, say 45 seconds or even a full minute, but that’s just picking a nit.  If I didn’t harbor lingering affection for owning albums in a physical form, I’d already have paid to download it, and I still might.  For an oldster like me, that’s saying something.

Sadly, I can’t use the iTunes store to replace my long-lost copy of “The Bobs“, but maybe I could use the store to acquire some Neil Young music…

• Thematic was published on Sunday, March 21st, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Mac categories.
• There have been no replies.

When I praised Apple yesterday for their repair service, I didn’t realize just how much praise was due.  I was so excited to get my laptop back with working hinges, I hadn’t looked closely at the rest of the exterior.  As TiBook owners know, the finish has a tendency to scratch.  I’m not sure why that is, although I’m sure a Google search could yield all manner of answer, but the upshot is that the back of the display panel had a few nicks and dings; even a small dimple that prompted someone to ask if the laptop had stopped a bullet for me.

Now it doesn’t.  The unknown technician replaced not only the hinges, but also the whole panel backing… and maybe even the whole display panel, screen and all.  Now the machine looks as sharp and smooth as the day I bought it.

Let me be clear: those scrapes had nothing to do with the hinge problem.  They were the result of “normal wear and tear.”  There was absolutely no obligation on Apple’s part to do anything about them, any more than it would be Dell’s responsibility to replace a plastic surface on a Windows laptop that had gotten a scratch after half a year of ownership.  While fixing the major problem, the unknown technician noticed that there was something else that could be fixed, and just went ahead and did it.  No fuss.  It wasn’t even noted on my repair history.  It was just done.

I’ve never been sorry to buy Apple products.  Now I’m actually proud to be a customer.

As a postscript, I’d like to point out that mine is an older-model Powerbook.  The new ones have a much more scratch-resistant surface, and a totally different hinge system.  On the new ones, there’s a single large and sturdy hinge that runs most of the width of the machine, occupying about the same amount of space as the gap between my hinges.  They have other improvements too, like a backlit keyboard and ports on the sides instead of in the back, and I wish I could have waited another two months to buy my laptop so I’d have one of the new ones.  Nothing wrong with mine—the new ones are just cooler.

For those of you using an RSS aggregator, you’re probably going to see all of my entries turn up as new a few more times.  I’m adjusting the way I produce the feeds to include an indication of the post length and the categories to which the post belongs as text at the end of the feed description.  I may also modify it to include the first sentence of each paragraph instead of just the first sentence of the entire post.

Incidentally, a few of you have asked why I don’t provide the complete post content in my feeds.  For me, it’s a bandwidth issue.  I was looking over the access statistics for January, and was astonished to find that the two RSS feeds together were accessed over 189,000 times.  The home page, by comparison, was hit over 53,000 times.  The latter accounts for 9.3% of the outgoing bandwidth; the two feeds together add up to 1.54%.  If I were to have the feeds contain full posts, that would increase RSS-feed bandwidth by an order of magnitude at least.  It would also reduce the number of 304 (Not Modified) responses the server returns for the RSS files, because I do go back and correct spelling errors and such.  The feeds don’t have to be updated when I do, but they would if I provided full post content.

I do have sympathy for those of you using aggregators like NetNewsWire (I’m using the Lite version, myself) and FeedDemon.  I’d have more sympathy for LiveJournal users if the LJ server returned 304s, but it never does, forcing me to download the whole feed every time I ask for updates.  So I did consider the syndication experience from the user’s point of view.  I also have to consider the impact on the server, and frankly, given the way RSS is designed, the potential impact is just too high for me to move to full-content feeds.

So now you know.

• Exceeding Expectations was published on Tuesday, February 17th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Mac and RSS categories.
• There have been no replies.

Ordinarily, you’d think that an almost weeklong absence indicates a major project, or maybe an illness, or some other major life event.  Not this time.  This time it was a major computer hardware failure.  Not a hard drive, nor a monitor, nor anything you might usually suspect.  No, this was far more basic.

Not too long after I posted the previous entry, I was working on my TiBook in the living room.  Kat asked me to get something—probably a milk blanket or a pacifier or something baby related—and so I put the laptop, still open, down on the ottoman.

There was a sharp cracking sound.

As it turned out, it had actually been two cracking sounds.  Both hinges that connect the laptop’s display panel to the body had snapped clean away from the panel.  Longtime readers may recall I had a similar experience about this time last year while in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Apparently that wasn’t some bizarre and isolated incident.  In both cases, I had let go of the laptop panel when it was an inch or two above a well-padded surface.  In both cases, something had given way.  Amazingly, in both cases the laptop screen continued to function.  The extra problem with this latest breakage was that since both hinges had failed, there was nothing to hold up the screen.

Luckily, a few months back an Apple Store opened up in a new mall about five miles from my house.  I’d been meaning to get up there and check it out; last Wednesday, I finally did.  I would have preferred better circumstances, obviously.  So I took my broken laptop to the Genius Bar.  As I opened it up and laid it flatter than a TiBook should really ever be, a guy standing nearby said, “Gosh, I’ve always wished I could open my PowerBook up that far.”

