So. While the whole tech/blog world is caught up in Apple’s brilliantly orchestrated storm of leaks, guessing games, waaaay-too-elaborate renders/mock-ups and general breathlessness about the heavily rumoured but never officially acknowledged Tablet/Slate computer I’m sitting here cursing this piece-of-crap operating system they pooped out last year. Yeah, I’m talking about Snow Leopard (hereon called Slow Leopard)

Wasn’t this supposed to be The world’s best operating system, finely tuned?

Why has boot time gone from a snappy 25 odd seconds to a minute or more? Why does Slow Leopard need to restart every couple of days when Leopard could easily go for weeks without a reboot?

Why do both my screens get a grey tint and my keyboard and mouse stop working when I try and logout instead of restarting to save time? Which then necessitates a hold-down-the-power-button-and-hear-the-sickening-clunk-of-the-hard-drive as the system shuts off while you get Windows ME flashbacks.

And all this grief for what? No new features besides the ability to play movie clips in the icon itself! Thanks Cupertino. Thats real useful. Slow claps for you. Windows users… eat your heart out.

Is anyone else hating Snow Leopard as much as I am? Is there anyone else who just wants the 10.6.3 update to fix the myriad bugs that make Slow Leopard painful to use? Are there other users who don’t give a flying fuck about a freakin’ tablet computer and just want their expensive aluminium (yes thats the way the English speaking world spells that word) bodied computers to just work, as advertised?

Also, Superdrives. Fuck Superdrives. Mine seem to die on me every couple of months at the exact time I need to burn a few copies of my showreel to send out. This has happened so often that staff at my Apple reseller avert their faces and try not to make eye contact with me every time I walk in with a broken Mac. I feel like it’s my fault sometimes.

Anyhoo…. Rant over. Happy thoughts now.

There is nothing that can cheer you up after spending hours stuck in traffic like looking over into the next car and seeing that a girl you used to date looks like she has spent her life, post-you, stuffing fatty foods into her face with both hands.

Fucking.           Priceless.

You may have come across these warning flags, quite often if you search for warez or hacked software or serial numbers or porn. (I’m just sayin’) Google’s search result page will have a link with a warning saying “This site may harm your computer” more than once and it refuses to link you to the site directly. If you are sure you’re safe (on a Mac) or if you really want to see ‘Teh nekkid ladies’ you have to manually copy and paste the web address or URL into a fresh browser window and go there at your own risk.

Many people do this. I have done this very often too. You make a stupid mistake. Idiot at keyboard.

So, because of the gaffe at Google every site on the internet was flagged as unsafe and because Google is truly the lord of the internet these days it basically BROKE EVERYTHING for an hour. What happened? Fire? Server crash on a massive scale? Power outage? Internet link break down? Nope. Google’s servers and infrastructure are spread far and wide and redundantly enough that it could survive all these mishaps simultaneously with nary a hiccup. You and I wouldn’t even know about it.

What happened was someone (a human) was checking the list of sites that Google flags as malicious and blocks and to this list he/she added an innocuous little / symbol. Now anyone who knows how the internet works nows that / means everything. So the engineer basically flagged everything on the internet as potentially harmful. Every single site was bad. The whole internet. All of it. The whole kit and friggin caboodle. As you read this the said engineer is probably hanging upside down by his/her ankles in a large room where Larry and Sergey (Google Founders) beat him/her with sticks. 

This isn’t an exaggeration. The fuck up really was that enormous. Someone made a stupid mistake. 

This illustrates the weakest link in internet security. You & I. That’s right. We do stupid things on the internet. We send stupid e-cards from websites knowing that they are going to spam both the sender and the receiver for life. We visit sites knowing they look dodgy and nefarious and might do bad things to our computer. We open stupid attachments that our equally stupid friends send us because we want to see Anna Kournikova in her birthday suit or some cat riding a bicycle. We use Microsoft Internet Exploder when we know that there are better, safer, faster browsers out there for free.

Which brings me to Microsoft. The entire world uses their computers and I blame them for two things. (No. Not Vista) The first is for making software that has more holes than Swiss Cheese and the second is making people believe that the internet is for everyone. That it is so simple that you just buy a computer and plug it in.

I’m sorry. It isn’t.

You need a licence to drive. I know, I know, to get an Indian driving licence all you need is a goddamn pulse. Sometimes, not even that. But work with me here okay?

Why should anyone be allowed to get on the information highway or ‘teh internets’ without some basic training, skill or education about how things work?

Think about it. How many people do you know who have got into huge trouble because they didn’t know what they were doing on the internet? Many I’m guessing. One person I know got his US visa rejected because during his application process his computer got infected with the Kournikova virus and his computer mailed an alleged nudie pic of the young tennis star to the application officer at the US Embassy!

