On The Radio

In that 82% of you that visit this site are doing so from a PC, it’s safe to assume that many reading this are also likely considering an upgrade to Windows 7, leaving you potentially ripe for the picking… and by that I mean in need of some sage advise — Being a non-stop Mac user since ’88, I rarely care much about what’s going on in Microsoft’s orbit… but hanging out with the radio crew on a weekly basis has left me with at least a peripheral interest in what’s happening for (and to) the PC crowd… when I look at the shear tediousness that my PC brethren must endure to upgrade… 64-bit? 32-bit? from XP? from Vista? Website Wednesday Night, which is virtually free of any Macintosh discussion (you would guess a lack of problems as I’m amiable enough), has shown me up close and ad nauseum the sorts of problems PC/Windows users have as compared to the Mac crowd… yet they continue to purchase PC’s and stick with Windows… the only thing loonier than that would be… well… there isn’t anything loonier than that… I’ve always viewed the phenomenon as I viewed the lemmings (I also had a functioning Betamax deck for 8 years though, so I’m stubborn about quality gear)…

So just to bone up… I’ve just returned from Mike’s savemybutt.com site where I visited the downloads section to refresh my memory on the plethora of hoops you PC users need to jump through just to keep your machines (semi) functioning; Malwarebyte Spyware/Adware remover, Avast Antivirus, McAfee Stinger, Spybot Search and Destroy, Spyware Blaster, cCleaner, etcetera, etcetera… Sweet Jesus… it’s as if you owned a car where the oil and transmission fluid needed to be changed, radiator flushed, belts replaced, diagnostics run… all on a DAILY basis… Loony, loony, loony…

So let’s get back to the fact that your considering that upgrade to Windows 7. I’ll start by saying that if your PC hardware is relatively new… falling well above what Microsoft has put forth as the minimum system requirements to upgrade… then by all means, stick with your Windows… now is probably not the time to consider a switch… but if you’re driving a 5-year old Dell and still running Windows XP… why not consider a switch to Mac now when the gettins good… it’s true that a Mac will cost you a bit more… but you need some new hardware now anyway and how much is all that PC-related grief worth… you need to assign a monetary amount to the time and frustration your PC costs you over the months and years to keep it running smoothly.

Regarding a comparison of operating systems, Windows 7 vs. Mac OS X 10.6… Microsoft has always been burdened with two fatal flaws that should offer all the proof you need. These haven’t changed in 20+ years and I don’t suspect it will ever be any different;

Windows has, for the most part, done nothing but copy the Mac OS since the dawn of the GUI… you have your occasional innovation from Redmond, but most of the time what you get in a new Windows feature is a lack-luster imitation of a feature already present in OSX, just different enough to keep the trademark infringement litigation at bay. My partner Mike D. is fond of noting that both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were present at Xerox PARC that fateful day back in the mid-70′s when they were both turned on to the idea of a graphical user interface… but let’s be honest already… Wozniak and Jobs were the ones that figured out how to get it done with power and elegance… Microsoft has been reverse engineering and mimicking ever since. For that reason, “new” features introduced in any given incarnation of Windows… will be features that Mac users have been enjoying for about 3 years already…

The complex scenarios facing those with PC’s that are considering an upgrade to Windows 7 poses the question… why should it be this difficult to update my computer to the latest OS? The answer resides in controlling the complete computing experience, from hardware to software… this is what Apple has always done… and for that reason I can expect any Mac I buy to seamlessly upgrade to and efficiently run, three versions of OS X over its lifespan (effectively about 5 years). No prerequisites, no flow charts to consult with, not a fancy hoop to jump through in sight… Microsoft has about as much chance of emulating this aspect of Apple’s dominance as they do opening up a Microsoft Store on Saturn (which also happen to be blatant rip-offs of the Apple Store). The problem obviously is that they have no control whatsoever over the hardware that their operating system will be running on… that fact coupled with a withering economy that’s causing the Dell’s and HP’s of the world to strive towards building ever cheaper (and crappier) hardware… renders the extra ducats a Mac costs more than worth it from jumpstreet, as well as over the long haul…

So wouldn’t it make more sense to save a bit longer and get a computing experience that’s comparatively hassle-free, streamlined and leaves you with nothing to do other than whatever it is you want to be doing with your computer?

