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April 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Several months ago, I determined that my years-long fondness required reexamination. I quietly took a break from the Mac to get some perspective, to check out Vista, AMD, and Longhorn (Windows Server 2008) untainted by Apple's PR and uninfluenced by other journalists and bloggers. I elected to take a break from reviews of new Mac hardware, the occasion of which always piques my interest in Apple's platform. There were times when I felt I'd chosen the worst possible time for this hiatus. I ended up passing on MacBook Air, Time Capsule, Harpertown Mac Pro, and most painful of all, the new MacBook Pro. It was difficult seeing InfoWorld pick up reviews of these from sister publications, but I take my responsibility to readers very seriously. I can't very well counsel you on technology choices if I consider the field limited to one worthwhile player, especially when that player projects the image that it competes only with the generation of systems that preceded what's presently sold.

I found enormous value in my time away from Mac. I made the kind of discoveries I used to make routinely before I took on the Mac as a specialty, and as I take up the Mac again -- which I am doing immediately -- it's clear that my appreciation for the platform is justified, and that the customary split of my effort and attention between Apple and AMD is justified.

The genuine, practical superiority of AMD's Barcelona server platform, and its Phenom desktop platforms that derived from Barcelona, came to light during the break I took from Mac. A one socket, quad core Spider (Phenom plus ATI CrossFire graphics) runs Vista so obscenely fast that even a diehard Mac user's head will turn. Privately, of course.

I found it extremely intriguing that systems built on Phenom platforms can tune themselves autonomously for the maximum possible CPU and GPU speed over a surprisingly broad range, based on a whole system approach that takes cooling, power supply capacity, and your preferences for noise and maximum power consumption into account. I found that I could speed bump an AMD Phenom desktop for free by moving it closer to the floor, where the cooler air prevails. What a grand idea that in itself shows genuine customer-focused insight.

I gained a fresh appreciation for the GNU compiler collection, which has taken remarkable strides since I last took a deep dive in it. I was unaware of the level of engagement from commercial partners, including Apple, AMD, and Novell. Each is undoubtedly pursuing its own agenda, but it does so within the framework and culture of one of the most tightly controlled and liberally licensed open source projects in existence. AMD has finally embarked on the long road to compiler parity with Intel with its contribution of Family 10 (Barcelona/Phenom) architecture-specific optimizations to GNU.

Apple has been busy on the gcc front as well. Objective-C 2.0, with its desperately needed garbage collection, has been a reality in the GNU toolchain since Xcode 3 was in non-disclosure beta. In release 4.2 of gcc, auto-parallelization joins auto-vectorization to adapt projects to multiprocessing and vector acceleration without developer intervention. Unless I'm mistaken, the public beta versions of the iPhone SDK, now at Beta 3, mark Apple's first swing at Microsoft-style free public distribution of pre-release dev tools. The privilege of early access has been reserved for paid members of Apple's Developer Connection programs. That iPhone SDK carries all of the latest GUI tools, documentation, and GNU command line compilers, including FORTRAN, into Apple's default distribution. Hit http://developer.apple.com/iphone and scroll to the bottom of the page for the download link. You do not need to pay the $99 fee to register as an iPhone developer to use the new tools, which compile applications for Leopard as well as iPhone.

Apple is getting ever more daring in its engagement with open source in other ways. WebKit, the fast HTML/CSS/SVG rendering and JavaScript engine used in Safari, has caught on like wildfire outside Apple, and why not? To get a commercial browser, loaded with current and emerging standards, free and open for incorporation in your software, is the stuff of fantasy, and Apple holds virtually nothing back. The WebKit project is not strictly Apple's. It enjoys broad community engagement, but it is worked as a priority by Apple's staff, even to the benefit of direct competitors. For example, the browser on Nokia's E-series phones is WebKit-based, and this is not the only example where Apple effectively put its staff and technology to work for the benefit of a competitor. The GNU toolchain's adaptability to multiple embedded platforms will see WebKit in everything from phones to toys, starting with iPhone and iPod touch. Now that WebKit has been accepted into Google's Summer of Code, I can't wait to see what innovation comes from that gathering. I plan to ply the most influential attendees with the libations of their choice and get their take on where development is headed.

Apple pushed the source code for the publicly exposed innards of OS X Leopard, known as Darwin 9, out for public download on MacOS Forge. Every time it does that, I imagine the move preceded by arguments inside the office about the effort and risks that such a program visits on Apple's platform business. The work of preparing a project of Darwin's size for public distribution is inestimable, and Apple deserves credit for putting it on the agenda of its top OS engineers and project leaders.

I love the conservative approach that Apple is taking with iPhone, especially with regard to multiprocessing. iPhone Applications need to launch and quit instantly, yet relaunch after the first execution having cached and persisted their closing state in detail. It's a freeze/thaw model of state persistence that I'd like to see extended to applications in general. Apple's Xcode has Instruments (prior: XRay), a tool that jams electrodes into your program's and the system's running environment. It records and charts statistical data at runtime along several axes for later examination. It's the most effective means of hand-tuning code for efficiency that I've ever used, and it shows the benefits of persistence quite plainly.

Taking a break from Mac hardware gave me a chance to drink more deeply of the software that Apple maintains off its beaten path. MacPorts and Apple's validated versions of open source projects are open source treasure troves stuffed with some 5,000 free applications tuned and packaged for Intel and PowerPC Macs. Digging through these repositories is so addicting that I had to issue myself an edict to get back to work, which I shall do, newly confident in my mission and purpose. I'm a Macophile for good reason.

Posted by Tom Yager on April 16, 2008 11:36 AM

March 06, 2008 | Comments: (0)

iPhone/iPod touch Q & A

Q: Why is Apple the exclusive distributor of third-party software for iPhone and iPod touch?
A: Somebody has to take full responsibility for customer security. Apple is taking responsibility for security by issuing developer certificates that irreversibly link every app a traceable, physical creator. Apple is a good groundskeeper, too; the site's always going to look splendid.

Q: Why do I have to pay $99 to write code for iPhone, and what's that buy me?
A: You can write code for iPhone for $0; download the tools from developer.apple.com. Mess around in the simulator to see if it piques your interest. If it does, then $99, plus answers to the validation questions that Apple will ask, gets you a certificate that will burn your name into your code. When you get that, you can start debugging with a physical iPhone or iPod touch. And you can upload your software to AppStore.

Q: What is AppStore, and how do I get in it?
A: The AppStore icon will be added to iPhone and iPod touch

Q: I meant, how can I get my software in it?
A: Sign up as an iPhone developer. They'll guide you through it.

Q: What kind of merchant account, PayPal, Kagi thing will I need to get my software sold?
A: This is much as you need to worry about money: a) Pay Apple $99 to be a developer; b) write something worth buying; c) decide what people should pay for it; d) upload it to Apple; e) rejoice as you're paid 70% of your monthly sales.

Q: Is anything about this program open source?
A: Steve Jobs says no. You will find references to ARM (the MCU used in iPhone and iPod touch) scattered around the Darwin source code.