How many intelligent people do you know that just seem brain dead about security and common sense when they are in a web browser? Clicking on suspicious links, opening strange mail attachments, installing free screen-saver programs?

So. I have two proposals.

1. Basic training to use the internet. When you buy a computer you should get a few hours of free training. Maybe online. Maybe a video. Maybe an actual class you have to attend. But compulsory. With a test at the end.

2. If you click a stupid link on Google. Or you try to go a site that is known to be malicious. Or you try to install some questionable freeware programs from the internet. Or you open an attachment that your virus scanner WARNS you could be a virus.

Your screen goes dark and a large message flashes across the entire screen….

YOU ARE TOO STUPID TO USE THE INTERNET.

And your computer turns itself off. For a week.

Since the time I started doing this site (I hate calling it a blog) I have been searching for a decent way to post without using the online WordPress interface. Call me old school but I hate online apps. I always have. Unlike most people I know I have clients for almost everything I do on the internet. I like using a POP client for e-mail (Mail.app) and iChat for Google Talk. 

WordPress isn’t bad. Really. It has always been very stable and the current version (2.7, I think) is a huge improvement over its predecessor in terms of its user interface. It’s speedy too if you have Google Gears (Something that lets websites cache content to your computer to be more desktop app-like) installed. My problem is that Gears doesn’t work in my browser of choice, Opera and more importantly I don’t trust web based editors.

I was thinking about this the other day and have figured out what this habit (or preference) stems from. A lot of people I know who grew up in the same era I did, have the same preference for desktop apps and it stems from a word that brings up really, really bad memories.

Dial-up.

Thats right. Unlike most people, who take always online, ridiculously fast, unmetered broadband for granted, I remember the dial-up days. Not in a fond, nostalgic, sepia tinted way but in a manner that gives me the shakes and at times a cold sweat. Nowadays connecting to the internet is as simple as putting a password for a WiFi Network into your computer but ‘back in the dizzay’ you would have to mess with TCP/IP stacks, strings for your modem and all kinds of crap. To connect to the internet you had to pay your telephone company for the privilege AND you had to go out and buy hours from an internet company. I used to use Mantra Online, 30 hours of internet fun for 600 bucks or so. That would last me about a month if I was really careful. Nowadays that would last me about… 30 hours.

So here’s how I would check my e-mail.
1. Check that no one is using or might want to use the telephone for the next 10 minutes or so.
2. Fire up my dialer.
3. Receive a busy tone from Mantra Online’s modems.
4. Put in a different telephone number. Try dialling again.
5. Success! Verifying username and password…

At this point I would have my mouse pointer poised over the Send & Receive button in Outlook Express and I made a sport out of checking my mail and disconnecting from Mantra’s servers before my username and password was even verified.
Don’t laugh. Kids with no friends or muscle mass to speak off play these kinds of games.

So I never used webmail. When I wrote email I wanted to put a bit of thought into what I was saying (Unlike when I spoke) rather than worry about running up a huge phone bill. Even though I was ‘undefeated world champion’ at the quick mail check, every month the week after the phone bill was delivered to the Singh family household was not a pleasant one.

Also this was the age before FireFox, Camino or any alternative browsers existed (that I knew off) and I had to put up with Internet Exploder V 5.0 which would invariably crash the one time I decided to compose a mail in a web page. What a steaming pile of turds IE was is. Anyway, offline was where it was at.

So. I don’t trust web apps. I don’t use web apps. Never have.

On to Blogo.

I’ve only been testing it for a couple of days but it already feels right. One really important thing about any third party app on the Mac is its feel. For an app to fit in well with this platform it has to feel Mac-like. (I know, I know. Ewww. That sentence is cringe inducing) It’s UI should be simple and intuitive with a layer of sophistication and advanced controls for those who need them, hidden under a facade of simplicity that lets newbies get on with it.

Also, pretty. Over-rated in people, under-rated in apps. An app in which you spend hours composing, editing and generally doing stuff should be easy on the eyes.

Blogo checks all these boxes. It has a clean simple monochrome interface that is pretty without being distracting, it is has just the right balance of features and simplicity and one feature I really like. It automatically downloads the style sheet from your site and previews drafts as if online. Also if for some reason you lose your connection it automatically saves a local draft. No more retyping thousand word posts from scratch. It is an excellent example of a great little indie app for the Mac platform and I’m probably going to pony up the 750 INR for a licence once my evaluation period ends.

Try it out. Your mileage may vary.