It forever causes me to wonder… but at the end of the day I give thanks to the divine life source that my first episode of computer love was with a Macintosh 512k and that I never had any inclination to look back… Steve Jobs has just been declared Fortune’s CEO of the Decade… that should tell you something no? Or how about this (it’s a blueprint for pete’s sake)… At very least, do yourself the great service of visiting an Apple Store and seeing what you’re missing… On top of all this, the next version of OS X (which will arrive in about 13 months from now like clockwork) promises to be simply fantastic… If you’re running XP on a 3+ year old PC… I’m talking to you… and I wouldn’t lead you astray…

The Cult of Mac awaits…

So its been a while since I’ve posted anything here, almost two months unfortunately… that’s been in small part because nothing particularly striking in the area of Macs or technology had struck my eye… but in large part, I’ve been designing furiously and writing frantically to bring a second (and most likely final) weblog online that covers pretty much any subject matter not covered here on the showsite… that weblog is called theScroll… and you can visit there, from here.

So who’s a fan of stop-motion animation? Its been one of my addictions for the last 20 years or so… which is why I went out of my mind when I first set eyes on the following movie. Made at Fame Festival 2009, this video is a collaboration between Blu and David Ellis, produced by Studio Cromie with music by Roberto Lange… Makes me wish I had an ancient building with an interior piazza lying around… thanks to Anne K. for the link…

Facebook’s new World Headquarters in pictures… for a company that is yet to turn a profit… how on earth can they afford this? I guess if I knew the answer to that I’d be rich too… Just completed in Palo Alto, California by Studio O+A… Dezeen Magazine takes us on a tour…

As I’m in a stop-motion animation mood… another fantastic piece of work by Bang-Yao Liu that he executed for his senior project at the Savannah College of Art and Design… what could you make with nothing but a camera, your dorm room and a truckload of post-it notes?

And finally, for the Cult of Mac folks… have a new baby? love your Apple gear… look no further than this… hurry up though, they’re going fast…

It’s odd for me to write on the subject of a “back to school” computer because when I was in school that would have been a thousands of dollars proposition. We got ‘em when it was possible, sometimes borrowed one, pooled ‘em together from time to time… and in a pinch, headed to the schools computer labs which mostly sucked as 3 years old was the newest machine you’d ever find… but those days are behind us… these days you can go as low as $700 for a competent personal laptop on the PC side of things. That’s what I’m told at least by my PC brethren… I wouldn’t know as I’ve always spent a bit more for a Mac…

Once all is said and done, it’s a question of price vs. user-experience… what’s more important to you? I would argue that no matter which of these two choices describe you… the answer is still to buy a Mac… and here’s why…

If its the user-experience you choose… a Mac is the hands-down winner… Macs run OS X, the slickest most fluid operating system out there, about to get even leaner and meaner with the release of Snow Leopard next month. Out of the box, a Macintosh includes software to manage your pictures in iPhoto… to import, edit and release your video with iMovie… Core Audio coupled with Garageband is a great start on a digital audio studio… Integrated .ZIP compression, .PDF and .DOC recognition. A world-class browser in Safari, mail client in Apple Mail and contacts database with Address Book… etc, etc… all of which can be sync’d and backed up to the cloud at Apple.com. Macs can open Word, Excel and Powerpoint files, so bust that myth… and any peripheral you want to connect to your machine over time will do so seamlessly… and then that one last big time saver… you won’t get any viruses. You won’t have to spend your time combatting them either… How much is that worth?

Which is why I believe that a Mac is the price winner as well… how much is your time worth that you’re spending doing battle with all this invasive crap that’s trying to fight its way into your PC? How many additional dollars will you have to spend to equip your $700 PC with the sort of software functionality a Mac has right out of the box? And how time-consuming will the trial and error be as you fight your way towards a system where everything is working together?

That’s why Macintoshes cost more… and I don’t mind that they do… never have. I’ve always been able to see the difference in what I was getting for my money… appreciative most of the time just for the fact that an Apple Computer exists… and let’s not forget about the Apple Store… don’t believe me? Go to your local Apple Store and test drive all this for yourself… it’s free, what have you got to lose?

So let’s say I’ve made my point… you’re sold and want to know which Mac to buy… well here’s what I’ll tell you… balance what you can afford with the increased speed, memory and storage a more expensive model offers.