Q: Do you think it's possible to completely overwrite the software on iPhone so I can do what I want?
A: For carrier unlocking: a) Buy iPod touch; b) Buy unlocked telephone

Posted by Tom Yager on March 6, 2008 04:31 PM

March 06, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Apple's iPhone software strategy moves me

A colleague scolded me for applauding during Apple's press conference to announce iPhone 2.0, next-generation firmware that will bring a host of enterprise features and support for a native software development kit (SDK) to iPhone and iPod touch. In my defense, I kept my pen and pad in my hands while the room went berserk over Apple's deal with Microsoft to bring an extraordinary array of Exchange Server connectivity to iPhone. I was moved, but not to clapping, by Apple's implementation of Cisco VPN compatibility, WPA2 security and other touches that IT administrators set as requirements for devices that connect to their networks. The enterprise half of Apple's new mobile strategy speaks to IT, and therefore to me as an IT journalist. iPhone 2.0 brings iPhone and iPod touch many steps closer to parity with the high-end BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Nokia QWERTY and stylus handsets that are enterprise mainstays now. My journalist appreciates having a new contender in enterprise mobile, but does not applaud at press conferences presenting same. I nod and note.

[ Read my iPhone 2.0 Q&A. Read about the developers' reaction to the news. Read our special report, "IT's guide to the iPhone." Learn how to make the iPhone work at work. ]

But I am more than a journalist. I worked in engineering, consulting and technical management in the wireless industry before coming to InfoWorld. I've covered wireless, mobile and embedded technology during my entire tenure here simply by continuing to think and operate like a professional with skin in the mobile and embedded game. For over a decade, I've seen wireless carriers, hardware and component manufacturers and OS vendors come at custom software development from every imaginable angle but the right one. I've known for so many years that the barrier to a boom in mobile applications is a stable, simple, documented platform and a matched set of development tools. I've known that these things don't exist because no entity has found a way to make such an effort profitable. Apple has.

Lest I carry on too long in one post about a topic that will take many posts to cover, I'll clue you in on the points that provoked my applause.

Apple's native dev tools include live remote debugging and run-time profiling of USB-connected devices. During the demo, Apple showed Xcode's Instruments (formerly Xray, derived from Sun's DTrace) recording stack traces in real-time from software running on an iPhone. Developers of embedded software--and that's precisely what handset apps are--appreciate how difficult, expensive and tedious it is to design, code and debug with a tethered physical target, and what a big deal it is to have live debugging baked into an embedded platform and a free toolset. English translation: Applause.

Apple is hosting a catalog of third-party applications (AppStore), splitting the proceeds with developers 70/30, and paying developers for software sold on a monthly basis. AppStore will automatically notify iPhone and iPod touch customers when new releases of their purchased software is available. No desktop approach to shareware and small-volume licensing is adaptable to mobile. All a third-party developer needs to do is upload its software to Apple, hang on it the price tag of his choice, and it'll be added to the catalog. From there, the developer just waits for the checks. And, one hopes, responds to calls for support.

Apple will not charge developers or customers for free third-party software. Huzzah!! Developers will need their $99 certificate, but you can band together with your buds and code under an assumed name. Only the guy that actually has the phone needs the license. Everyone else can work for free, using free tools, with the free simulator.

Apple is opening the same APIs that it uses internally. OS X, BSD, TCP/IP, Sockets, security, power management, Keychain, Core Services (e.g. Address Book, Mail), Core Audio, OpenAL, audio recording, graphics (JPG PNG TIFF), PDF, Quartz 2D, OpenGL ES and H.264, to name a few. A new GUI API layer, Core Touch, has been added. A database layer, managed by SQLlite, is in there. Might could get something done with all that.

Apple will charge $99 per developer to issue a code signing certificate, and Apple will police the AppStore catalog for malware and the like. That's cheap, and in return, Apple's taking responsibility for security. Gutsy.

The iPhone SDK and documentation are entirely free of charge for use with the integrated iPhone simulator. You don't have to buy a certificate to write code. You don't even need an iPhone.

Interface Builder (the GUI designer in the Xcode toolset) is loaded with all standard iPhone and iPod touch interface elements and actions. No more AJAX hacks that look sorta like...

Safari WebView was only mentioned as a term, but if it gives me locally-hosted apps, written in JavaScript, with an HTML front end, I'm down. That might tide me over until Silverlight and Flash come around.

No, seriously, I won't wait. I must code.

After the break, a Q & A with our resident cynic.

Posted by Tom Yager on March 6, 2008 03:43 PM

February 12, 2008 | Comments: (0)

10.5.2 update: Way more than security, and Apple fixed Stacks

Apple's 10.5.2 update is a whopper. It addresses several issues that have been at the top of my list, many with regard to accessibility. Apple has heard the pleading and has reworked Stacks (e.g. the Downloads icon in the Dock) so that it's useful when you have more than a handful of items. Here are my other picks for most welcome changes in 10.5.2:

- An option to make the menu bar opaque (like Tiger)
- A reduction in the transparency of menus
- New list and folder views in Stacks, and a more eye-compatible grid view background
- More accurate Data Detectors in e-mail
- Reduces Mail's tendency to refuse to connect to SMTP servers on some networks
- Ability to make mailbox icons larger
- Remote printers won't disappear when Mac goes to sleep
- Backlight won't off before the user's set Energy Saver delay

What's left to do? If Apple wants to make me happy, it can let me see a full, normal column view when it displays search results. This patch doesn't leave me with much to gripe about beyond that.

For complete details of the items addressed in 10.5.2, see Apple's knowledgebase article on the update.

Posted by Tom Yager on February 12, 2008 10:58 AM

January 18, 2008 | Comments: (0)

InfoWorld Test Center Preview: Time Capsule wireless remote Time Machine backup

Take an Airport Extreme 802.11n base station, add a 3.5-inch internal drive and modify the device's firmware to permit the built-in LAN to share a drive as a volume (a device) rather than a folder within the filesystem, and you've got Time Capsule. Apple has also done away with the power brick; Time Capsule's power supply is internal.

The reason for Time Capsule's existence is to compensate for a few unfortunate realities: Time Machine, wonderful as it is, requires desktop USB or FireWire drives. All of these have to be sized appropriately, which is no easy thing, and worse, notebook users have to remember to plug them in often enough to make the backups useful. Xserve is one fix, but it is a dear investment considering how fast one Mac can eat through a hard drive with Time Machine. Time Capsule fixes that. It is expandable via inexpensive external USB drives. You won't get breakneck speed, but if one Time Capsule gets bogged down, set up another. The Time Machine client lets you choose your backup destination.

Time Capsule does not precisely match the protocol used by Time Machine Server on OS X Server Leopard. The effect is the same: A network that includes a Time Machine Server and one or more Time Capsules populates a pull-down list of Time Machine destination volumes.

Time Capsule does allow users the full set of Time Machine abilities of doing point-in-time file system exploration. It also supports Time Machine's ability to perform a migration or restore from a Time Machine image.