“I can show you how,” I said with an arched eyebrow.  He declined the offer.

So after looking over the whole machine and hearing my description of how it had happened, the Genius’ guess was that the hinges had been over-torqued.  They had been rather stiff ever since I got the machine, actually; it was almost impossible to open the laptop with one hand.  So Alan (the Genius) made some notes to the effect that it was a hardware failure, and not the result of abuse, and that it was a covered repair.  I changed the administrator password so they could get to the desktop if need be, shut down the system, and then handed the machine over to be shipped to a repair center.

It arrived back at the Apple Store today.  That’s five days to ship, repair, and return.  It’s one more day than the last time, but there was a weekend involved.  The new hinges are a lot smoother than the old ones, too.  I’m once more impressed by the speed and service Apple provides.  So thanks to Alan at the Genius Bar, to the unknown technician who repaired my poor baby’s spine, and to Apple for continuing to make me glad I’m a customer.  Of course I’d rather the laptop had never had any problems, but there will always be problems.  The mark of a good company is that they address those inevitable problems professionally and with a minimum of hassle for the customer.  As far as I’m concerned, that describes Apple in full.

• Unhinged was published on Monday, February 16th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Mac category.
• There have been no replies.

Ever since the day after Carolyn came home, our cat Gravity has mostly ignored Carolyn’s presence.  We’d been somewhat concerned that there would be hostility between them in the months to come, which wouldn’t really end well because Gravity still has claws.  Those concerns are now, for the most part, erased.  This afternoon, we discovered that not only has Gravity gotten used to Carolyn’s presence, but now regards her as a part of the family.

We know this because Gravity left Carolyn a gift—a freshly killed mouse, lying on the floor right next to the bassinet where Carolyn sleeps during the day.    From what I understand, this is typically how mother-cats feed their children, and start training them to hunt for their own food.  I wished there were some way to communicate to Gravity that she could have her hunting spoils back, since Carolyn’s fairly well fed even without rodent supplements.  When you think about all this, it’s really rather touching, in a morbid way.  Kat and I both got a pretty good laugh out of it.

Of course, then I had to dispose of the carcass.

So Safari 1.2 is out, and of course was released just two days after I changed designs.  So the fix for the first-letter bug that occurred with “Thoughts From Eric” in the previous design is in place, but you can’t see it working here.  On the other hand, my recently constructed test page demonstrating Safari 1.1’s bugs with :hover and generated content show that 1.2 fixed the problem.  So, that’s cool.

What is even cooler is John Gruber’s in-depth exploration of the OmniWeb beta.  The “tabbed” interface, although not what I personally think of as tabbed, is still a welcome addition; I’ve found that I basically can’t live without tabs.  (I do a sweep of all my regularly read blogs by opening them all in tabs, via a bookmark group.)  What sounds really outstanding, though, is OmniWeb’s workspaces and site-specific preferences.  It’s probably enough for me to tolerate the obsolescence of the rendering engine, which is equivalent to Safari 1.0, but we’ll see.  You should see, too—go read John’s review of the browser, which is comprehensive and detailed.  Truly excellent.

Complete topic shift: back in September, Molly was aghast at the Quizno’s television commercial featuring an adult male human suckling at the teat of a wolf.  Well, their new ad campaign has launched, and if anything it’s more wrong.  Sure, it’s a complete ripoff of the Spongmonkeys, mostly because it turns out the same guy did both.  Warning: if you follow the Spongmonkeys link, I am not responsible for any psychological damage you may suffer, but it is very much like the commercial.

Is it just me, or are commercials in general getting a lot weirder of late?

• Love, Feline Style was published on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, Carolyn, Humor, and Mac categories.
• There have been no replies.

At the Web Design Meetup last week, Warren expressed annoyance that there are a limited number of fraction character entities.  I pointed out that you can use MathML to represent any fraction you like, but of course it requires a browser that supports MathML.  Those are kind of rare.

So absent MathML, it’s easy to get a nice presentation of, say, one quarter (¼, a.k.a. character entity ¼), but how do you get a similarly nice rendering of thirteen thirty-seconds?  As it turns out, you can at least get close with a bit of structural massaging.  (That sounds so much better than “structural hacking,” doesn’t it?)  Here’s what I came up with:

span.frac sup, span.frac sub {font-size: 75%;
  vertical-align: baseline;
  position: relative;}
span.frac sup {top: -0.5em; left: 0.15em;}
span.frac sub {left: -0.15em;}

17 <span class="frac"><sup>13</sup><b>/</b><sub>32</sub></span>

That results in the following, which I recreated using inline styles just to make life easier when I archive this post:

17 ¹³/₃₂

Not too bad, at least in Safari, Mozilla, and IE5/Mac, but not great.  In his own efforts along these lines, Warren uncovered the fraction-slash character entity (⁄), which could help improve the result.  I also notice that my numbers are bigger than the numbers in the original entity.  So I adjusted my styles, with the following result.

span.frac sup, span.frac sub {font-size: 60%;
  font-weight: bold;
  vertical-align: baseline;
  position: relative;}
span.frac sup {top: -0.5em; left: 0.1em;}

17 ¹³⁄₃₂

So let’s compare the one-quarter entity to the styled version.