At the extreme entry level, Apple currently sells one MacBook that doesn’t include the “Pro” designation. This MacBook sells for $999 and includes a 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 megs of RAM and a 160GB hard drive… I couldn’t really recommend this computer to anyone other than a grade schooler or for a new computer user that’s truly starting from scratch. From there you move to the MacBook Pros…

Apple currently offers two flavors of 13″ MacBook Pro starting at $1199, three flavors of 15″ starting at $1699 and the sole 17″ offering priced at $2499… Bigger monitors, more cash… more RAM and hard drive space, larger video cache… more money… pretty standard in the electronics biz… the more you pay, the more you get. Click here to compare the six Apple MacBook Pros side by side…

And if budget is simply too strong of an issue but you still want to rustle that Mac… then the refurbished market might be a good place to go… get your search started here in the Apple Store as Apple offers the 1-year warranty as well as free shipping… Other options are here at PowerMax or here at Refurbished MacBook Deals…

And one last thing to put out there… in 2009 it seems odd to recommend a desktop computer in a “back to school” themed post… but for some this might end up making the most sense as you get more bang for your buck on the desktop side… and for those that need to do image manipulation, video or audio work at a more complex level… a desktop could seriously be the way to go… especially if the need for mobility isn’t that great… something to think about at least…

Happy shopping.

So after writing laboriously to cover nin:access a month or so back… Trent Reznor has announced that he’s pulling out entirely from social networking sites… Twitter, Facebook and most likely his own forums at nin.com, although considering his heavy involvement there in the past, I can’t imagine boycotting his own forums would be a permanent thing… One way or another, Trent says he’s “tuning out of the social networking sites because it’s now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result… Idiots rule”.

Trent’s issues become easily recognizable to any of us that have spent even the least bit of time on forums or social networking sites… In a nutshell, there will always be people that have the sole intention of ruining things for everyone else. Apparently Reznor has a few people registered to the NIN forums that send him 50-100 messages a day filled with “delusional, often threatening nonsense”. Any attempts to delete their accounts just results in the offenders re-registering under a different email address and continuing on… Just handling my non-celebrity data flow when it comes to social networking can sometimes be daunting… I can’t imagine what it must feel like to try and have a ‘real’ presence when your forum has a quarter of a million registered users… I wouldn’t wish that on an enemy.

One way or another… NIN has been broken… a guy that went way beyond the call of duty in terms of online engagement just can’t take it any more. The godfather of goth angst has actually been brought to his knees by a few select shit birds… so thanks guys, time to move on to your next target as you continue not to live your own lives choosing instead to make other peoples less fun…

You know who you are… we know who you are… you suck.

Read the complete Trent kiss off here.

Fun With Apps at the WWDC

One fact that temporarily eluded me as it pertains to this years WWDC was that this has historically been a conference for developers that wrote software for the Macintosh… This year that focus appears to have shifted in large part to App Developers for both the iPhone and iPod Touch… with the lure of low start-up costs and potential windfalls if your App ends up catching on, legions of developers have retooled a bit and are giving the App Store a shot.

To this end, Apple figured out a stunningly cool way to both showcase their new technologies (slated for Snow Leopard this coming September) while at the same time visually illustrating how popular the App Store has become. They set up an installation of 20 synchronized 30″ Cinema Displays blanketed with over 3000 icons representing the App Store’s most popular apps… In real time (albeit a 5-minute delay), every time an app was purchased on the App Store, its associated icon would kerplunk and then ripple on the pond of icons. The whole thing was programmed in Quartz Composer using new OpenCL API’s and was powered by 20 Mac Pro towers running OS X Snow Leopard.

Plus a pretty cool set of still pictures can be found here.

Is Conan a Hater Too?

Got this one from friend of the show Mike Reid. Married to that U.S. 30 Dragstrip vibe, this one emphasizes the hype and shines a light on a concept destined from birth to jump the shark… if you’re finding value in Twitter, all the power to you… I find the occasional nugget perusing it as well… But at the end of the day…

Bro’s a no-no for coco… Easily inside the 140 character limit. Such a small space to be clever in huh?

The annual Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, currently being held in San Francisco, was the forum back on June 6, 2005 when Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be transitioning from PowerPC to Intel processors over the coming two years. Today, 4 years later, Apple announced Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which in the absence of support for non-Intel Macs, officially marries OS X to the Intel processor.