One of the greatest things about a Macintosh notebook is that you never, ever need to shut it down, ever. One things Macs do really well is what the PC world calls a suspend state or in Mac lingo is Sleep. This is particularly important on notebooks because once you are done with your work, say in a library, in class, at work or wherever, you drop the lid on your MacBook and get up and go. Once you’ve got where you want to be you pull out your MacBook, open the lid and you are right back where you left off. Immediately. No boot up, no login, no restarting applications or opening documents, everything is the way it was when you last closed the lid.

You pull out your MacBook and start doing what you have to with it while people with Windows notebooks sit and look at boot-up screens resignedly and if they are running Vista you’re normally done googling, mailing or writing half a page before they hear their Windows startup sound. 

Its also fun to just close the lid and drop the MacBook into your bag and have people say “Don’t you need to shut it down?” and answer “Meh.. It’s a Mac.”

 
From here on things get geeky.

Macs ‘Sleep’ by dropping into a suspended state where the RAM is kept powered up and your applications and the OS itself is kept ‘frozen’ in the memory. When Apple moved from IBM’s PowerPC chips to Intel’s CoreDuo they added an additional step to the sleeping process that involved writing the contents of the memory to the hard disk as well as keeping the RAM active. They did this ostensibly so that one’s session would not be lost in case the battery died out while the Mac was in Sleep mode. In this case the memory would lose power and hence lose its contents but once attached to a power source and started up the system would simply reload the memory state from the hard disk and you’d be right back where you left off, albeit not instantly as the process would take a few seconds. 

Apple calls this ‘Safe Sleep’ which is the Mac equivalent of a PC hibernating.

The only problem with this is that once you have a large amount of RAM. In my case, 3 GB of it, the process of writing the contents of this memory to the disk before going in to Sleep mode takes a while. Previously, if you didn’t have the patience to wait for a few seconds every time you closed the lid on your MacBook you could disable Safe Sleep through a terminal command but you did lose the safety of a non-volatile copy of your system state if your battery died on you.

Obviously the smart thing to do would be to go into Safe Sleep mode if the battery was precariously low else just go into normal Sleep mode but Apple made the setting all or nothing (even the ‘nothing’ setting only available through an obscure command line hack)

But a few days ago I came across a brilliant little utility called Smart Sleep that gives a system preference that allows you to switch Safe Sleep on, off or let the system decide based on how much battery power remains. This should have been part of the OS itself but it took an indie developer to do Apple’s job for them.

This brings me to the second part of this post. The future of Mac hardware. Safe Sleep is a case in point.

Back in the PowerPC era you could take the battery out of a PowerBook and put in a new one and not lose the contents of the RAM. There was some sort of capacitor that would keep the RAM charged for about a minute while you swapped in the new battery.

Apple could provide this hugely useful feature only because they designed their own northbridges. With the move to Intel Apple began to use Intel’s standard northbridge design and that is the root of a lot of what is wrong with Apple’s hardware today.

With the switch to Intel came Apple’s first huge step back. Integrated Graphics. Low-end desktop systems and MacBooks all use Intel integrated graphics. The Intel GMA 950 to begin with and the X3100 later on. For a graphically intensive UI like Mac OS X that uses 3D acceleration for so many tasks like drawing windows and animations, integrated graphics by Intel are just not good enough. 

Luckily this has been remedied in the latest line of Mac portables where even the low end MacBooks get decent Nvidia GPUs. But the latest line of MacBooks and MacBook Pros have a bigger problem. Especially if like a lot of Macintosh users you do a lot of video or audio work.

Apple is killing firewire.

Firewire is much better than USB in every way. First of all it is peer to peer, you can daisy-chain devices, it doesn’t put a huge load on the CPU and it supports target disk mode which by itself has helped me fix more Macs than I can remember.

But firewire hardware is expensive or at the very least not as cheap as USB hardware which you can find just about everywhere these days. Firewire is also not very common in the Windows world that Intel designs its chipsets for and hence I fear for its future.

The new MacBooks don’t have firewire of ANY sort. So If you are a video professional you can just rule them out immediately. The new MacBook Pros only have a firewire 800 port that is backward compatible with firewire 400. So if you want to capture video from a DV camera to an external firewire hard disk you’re shit outta luck.

Steve Jobs has been answering e-mail telling people that all new cameras have USB connections to capture video which is quite true but he hasn’t taken into account all the institutions that already HAVE a lot of money invested in expensive camera equipment that uses firewire. Production houses large and small and more importantly film schools, which don’t upgrade their equipment very often. For students the entry cost for a Mac than can capture video over firewire or attach to an external audio device, has just become 2000 USD which is a stupid amount of money.

So, to end this rather long post, let me just say, Apple please don’t kill firewire.