Time Capsule's USB port still handles printer sharing. Except for the direct power input, Time Capsule's enclose is identical to that of Airport Extreme 802.11n. Time Capsule's base price is $299 with a 500 GB drive, and $499 with a 1 TB drive. Apple claims that it uses "server grade" drives, which I learned require special care compared to lesser drives. I carried a Hitachi DeskStar drive in an external enclosure and pulled it about two feet onto the ground while operational. It was shock-mounted in it chassis, but the drive was immediately destroyed. Server-grade drives don't park their heads by default. The next time I configure one, I'll see if it's an option.

I also need to test Time Capsule to see what the reasonable maximum number of USB drives is, and where performance starts to hit that part of the curve that says "buy a second one."

Posted by Tom Yager on January 18, 2008 12:30 AM

December 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Wii News Channel report: German court re-locks iPhone, bad dad blogger baffled

The funny thing is, this happened (link to AP) before I filed my brilliant analysis on the subject of European court and law-imposed unlocking of iPhone. However, even though the German court, operating under my precisely tuned radar, pulled its injunction against iPhones locked to T-Mobile, German law still requires that iPhones be unlocked after the 2-year contract expires.

Anyways, my point remains.

You can't get this kind of up-to-the-yesterday news commentary at any price, my friend. It may also interest you to learn that I spotted the updated AP story on my trusty news ticker, the Nintendo Wii that I'm giving my kid for Christmas.

I see that despite the fact that I have tons of actual work to do, I'll have to explain why I had my son's gift out of its box. I had to pair it with my Airport Extreme, install the batteries in the remote and set the parental controls. And wouldn't it be a drag if it came out of the box on Christmas not working? Yes, I absent-mindedly left it out in my office, and it was sitting next a GameCube controller and Blockbuster rentals of Super Mario Galaxy and Sonic Heroes. He saw that whole pile, but in my office, they blend. When we're all gathered 'round the tree, he'll pretend to be surprised, and I'll pretend that I didn't check it out. Isn't that everybody's Christmas?

Stop judging me.

Posted by Tom Yager on December 5, 2007 01:35 PM

December 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)

How Leopard Time Machine works, and how it doesn't

For Time Machine's primary target audience, home users, backups of desktops and notebooks running OS X Leopard are fully automated, just as advertised. All that's needed is an external hard drive that's at least as large as the system's internal drive. Pull up the Time Machine pane in System Preferences, select your external backup drive, and flip the big switch from OFF to ON.

After making an initial full copy of your system's drive--file by file, not sector by sector--Time Machine scans your system hourly and copies the files changed since the last scan to the external drive. The copy is non-destructive: A file is not overwritten if the archive already has a copy of it. In effect, the old file is renamed before the new copy is written. A catalog tracks the location of every file in the archive, and the time at which file was appended to the archive.

Time machine conserves disk space by folding every 24 hours' worth of hourly backups into one daily backup. It retains 30 days' worth of daily backups. After 30 days, Time Machine starts folding daily backups into weekly backups, which are kept until the backup volume is full.

Apple brilliantly created a Finder-like view into the archive catalog that lets you browse your backup archive's catalog hierarchically and temporally. As Apple puts it, you can see your entire disk as it was at a given point in time. True, but depending on how far back you step to find a lost file (for example), time may rewind in increments of hours, days or weeks.

As Apple presents the Time Machine filesystem view, you can see your system approximately:
As it was at the top of each hour today
As it was each day for the past 30 days, starting yesterday
As it was each week, starting 31 days ago, going back as far as disk space permits

A distraught user might only be interested in the amount of data he may have lost:
If you accidentally deleted a file today, you lose up to an hour's work
If you deleted it between yesterday and 30 days ago, you lose up to a day's work
If you deleted it more than 30 days ago, you can lose up to one week's work, or all of it

There are users even among Apple's targeted consumer population who need to think about their use of Time Machine, or who may be better off not using it at all. Consider the case of a home user who time-shifts television shows via iTunes, BitTorrent or another source. A sensible user deletes episodes he's already watched to conserve disk space, but when Time Machine is active, it may take a month for that deleted episode to vanish from the backup drive. If the backup drive fills before it can archive 30 days' worth of data, Time Machine flags an error and quits.

That scenario plays out for any user or application that creates expanding or volatile files. A 10 GB database can be appended to your Time Machine archive hourly. A lengthy log will be appended in its entirety even if only one line is added between hourly archive runs. Deft management of Time Machine's exclusion list is essential for busy systems.

Time Machine is archiving, not data protection. If your external drive fails, you lose all of your backed up data. Data protection that covers the failure of a storage device calls for a disk array with RAID mirroring or parity striping. If you want to archive and protect your data, which isn't a bad idea if you're a professional Mac user, use a RAID volume as a Time Machine backup device.

Or, as I'll detail in the next entry on the subject, use Xserve as a Time Machine back-end.

Lastly, to get ahead of what will likely be the most frequently asked questions about Time Machine:

Q: I set up a directory for Time Machine on my external drive. Why can't I see it in Time Machine's list of backup destinations?
A: Time Machine can only back up to volumes (formatted partitions) that are dedicated to the purpose. For geeks' sake, if it doesn't have a /dev/disk* entry, Time Machine can't target it.

Q: Why won't Time Machine use my AirPort Extreme base station's USB drive, or other Mac or Windows storage on the network?
A: Windows and Apple file sharing share at the directory level. Even if you share a whole Windows lettered drive or the root directory of a Mac partition, you're sharing a folder, not a volume.

Q: I'm a fearless genius. Isn't there some way to work around these limitations short of hacking the kernel?
A: Learn ZFS, but know that the likelihood of creating unreadable Time Machine archives is enormous despite what appears to be success. I won't help you beyond that.

Posted by Tom Yager on December 4, 2007 10:24 PM

December 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)

InfoWorld's OS X Leopard review: "A Perfect 10," and thanks for the links

If you haven't seen it yet, I'd be honored if you'd check out my just-posted review of OS X Leopard. It was a long time in the making, and if you can believe it, I'm still not done. Part II of that review is being edited as I write this, and my review of OS X Leopard Server is nearing completion. You don't have to wonder whether InfoWorld is serious about Mac coverage. You just have to ask yourself how much Mac you can handle.

I'm exceedingly grateful to bloggers, aggregators and other sites that create links to my stories.

Posted by Tom Yager on December 3, 2007 07:28 PM

November 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)

The only Leopard tip guide you'll ever need

If you want to be in the know about Leopard's new features and how they can improve your work and life, you could wait for a book, sift though OS X tips sites, or have insider secrets leap into your hands the moment you need them.

The first step is to abandon presumptions about what Apple couldn't possibly have built into Leopard and its bundled apps. These presumptions lead to premature workarounds for absent features that actually exist in Apple's code. It's folly, bordering on hubris, to imagine that you're the first person who ever needed to do a given thing. Instead of assuming that a feature is missing because it isn't where you expected to find it, ask your Mac where that feature is.