Apple replaced its classic 68k operating system (1984-2001) with OS X 10.0 Cheetah in March of 2001… from there was the incremental 10.1 Puma (09/2001), 10.2 Jaguar (08/2002), 10.3 Panther (10/2003), 10.4 Tiger (04/2005) and now the current 10.5 Leopard which debuted in October of 2007 and is currently at version 10.5.7. When asked to compare OS X to Windows, I maintain that this consistency of over-haul updates that average every 16 months, interspersed with significant interim automated updates, is one of the major contributing factors to what makes OS X superior, so brilliantly stable and practically pain-free.

The problem is though… to the casual user of the personal computer, those that choose to not get involved much with what’s going on behind the scenes, the value of a stable operating system is often overlooked or taken for granted… but in reality, the OS provides the very key to your computer turning on at all… without it, your computer, be it Mac or PC, is just a dumb, lifeless collection of electronic sculpture… As we’ve talked about on the radio, Mac’s and PC’s are for the most part made up of hardware produced by the same vendors; Intel processors, Seagate hard drives, RAM, USB and Firewire circuitry, etc.

Which is why the operating system becomes the all important place to start when deciding what computer is right for you.

With that I present some of the highlights of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which was officially announced today and will hit the streets this coming September. As described by Bertrand Serlet (Senior VP for OS X) at the WWDC today, a big part of what Snow Leopard represents is a thorough refinement of its predecessor… Apple feels, and correctly so I believe, that the current OS X 10.5 is pretty awesome as it is… so as a response to that they’ve chosen with this release to use a large percentage of their development time completely re-writing the underlying code for 90% of the OS… making it leaner while at the same time preparing the OS X architecture for what they feel is ‘around-the-bend’ technologically.

Some cool new stuff coming with Snow Leopard…

Installation time has been cut almost in half… installing Leopard took about 3 hours if I’m remembering right… so this was a feat… another benefit reaped upon installation is that Snow Leopard needs 6GB less space than its predecessor… evidence of the underlying re-write transitioning to modern, lighter code structures. So right from jump street you get 6 gigs of space back… works for me… that’s the opposite of bloatware my PC-lovin peeps…

Safari 4, which was released today for Tiger, Leopard, XP and Vista is now arguably the worlds fastest browser… it also lays claim to being among the worlds most compliant browsers with a perfect 100 score on the Acid3 test, the benchmark for compliance… this compared to a score of 21 for IE 8.

Come September, Mac users will enjoy an even bigger browser speed boost running Safari 4 within Snow Leopard as well…  Safari, like all other core system applications of Snow Leopard, will now run natively in 64-bit. Safari on Snow Leopard will also feature compartmentalized crashes, a feature introduced by Google Chrome that prevents a crash within one tab of the browser to affect other tabs.

To round things out, Safari 4 tracks your most visited sites and offers these up in icon view within the browser window… it also indicates those that have updated content since your last visit with a blue star… the browser will also let you view your browsing history in Cover Flow view, which to see it work is truly impressive. You can also search your browsing history using Spotlight which includes all the text within the web pages archived. Amazing.

When it comes to the new Quicktime X… not only was the code re-written from the ground up, but the appearance and behavior of the Quicktime Player on-screen has changed significantly as well… When invoked, the player opens full screen with the controls fading away after a couple seconds (as DVD Player now works). Quicktime has been finely tuned to eek out every last bit of hardware acceleration performance and can now be tied directly to ColorSync profiles… and as it applies to the web, Quicktime X introduces HTTP streaming coupled with h.264 compression as standards allowing it to work on 93% of the worlds web servers, including Apache obviously…

Quicktime X now also has an embedded simple editor that allows you to view a visual timeline for any movie… set a start and end point, save a trimmed clip and then post that clip to an email or any of a number of online social sites... all without leaving the Quicktime Player… As I consider the ‘delivery’ technology of Quicktime coupled with the editing prowess of Final Cut Studio… I salivate at the possibilities… Windows Media Player? Really?