¼   ¹⁄₄

There are font-family differences, I admit, but they’re pretty close to each other in the browsers I mentioned before.

The problem, really, is the markup involved, but I don’t see how one can really reduce it any further.  MathML’s representation of fractions isn’t noticeably less weighty, really, not even counting possibly required namespacing, which I’m not going to include here:

<mfrac><mi>1</mi><mrow>4</mrow></mfrac>

I suppose that if I wanted to show arbitrary fractions a lot, I could represent them in MathML and then transform the math markup into HTML before delivering it to browsers.  I don’t have a lot of need for such fractions, at least not so far, but it was an interesting exercise.

Now for a little cleanup with regard to previous posts.

• Chuq pointed out that iLife was never totally free, but that Apple was allowing updates to old versions at no cost.  In my case, iLife appeared to be free because it came installed on my OS X laptop, so I never overtly surrendered money for the product.  I suppose the cost is somehow built into the cost of the operating system.  Regardless, I still think that there was a bit of baiting and switching in letting people download major upgrades at no cost and then closing the gate.  I guess what I want is consistency; I didn’t realize I was benefitting from lax license enforcement, if that’s what it was.  I thought Apple was just making decent tools available for free to Mac users in order to draw more people to the Mac.  That would make some business sense, even if it isn’t what they were doing.  After all, I haven’t heard any plans to charge for upgrades to iTunes, and I don’t expect that I will.  Apple may be many things, but grossly stupid isn’t generally one of them.

  At any rate, I’d still be interested in paying for just an iPhoto upgrade, especially since I looked at some programs readers e-mailed me to suggest, and they were all either not what I wanted, or too darned expensive.  I imagine there are people who would pay to download GarageBand as a standalone, for example.

• It turns out that there are a number of demonstrations of using behaviors to get PNG transparency in IE/Win.  Here are a few that people sent me:

  • PNG Behavior Demo from WebFX
  • Sleight from Youngpup
  • Explorer versus PNG (AlphaImageLoader) which offers the most complete explanation of what’s happening, but employs language that might not be work-safe—not a condemnation, just a warning

  I’m sure there must be others.  Google could tell me, but I feel overloaded already.

Carolyn turns six weeks old tomorrow.  I’ll have to find a good picture to post, especially since so many people have asked for them.  She’ll get her own page sooner or later, but I’ve had other and much more pressing things on my plate.  As long as I have it ready by the time she wants to start blogging…

• Fractional Styles was published on Wednesday, January 14th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Mac, and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

From my point of view, the biggest news from Steve Jobs’ keynote this morning was the announcement of iLife.  More specifically, it was the new version of iPhoto, which I’d really been hoping would be announced.  And so it was.  It’s much faster, more capable, enables photo sharing with Rendezvous—just about everything I’d hoped would happen.  Unfortunately, it also came with something I hadn’t expected: a price tag.

I have no problems with Apple charging money for a piece of software.  What bothers me is the practice of releasing it for free and then, without warning, bundling it into a commercial suite.  If they’d charged for it all along, that would be fine.  If we’d known ahead of time that it would be free until Apple felt it was a product worth selling, at which time it would stop being free, fine.  But that was never made clear, if it was even mentioned at all, and I find that annoying.

Further exacerbating the problem is that of the five iLife components, I have use for only two of them, iPhoto and iTunes, and the former of them is (for the moment) free.  iDvd, iMovie, and Garage Band are completely useless to me as I have neither a video camera nor a garage band.  So if I really want iPhoto 4, I have to pay $49 for it and a bunch of unnecessary code.  That doesn’t make sense to me.  Hopefully, Apple will offer the iLife components separately, so that I could pay $9.99 for iPhoto and ignore the rest.  Or, better still, they’ll release an update to the free iPhoto that fixes the sluggishness but doesn’t include the other cool stuff in the commercial version.

Alternatively, I could hunt for a freeware replacement to iPhoto.  At least one colleague has asked me why I use iPhoto at all, given its slowness and the bloated data files and directory structures it creates.  The thing is, I really like the way iPhoto allows you to modify photos while preserving the originals, and the way album organization is handled.  The transition effect in the slideshows is pretty nifty, too.  In general, the whole iPhoto interface and feature set works pretty well for me—it’s just the lack of speed that’s a problem.  Well, that and the lack of smoothly resized exports, but I’ve complained about that in the past.  If I could find something equivalent to iPhoto, or at least darned close to it, I’d probably switch.  If no such application exists, then I’d love to see some open-source coders get together and create one.  Any takers?

• iRant, But Not Too Much was published on Tuesday, January 6th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Mac category.
• There have been no replies.