Whenever you need to do something you haven't tried yet, turn to Help first. Query each application's Help; the Help for Leopard as a whole is linked to the Help menu that's available when Finder is selected. If your query fails, your terminology might be to blame. Go to the Help table of contents and drill down the hierarchy until you narrow in on what you're trying to accomplish, or its nearest identifiable neighbor.

If you lose your way in System Preferences, which is much harder in Leopard since Apple did a major reworking of the most complicated Security, Sharing and Networking preferences, enter a keyword or two (e.g. "firewall") into the search field in the corner of the System Preferences window. Preferences panes matching your query will light up. Most buttons and fields pop up brief, useful descriptions when you hover over them for a few seconds, and you'll often see questionmark buttons on dialog boxes that open context-sensitive Help.

Enter "shortcuts" into any Help window's search field. This will point you to a list of keyboard shortcuts for the app or, using Help while Finder is active, for Leopard. Even if you're not a fan of shortcuts, Apple wires most important and most commonly-used interactive features to the keyboard. Reading the one-line shortcut descriptions is much easier than pulling down every app's menu bar item and trying to figure out what it does.

I spell this out in such detail because Help is grossly underutilized on the Mac, especially among Mac users who are just too cool to click Help. Leopard's Help is concise and easily navigable. Use it when no one's looking if you must, but no matter how good you are, you will always find happy surprises in Help. Covert use of Help has made many a superstar on OS X tips sites.

If you still can't figure out how to make your Mac do what you need it to, open Automator. It drives GUI apps in ways that you'd never have imagined, and if Automator can make an app do what you want, then so can you.

Lastly, you'll come across simple needs, like sorting a list of number/name pairs, or converting data from one format to another, or removing the top five lines from every file in a certain folder, that you won't find in GUI apps because it's already been done in UNIX. The command line (Applications/Utilities/Terminal from Finder) opens the astonishingly well-stocked UNIX cupboard that Apple doesn't expose through GUIs. If GUI Help doesn't reveal a way to do what you want, open up a Terminal window and type "apropos" followed by a keyword (for example, try "apropos firewall"). This will search the documentation for commands relevant to the keyword. Then type "man" followed by one of the command names displayed by apropos. If the resulting manual page is long and confusing, many have Examples sections that spell out the most common usages. Of the roughly 1,500 command line programs in OS X, you may only need a handful, and learning these will take some experimentation. But you will discover that most of the wheels you have in mind to invent to work around some perceived shortcoming in OS X were created by a guy at AT&T or Berkeley back in 1983.

Familiarity with grep, awk, tr, find and the built-ins of the bash shell will serve you well.

Rest easy. Help is always there when you need it, and it's right on your Mac.

Posted by Tom Yager on November 24, 2007 12:08 AM

November 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

A little more detail on MacBook Pro recovery

As I related, I have recovered the data from a MacBook Pro that quit working on me a couple of weeks ago, and that I used the ditto command to do it. For the benefit of those more savvy Macheads among my honored readers, I'll offer a few more details on the process and its outcome.

When I discovered that Disk Utility would not create a restorable image of the dead MacBook Pro's internal drive, I fell back to ditto, figuring that to populate the new MacBook Pro with my existing data, I'd have to resort to a cautious, manual transfer to a clean Tiger install of those documents, applications and preferences that I could safely overwrite. I knew that some information that was encoded in binary form would have to be recreated in the application or preference pane that produced it, and that I'd lose the benefit of Migration Assistant's automated upgrade to Leopard.

As it turns out, Migration Assistant transfers files without much concern about the validity of their contents except when data translation is part of the process. When I finished with ditto, I had an OS X Tiger partition that I knew wasn't worth finessing into a bootable state. It might be worthwhile as the source for a Leopard Migration Assistant run. It was, and the result was better than I could have hoped. Most 3rd-party kernel extensions didn't survive the trip, but this gave Migration Assistant no trouble.The sole losses were kernel extensions and license managers and keys.

The lesson here is that a restorable block-by-block partition image need not be your objective in backing up or recovering data. It is okay to write changes to files as they are modified, just as Time Machine does. Time machine can even be outdone by ZFS and overlay mounts.

Whatever you do to back up your data to an external hard drive, don't use USB. Buy enclosures that have USB and FireWire.

Posted by Tom Yager on November 12, 2007 07:44 PM

November 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

MacBook Pro gremlin vanquished, lessons learned

[accidentally posted with messed-up title to my other blog]

Noting gets my Irish up as quickly as when a hunk of technology takes on the characteristics of a stubborn animal, to wit, one more so than I. It's been the better part of a week struggling, with little success, against some cowardly goblin that infested the innards of the MacBook Pro in my possession, and in the course of his exploits managed to shred months of hard work.

My grief did not immobilize me. I dug through a stack of raw hard drives and found an archive that brought me back to late August. I then resolved to crack, rather, gently open the MacBook Pro's chassis to extract the hard drive to see if it was readable elsewhere. I had assembled the notebook's service manual, the requisite tools and the will for the operation, but Apple's replacement MacBook Pro had just arrived. I went to my office to restore the August backup image onto it, and the most wonderful thing happened: It locked up after the chime, precisely as the dead MacBook Pro had done, and in which state MacBook Pro the elder remained.

I call this a wonderful event, but I didn't think so at the time. I yanked the cables out of both sides of the notebook, reached underneath and ejected the battery like a spent magazine. After a minute's rest, I powered up again and found the new MacBook Pro in good health.

The wonderful part is that in a flash of understanding, I realized three things: The MacBook Pros' USB ports were the proximate cause of death, I might be able to get the dead MacBook Pro to boot from a flyweight FireWire drive, and that if it booted, it would be the last time I'd see that machine alive. While there is no defending this as a product of reason, it played out precisely as I had envisioned it. I was able see the internal drive and image most of its contents to an external FireWire drive, then transfer that to the new MacBook Pro.

Apart from reinforcing my long-standing disrespect for the USB implementation in Intel chipsets, the lesson, the yarn of which is too long to spin, left me with two simple bits of advice, one which you may take or leave, and one you're obliged to keep in mind. I recommend that you use FireWire drives. Apple developed it, they're understandably fussy about its implementation, and FireWire is not part of Intel's chipset. If you need to pull data from a damaged hard drive, don't use Disk Utility; it stops at the first error. Use the command-line utility ditto instead, which will plow through any read errors it encounters and copy everything it can, and with HFS+ metadata intact.

The dead MacBook Pro never boot again, and I don't believe it ever will. It is winging its way back to Cupertino, where it will be thoroughly refurbished and given a new life. I wish it well.

Posted by Tom Yager on November 12, 2007 04:26 PM

October 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Leopard Hands-On: The Beginning

As a counterpoint to the crushing disappointment that was Vista, which emerged with only a fraction of its promise intact, Apple's OS X Leopard (10.5) is everything that Steve Jobs said it would become when Apple first placed that first unsteady cub in developers' hands. Leopard is also a thick catalog of inventions and improvements that Steve flat neglected to mention, so thick that Apple had to resort to running the equivalent of a software project change log on its site for marketing purposes. You can't possibly chew through that list. I've been testing and assembling my own list of relevant and remarkable changes in Leopard, a list that speaks to more professional and savvy Mac users as well as those who might switch (or are sure they'll never switch) from Windows and Linux.