Without getting into too much detail… some ultra-cool enhancements for our old friend the Finder… The dock is now more 3d… how Stacks work has been refined and they can now handle a ton of files efficiently, which makes it simple to keep your desktop clean… Finder windows in icon view now allow you to scale the size of the icons in real-time… if you’re looking at the icon of a multi-page .PDF, successive clicks on the icon step through the pages of the document. A click on a movie icon, plays the movie (within the icon)… and for those of you that are fans of Expose (the system utility that allows you to step back from the desktop and see all your open documents and windows), it has now been integrated with the Dock in the most natural, intuitive, amazing way. Wait until you see this…

Getting back now to 64-bit software coupled with multi-core processors… the key to increasing a computers speed in 2009 is not upping the clock speed of the processors, as has always been the case… but rather it involves increasing the number of cores. The trick to realizing speed increases is in getting all those cores to work together in the most efficient manner. To address this, with Snow Leopard Apple introduces Grand Central Dispatch, a comprehensive system utility that monitors and manages the flow of computer code to the multi-cores of the Intel processor freeing up resources back to the system in a much more efficient manner. Over the range of applications you may have open at any given time, this change amounts to an even more responsive system, fully taking advantage of the multi-threaded, multi-core architecture.

So we’ve covered a lot of ground… and I could keep writing here deep into the night… but before I sign off this time around I’d like to cover just one more Snow Leopard addition… one that could prove to be the tipping point for those of you who are using PC’s at work but may really want to get a Mac for home… You already have Microsoft Office on the Mac as well as the ability to run Windows natively using Boot Camp or Parallels… now comes the final piece in the puzzle if you ask me…

Microsoft Exchange integration has now been built in to the three main Mac communication applications; Mail, iCal and Address Book. Simply enter your email address and the associated password… and you’re set up in all three apps. Connect to the Exchange server at your office and view all your Exchange content, on your Mac, with access to all of the OS X technology… Search your Exchange data with Spotlight, view all .XLS, .DOC, .PPT content using Preview (whether or not you have Microsoft Office installed) and view your Exchange contacts in concert with personal contacts, Exchange calendar events with personal calendar events… again, yet another reason to take the leap and I’m guessing this will entice legions of converts for whom a lack of Microsoft Exchange integration was a deal breaker.

So this post turned out longer than expected… but I get excited when feasting on a new version of OS X… Apple has never failed to impress… and for all of you already using a Mac and running Leopard… one last morsel for you is that the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard will only be $29 this time around, so that’s awesome… but also know that Snow Leopard will only run on Intel-based Macs… so for those of you without… Leopard is as high as you will go on your current machines… but Apple’s track record shows that they will continue to support Leopard for at least another couple years… plenty of time to save your pennies for that quad-core…

If you’d like to watch the WWDC keynote, do so here… if you’d like to read more about the refinements in Snow Leopard, do that here… and if you like to bone up on the more hard core technology, do that here…

All for now… and if there ever was a time… now is the time to consider a Mac running OS X… I can virtually guarantee you’ll never look back… why would you?

My personal countdown to Snow Leopard will now officially commence!

I’m not asking you to throw away your email address… abandon your Twitter, your Facebook, your Linked In… jettison your digital cameras, mp3 players, bluetooth accessories, smart phones or… god forbid, your internet connection… I know I won’t be… but I am asking you to consider the following random thoughts that have been running through my brainosphere of late…

For those of you who have at least reached your 30th birthday… do you remember postal mail? Film cameras? Cassette walkmans? Pay phones? That’s right, in retrospect they were cumbersome, slow-moving pains in the butt… but how that translated to everyday life was that we were much less likely to have them with us everywhere we went so as to perpetually be able to document and share with the masses everything we were experiencing.

Good or bad? Probably a little of both… but what’s on my mind is what I’ve always thought of as recall memory. You know how a certain smell, or song or place will always remind you of a happy memory or experience long since passed? I don’t know about you… but I enjoy the hell out of that particular symptom of the human condition.

This phenomena happens to me all the time… and I attribute it to a life well lived… which is sort of the gist… I was lucky enough to be born in a time that permitted me to live my life as opposed to constantly feeling an obligation to archive, document and share it. How many of those recall memories would I now be without if instead of living those experiences… I was busy photographing them, tweeting them, posting them to my wall on Facebook or even worse yet… I was on the phone at the time…

Just some food for thought… at best I’m conflicted on the subject because all these technological marvels are very much a part of my everyday life here in 2009… but the artist within me… the essence that’s perpetually in search of a muse… would suggest a modicum of moderation… stay aware of what you may be missing at any given moment of your day… and sometimes, literally, stop and smell the roses.