I have to start the introduction to this series of hands-on Leopard stories with what I consider to be Leopard's most impressive quality. For its 300 changes since Tiger (OS X 10.4), the line item reading of which provokes a range of reactions from the head nod to the ear-to-ear grin, there is not one ounce of fat, no feature in Leopard that you'd opt to leave on the DVD the next time you install it. Instead, for all that's been added, Leopard remains trim enough to run on a PowerBook G4 with 512 MB of RAM. The very same OS is a robust, Open Group certified 64-bit UNIX when run on Intel Core 2 Duo and PowerPC G5 machines, with no need to buy a special edition. One of Apple's marketing lines says that everyone gets the ultimate edition of Leopard because that's the only edition there is. I'd argue that if Microsoft's Vista product tagging is the basis for comparison, then all Leopard buyers get the 64-bit enterprise edition.

Despite the fact that I'm far past this stage, the first hands-on experiences I can relate involve stability and installation.

If you're eyeing Leopard, one concern that you can cross off your list straight away is stability. I've spent several months working with Leopard as a developer and administrator. I began rolling Leopard into production on MacBook, MacBook Pro, Mac Pro and Xserve Xeon, against Apple's advice but not requiring its consent, at a point well prior to its release. I'd be testing the bounds of non-disclosure to tell you when I felt Leopard hit its stride. Instead, I'll just say that there is no need to obey the standard advice to wait for the first boatload of fixes before buying in. That's true of Windows, and true of Linux, but not Leopard. Leopard shed its training wheels a while ago.

Non-Mac users coming to Leopard will find a really simple, automated install experience, but it is more flexible than before. That's most notable in network configuration, where auto-detection of wired and wireless networks is more accurate. It's easier to enter the SSIDs of private Wi-Fi networks, and you can bypass network configuration entirely. OS X doesn't phone home for authorization, so you can install completely and permanently without exchanging registration info with Apple.

Existing Mac users thinking of taking the leap can safely take ease of upgrades and installation for granted, after they burn their most critical data to DVD or an external hard drive. Migration Assistant, which you can invoke at install time or at your whim later, transfers your user data and applications from Tiger to Leopard after what amounts to a clean install. The Leopard installer will let you do an overlay install, which updates the system software and tries to leave everything else alone. It is impossible to automate all possible cases, but I can't imagine any user who could make Migration Assistant fail. Do be patient, though. Take measures to ensure that Migration Assistant runs uninterrupted, and understand that Migration Assistant's estimated time to completion is a wild guess. In my experience, it finishes sooner than expected.

As a taste of what's to come, I'll spend a few words on what I found to be the most substantial user interface enhancement: Spaces. Spaces gives you multiple virtual desktops, and you can switch among them via the keyboard, Dock or menu bar icon. It isn't fast user switching--all desktops are the same user--but it's more lightweight, and there's no need to enter a password when you switch desktops. The unexpected killer here is that Spaces lets you target specific applications to selected desktops. So, for example, you can arrange things so that Mail always opens in Spaces' second desktop, or you can set up separate developer and productivity desktops.

I'll go on from here through the weekend and into next week. I'm holed up in a hotel doing nothing but Leoparding. To tide you over until my next hands-on dispatch, you'll find one Apple exec's selected Leopard high points in this interview, and my thoughts on Leopard from a technologist's perspective are in my Leopard: A Beautiful Upgrade column. Hang out. You're welcome to the pull-out sofa, and you get used to the noise from the Xserve.

Yes, there will be screens and video. Many, many visuals.

Posted by Tom Yager on October 26, 2007 05:40 PM

October 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Why Leopard matters, plus more ZFS details

I can't assume that subscribers and visitors to Enterprise Mac necessarily follow my Ahead of the Curve blog. Pointing you toward other Mac-related content I've created saves me the effort of paraphrasing it for use here.

My recent column, "OS X Leopard: A beautiful upgrade" highlights Leopard as a turning point for Apple, Mac users, UNIX and the market as a whole. It's worth a read even if you've already decided to pop for Leopard, and even worth reading if you're sure you'll never touch a Mac. Leopard is an exemplar of user-focused design that doesn't obscure the underlying power of the OS.

My last Ahead of the Curve is a higher-altitude look at ZFS, a "why ZFS?" counterpart to the two-minute ZFS primer I've already written in Enterprise Mac.

Posted by Tom Yager on October 24, 2007 12:51 PM

October 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)

How to connect to remote X11 hosts from a Mac

In my previous two posts on the subject, I explained why you'd want to use X11 to drive a host remotely, and the basics of configuring your Mac to run OS X's X11 server and to use local X11 software. Now we get to the most important step, which, once you understand the whole X11 client/server thing, is a walk in the park.

In X11 parlance, the X11 server is the software that handles communications and renders client content. The X11.app that you run on your Mac is the server. X11 applications on remote hosts are clients. They reach out to your server to tap your display, keyboard and mouse, but with far lower networking and compute overhead than full-screen remote desktop sessions require.

The toughest thing about X11 used to be arranging for X11 clients to see your server. Reaching across LAN segments, or through NATs and firewalls, was no picnic without resorting to VPN. Fortunately, some creative melding of X11 and SSH, the secure shell, gave us this gem:

ssh -X hostname

When run from inside xterm on your Mac, this command creates a tunnel from the remote machine to your X server. You have to be able to access that machine via ssh, of course, which requires that you set up sshd (the SSH daemon) on the remote box and exchange credentials.

When ssh -X connects, it will ask for a password, just as regular ssh does. Once you get a shell prompt, do this:

echo $DISPLAY

The answer should come back "localhost:10.0" unless the remote machine has been configured differently. If DISPLAY is blank, you can set it:

export DISPLAY="localhost:10.0"

Now, whenever you run an X11-enabled app in that ssh session, the application runs on the remote machine and automatically opens its windows on your Mac. You may need to specify the path to your remote system's stash of X11 clients. For example,

export PATH=/usr/openwin/bin:$PATH

is required on Solaris machines.

Once the X11 apps are in your PATH, you can go snooping around. Everything compiled against GNOME and KDE is intrinsically X Window-enabled. If your remote machine has the GNOME desktop environment installed (it doesn't need to be running), try this in your ssh session:

nautilus &

That's GNOME's file manager.

gnome-system-monitor &

is useful, too, and Firefox runs nicely on X11.

When you're offline for periods of a few minutes, your SSH tunnel will be held open for you and reconnected as soon as your LAN interface comes back up. But if you're offline for too long, your session will expire and you'll get kicked back to your Mac's shell prompt. Just ssh -X again.

X11 is much faster and more efficient than VNC for remote access to GUI apps, and once you get it down the first time, it'll be second nature, even to connect two Macs.

Posted by Tom Yager on October 19, 2007 03:43 PM

October 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)

From Steve Jobs: Third-party iPhone SDK in early '08

Steve Jobs just issued a letter in response to criticism of Apple's decision to keep iPhone closed to third-party developers. The full text of the letter can be found at Apple Hot News. What follows is my commentary on Jobs' text. I have not included his full letter, only the portions on which I chose to comment. Jobs' text is set off in italics.

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users.

iPhone crackers can quit gloating. This isn't their win. It's a response to customers and alignment of policy with the state of the mobile device market. iPhone can't reach consumers like me because show-stopper apps and functionality, like TeleNav turn-by-turn navigation and Java MIDP, will never work on the phone, but work on all other devices I'd carry.

It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc.

Agreed. Having an SDK without tight security is as inadvisable as having no SDK. I'm adamant on this point.

Mobile devices are constantly connected to the Internet, and like PC users, most wireless subscribers haven't the faintest idea how to respond to firewall pop-ups like "Grant application xxx access to the Internet?" All a hacker needs to do is give malware an important-sounding name like "cingular_update" to get 95 percent of phone users to let it run amok.

This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true.

Correct, but for balance's sake, let's say that cell phone users assume that the cellular network is safe and secure, and that operators cultivate that assumption because it's good for business.

Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer.

Requiring signed apps is cool with me as long as phone manufacturers don't turn software registration into a developer tax. Nokia grants free signatures to freeware authors, and developers can self-sign software for testing, but commercial signatures cost money.

Nokia also lets users disable application signature checking on their phones.

Prior to delivering an SDK, I'd be pleased if Apple initiated support for Java MIDP and Flash Lite, both of which are extremely secure environments for local applications.

P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch.

Very smart.

Thank you, Steve.

Posted by Tom Yager on October 17, 2007 04:10 PM

October 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

News summary and interview: Apple to release Leopard in ten days

After a months-long delay that only seemed to provoke greater buzz and anticipation, Mac OS X Leopard and OS X Server Leopard will go on sale at 6:00 PM on October 26, 2007. Apple boasts 300 new features in its Leopard client OS, and 250 new features in its server operating environment. During a harried 15-minute briefing, Brian Croll, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Mac OS X, rattled off what he considers to be the high points in the client version of OS X Leopard:

A redesigned desktop with a consistent look across applications, and a semi-transparent menu bar to allow desktop backgrounds to show through.
A redesigned Dock, a row of icons for launching frequently-used applications, with a semi-transparent background and reflections under each icon.
Finder, OS X's counterpart to Windows' Explorer, has an updated Sidebar. The customizable collection of icons for frequently-accessed folders now locates and displays network files shared from PCs and Macs on the same LAN.
Finder has gotten an overall revamping to a more intuitive and modern look and feel. The new Finder borrows its appearance and behavior from iTunes, Apple's media player and content purchasing interface, including an iTunes feature called Cover Flow that lets you flip through images and other viewable content like pages in an album. "It's really fun and useful to browse content on the PCs and Macs on your network using Cover Flow," said Croll.
Most viewable content types, such as images and PDF and Word documents, can be viewed with Finder's integrated Quick Look without launching an additional application.
To-do lists synchronize with both Mail and iCal, OS X Leopard's bundled e-mail and calendar/scheduling clients. Croll said, "We've noticed that people send reminders to themselves in e-mail."
Leopard's Mail application implements Data Detectors, which scan e-mail messages for phone numbers, e-mail addresses and street addresses. These can be added to Leopard's Address Book, located in Google Maps or copied into iCal.
iChat, Apple's bundled instant messaging client, takes on a host of new features in Leopard, including special effects from OS X's Photo Booth Web cam snapshot app (iSight Web cameras are standard in Intel-based Mac client systems). Leopard's iChat also supports the live playback of images, audio and video during a live chat, and users can share their screens for remote viewing or remote control.
Croll also pointed to several new facilities for OS X Leopard Developers: Core Animation automates smooth 2-D animation with simulated 3-D paths and transforms; Xcode 3.0 is a rich integrated development environment for programs written in C, C++. Objective-C and other languages; Xray, adapted from Sun's DTrace, lets developers monitor and profile applications while they execute without the hassle of a debugger.

Croll described "reasonable system requirements" for Leopard that reach well into Apple's legacy PowerPC platforms. Any Macintosh with a 32-bit PowerPC G4 CPU running at 867 MHz or higher can run Leopard, as can all Macs with 64-bit PowerPC G5. All Intel Macs support Leopard, and Croll said that the minimum memory requirement for all architectures is 512 MB. An optical drive capable of reading DVD media is also required.

Croll laid out the plan for upgrading recent buyers of Mac systems from Apple's currently shipping operating system, OS X Tiger, to Leopard. Apple is giving Mac buyers, including those who purchased Apple's Xserve rack server, a free copy of Leopard (for a handling fee of $9.95) provided that they purchased their systems after October 1, 2007. Customers purchasing new Mac or Xserve systems after October 26 will receive Leopard either pre-installed on their systems or as a DVD inside the box.

Boxed copies of OS X Leopard client and Server will be priced at $129 and $999, respectively. A family pack with five client licenses of OS X Leopard will sell for $199. Apple's Web site for Leopard can be found at http://www.apple.com/macosx.

Posted by Tom Yager on October 16, 2007 07:21 AM

October 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

LEOPARD SHIPS 10/26 (press release)

Apple to Ship Mac OS X Leopard on October 26

CUPERTINO, California—October 16, 2007—Apple® today announced that Mac OS® X Leopard will go on sale Friday, October 26 at 6:00 p.m. at Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, and that Apple’s online store is now accepting pre-orders. Leopard is packed with more than 300 new features and introduces a brand new desktop with Stacks, a new way to easily access files from the Dock; a redesigned Finder that lets users quickly browse and share files between multiple Macs; Quick Look, a new way to instantly see files without opening an application; Spaces, an intuitive new feature used to create groups of applications and instantly switch between them; and Time Machine, an effortless way to automatically back up everything on a Mac®.

“Leopard, the sixth major release of Mac OS X, is the best upgrade we’ve ever released,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “And everyone gets the ‘Ultimate’ version, packed with all the new innovative features, for just $129.”

Leopard’s new desktop includes the redesigned 3D Dock with Stacks, a new way to organize files for quick and easy access with just one click. Leopard automatically places web, email and other downloads in a Downloads stack to maintain a clutter-free desktop, and users can instantly fan the contents of this and other Stacks into an elegant arc right from the Dock. Users can also create their own Stacks for quick access to folders, documents or applications. Leopard’s gorgeous new look extends to all applications, with every window on the desktop offering a consistent design theme and active windows outlined by deeper shadows that make them stand out.

The updated Finder includes Cover Flow® and a new sidebar with a dramatically simplified way to search for, browse and copy content from any PC or Mac on a local network. Content on any computer on a local network can now be searched using Spotlight™, browsed using Cover Flow or copied across the network with a simple drag and drop. .Mac members can use the new Back to My Mac feature to browse and access files on their remote Macs over the Internet.

Quick Look is the fastest and easiest way for users to look inside files without launching them or even having the application that created them. With Quick Look, users can instantly view full-screen, high-resolution files of virtually anything, even media files, from any view in the Finder.

Spaces gives users a powerful new way to organize their work by creating customized desktops which can contain only those applications or documents needed for each project, with the ability to quickly switch between Spaces with the mouse or keyboard.

Time Machine lets users easily back up all of the data on their Mac, find lost files and even restore all of the software on their Mac. With just a one-click setup, Time Machine automatically keeps an up-to-date copy of everything on the Mac.* In the event a file is lost, users can search back through time to find deleted files, applications, photos and other digital media and then instantly restore the file. If it’s ever necessary, Leopard can also easily restore an entire system from the Time Machine data on an external drive.

Mail has been updated in Leopard and features more than 30 stationery designs and layouts that look great on a Windows PC or Mac so users can easily send stylish, personalized emails with beautiful graphics and photos. Notes and To Dos help users stay organized by acting just like emails that can be easily created, saved as drafts, synced across multiple Macs and stored in Smart Mailboxes. Data detectors automatically sense phone numbers, addresses and events so they can be added to Address Book or iCal® with just a few clicks, and users can keep up-to-date by getting the latest news and blog feeds delivered directly to the their mailboxes with a built-in RSS reader.

iChat®, the easiest-to-use video conferencing application on any personal computer, offers even richer video chats in Leopard with iChat Theater, which makes it easy to show photos, presentations, videos or files in a video conference; screen sharing which lets users remotely view and operate another Mac; and Photo Booth® effects for fun distortions and video backdrops that can instantly make users appear to be anywhere they choose.

Other new features in Leopard include:

improved Parental Controls, aiding parents in managing their kids’ online activities with automatic identification of unsuitable content before allowing website access, plus time limits and activity logs that can be accessed from any Mac on a home network;
the complete Boot Camp® release, previously available only as a beta, making it possible to run Windows natively on Intel-based Macs;**
Web Clip, bringing anything that a user wants from a web page to Dashboard as a live widget;
new Photo Booth features, helping users create animated iChat buddy icons or fun effects and backdrops with still or video images;
an enhanced Dictionary with Wikipedia built in, allowing users to access up to date information on virtually any subject in a snap;
a newly updated iCal with multi-user calendaring based on the new CalDAV standard; and
an updated version of Front Row, making it even easier to play music or watch movies, TV shows and photos on a Mac using the ultra-simple Apple Remote.

Pricing & Availability
Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard will be available on October 26 at Apple’s retail stores and through Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $129 (US) for a single user license, and online pre-orders can be made through Apple's online store (www.apple.com) starting today. The Mac OS X Leopard Family Pack is a single-household, five-user license that will be available for a suggested retail price of $199 (US). Volume and maintenance pricing is available from Apple. The standard Mac OS Up-To-Date upgrade package is available to all customers who purchased a qualifying new Mac system from Apple or an Apple Authorized Reseller on or after October 1, 2007 for a shipping and handling fee of $9.95 (US). Leopard requires a minimum of 512MB of RAM and is designed to run on any Macintosh® computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5 or G4 (867 Mhz or faster) processor. Full system requirements can be found at www.apple.com/macosx/techspecs.

* Requires an additional hard drive sold separately.
** Copy of Windows XP or Vista required.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market this year with its revolutionary iPhone.

Posted by Tom Yager on October 16, 2007 05:52 AM

October 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

iPhone batteries, $30, buy now

200710121446

Exhibit A, "non manufacturer-approved battery vents with flame (battery biz term of art) in back of car." Note headrest in top picture.

Many thanks to batteryuniversity.com for showing that $80 is cheap for a new iPhone battery.

Posted by Tom Yager on October 12, 2007 12:59 PM

September 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)

iPod touch: Because I demanded it, and it's good for other people, too

iPod touch wipes out all of my objections to iPhone. I win, Apple wins, consumers win, and everybody who wants to leave work at work, and yet still remain just connected enough to stay on top of things, wins. Reverse-engineering projects lose. iPod touch's price, $299 or $399, genuinely defies reason, for reasons I explain below. iPod touch, plus a sweet phone, is all I need to bring with me on quick business trips.

I am, in the words of one blogger remarking on my photo (which I disavow), smug and condescending, so of course I believe that Apple created iPod touch based on my feedback and for my benefit. The fact that it was designed before I laid hands on an iPhone won't keep me from taking credit for it.

I've told you what I want, and don't want, from an Apple handheld device. I don't want it to have a lid. I don't want it to ring or light up an "available" icon on anyone's buddy list when I go on-line. At those times when the sight of a computer knots my stomach, and when QWERTY is a four-letter word, I'd still like to get some studying in, watch WWDC sessions that I couldn't attend, read comments to my blogs, pull up a datasheet for the mystery part that I just yanked out of my old DirectTV receiver, listen to Stevie Wonder's 4-disc boxed set, or perhaps even do something that's not horizon-broadening (fark.com). Out of pocket shouldn't have to mean off-line.

Oh, before I forget: Merry Christmas, Microsoft.

With the season in mind, I have blessed iPod touch's expanded distribution to addresses not my own. Nobody over the age of twelve will fake an enthusiastic reception of an iPod touch. One box per loved one, shopping's done, have a martini. Ones not quite so loved will enjoy any of Apple's lesser iPods, and the one that you're replacing with an iPod touch will take a nice polish. In coming years, all holiday/birthday obligations will be satisfied by iTunes gift cards, denominations scaled according to your affection for each recipient. Apple has a helpful table on its Web site.

And now, a spin of my beanie. iPod touch's price does not make sense. I may miss my guess slightly, but I believe that what we have here is an embedded system with a 32-bit CPU, 8 GB of flash (base model), a 3.5-inch backlit true color LCD and controller that's fast enough to run 30 full-screen frames per second with frame-accurate audio sync (if that's done by blitting from the CPU, double wow), a multitasking OS with a TCP/IP stack, Wi-Fi and high-speed crypto, and a battery, all mashed into an 8mm enclosure. Now, compare the 8 GB iPod touch, at $299, to the 8 GB iPhone, at $599. Ask yourself how Apple knocked down its engineering and build costs enough to pay for a $300 price drop while still keeping an Apple-esque margin. "Calm down, it's iPod nano with Wi-Fi, dude" comments will be filtered. From this mystified embedded-fascinated geek to Apple's enlightened ones, I can only say that I am not worthy. I just threw out my breadboard and Mouser catalog.

Back to you, reader. Are you about to pop The Question? Your intended won't think twice about feeding you your diamond over that illustrated diary in your ex's blog, but your (new) sweetie will forgive you to avoid giving back that engraved iPod touch. Anniversaries? That's right: iTunes gift cards, denominations graded by half and full decades of bliss. Consult the table on Apple's Web site.

Posted by Tom Yager on September 6, 2007 03:39 PM

August 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

The unholy Apple/AT&T alliance has been undone, but iPhone is still a waste of money

If your biggest gripe with Apple's flagship media player is that it refuses to make voice or data calls on anything but AT&T's wireless network, you're officially free. But the price of freedom, in this case, is either a very steady hand and soldering iron, or a willingness to send money to Australia in exchange for a "Turbo SIM," delivery date unknown. Of the two methods, I prefer the third: Buy a real phone. Following an exhaustive comparison of alternatives, I have overwhelming backing for my early conclusion that iPhone is vastly outmatched by several devices in its price class.

200708262054
If you simply must buy and unlock an iPhone, use George Hotz's (forum nickname "geohot") 10-step hack, the one that requires soldering. If you need help with the soldering, go to a ham radio fest or sit in on a robotics club meeting. If you want to tackle it yourself, practice with throwaway surface-mount electronics, scraping conformal coating from circuit traces and soldering wire to them before you crack the case on an iPhone. George's method is the easiest possible hack to a surface-mount board. While George recycled his wire from a motor, I suggest you buy new magnet wire from Radio Shack. The thinnest wire in the three-spool pack is the 30-gauge Kynar insulated wire you need. Scrape or burn the insulation off the ends.

Posted by Tom Yager on August 26, 2007 06:56 PM

July 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Canceling AT&T service does not lock your iPhone

At the time I wrote the iPhone review, it was not clear to me (or anyone) how iPhone would behave if the device were activated, a process that requires a two-year commitment to AT&T Wireless, and the AT&T Wireless service were subsequently cancelled. I called AT&T yesterday to cancel my service, something that you can do without penalty within 14 days. My iPhone's only been one day without AT&T, but so far, all of the device features that don't rely on the cellular network--pretty much everything but Visual Voice Mail--work without issue. And if I had to call 9-1-1, I could.

The only sign that anything's amiss is "NO COVERAGE" where the carrier name, mobile net signal bars and EDGE data indicator appear.

The first and final AT&T bill for iPhone service comes to about $69. That covers activation and 12 days' worth of prorated service.

Is activate-and-cancel smarter than using the unbricking crack? Users who have applied a "crack-tivation" technique to unbrick (i.e. get past the "Activate with iTunes" lock screen) their iPhones have found that YouTube does not function, and that other applications that use the network complain about not being able to find an EDGE connection before they connect with Wi-Fi. I haven't had any of those problems, but I can't say what would happen if I did a hard reset on iPhone or wiped out the MacBook Pro that I used to activate it. I also don't know whether Apple's first iPhone software update will re-brick my iPhone.

It shouldn't. The SIM is valid. It's in the same state it would be in if I had missed a payment, or if I were out of wireless range and couldn't register with the network. Even so, I'll turn off the GSM/GPRS/EDGE radio to save a bit of battery.

AT&T was very quick and courteous. I was impressed with the professionalism of the AT&T reps that handled my cancellation. I only had to talk with two people, neither of whom gave me a hassle. My contribution to the "how can we keep your business?" exchange was an offer to stay on if AT&T would let me add data service for another device onto my account so that I could move iPhone's SIM between two handsets (one device on the mobile network at a time). The rep understood what I wanted: "You want to keep your existing phone but carry iPhone once in a while?" Exactly. "I can't do that." she said. "You can't use an iPhone rate plan with another phone, and you can't use another phone's rate plan on iPhone." I offered to pay them more money per month, but they turned me down. iPhone really is a game-changer.

As soon as you add iPhone data service to an existing rate plan, it wipes out any other data service you have on the account. I learned that on my own. An iPhone SIM only works for voice in another phone.

Posted by Tom Yager on July 13, 2007 11:59 AM

July 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)

The unofficial Apple TV SDK is a model for white hat iPhone hackers

iPhone crackers have their priorities mixed up. They're laboring to unlock iPhone to work on multiple wireless operators' networks. That's effort that AT&T and Apple will actively block because it interferes with revenue. Remember that Apple's exclusive deal with AT&T puts money in Apple's pocket every month for every iPhone subscriber that signs up. If you go taking money out of Apple's pocket, you should expect to have your effort rendered wasted by a future firmware update.

Crackers have discovered that iPhone's firmware bootloader is locked up tight and will only boot code that's encrypted against Apple's private key, and now they're picking away at an interface to iPhone's radio chip to work an unlock. I respect the desire for freedom, but I think that some of the guys who are pushing their way into iPhone should be focusing on work that's of more immediate benefit to iPhone owners and to potential developers. Access to iPhone's sandboxed file system and adding plug-ins to Safari are more productive goals. That effort would help sell iPhones, and I doubt that it would draw much fire from Apple.

There is a precedent for that belief. Apple rolled out Apple TV as a non-user-extensible platform. Apple released no SDK, no technical documentation and no development tools, and informed me in a briefing that Apple would not be supporting custom development on Apple TV. Bummer. Why, I wondered, weren't developers protesting about being shut out of Apple TV?

Mac developers spend no time complaining. When Apple says "no," they find a way to do it anyway. Apple expects that, and I believe it counts on it. Many outside Apple are as smart and resourceful as the engineers inside Apple, especially when they can work without answering to management and marketing.

I wasn't surprised when early Apple TV users uncovered traces of a mechanism used for enhancing Apple TV through downloadable plug-ins. I wasn't surprised by hacks, albeit ugly ones, that get Apple TV to boot full OS X (possible, but awfully silly since you end up with a Mac that has 256 MB of RAM). But I underestimated how seriously the Mac developer community would take the mission of opening Apple TV to developers, a goal that I consider worthwhile, and in a way that doesn't deny Apple any income.

There is an independently-authored Apple TV "Back Row" SDK, developed by Alan Quartermain, which comes complete with Xcode templates, sample code, an emulator and tutorials. And in the best Mac tradition, it's all free and open source. Some of the really useful plug-ins that were built against this SDK are listed on the Awkward TV site, and developers took the time to make them mesh with Apple TV's UI and its clean, commercial look and feel. I'm not interested in making my Apple TV a Mac, but extending it with additional video codecs and access to content beyond iTunes and YouTube make an investment in Apple TV more worthwhile. There aren't many who will be willing to go through the process required to get Back Row apps and plug-ins running--you still have to crack Apple TV's case--but it's turned out to be a fun device for harmless hacking, and non-hackers who can stomach the risks benefit from the effort.

"Harmless" is the operative word.

Posted by Tom Yager on July 10, 2007 11:41 AM

July 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)

How to store files in iPhone for off-line viewing: E-mail them to yourself

iPhone Web apps can't use iPhone's internal file system. Storage has to be handled on the server end, which makes off-line viewing of documents and Web pages challenging.

However, there is a solution to this that I haven't seen discussed elsewhere. Web sites that want to persist data should e-mail it to the user. Word, Excel, PDF and HTML attachments are directly viewable from inside iPhone's mail app while iPhone is not on the network. The mail app warns you that you can't access data while off the air, but you can ignore it. Attachments are downloaded. Hyperlinks with long parameter lists can stand in for off-line storage. I created a special e-mail alias that I set aside solely for that purpose.

You can't insert pointers to other e-mail messages, and there is still no way to access iPhone files directly.

You can also use e-mail to create a desktop of sorts containing icons for sites and Web apps you use often. Bookmarks in Safari are text-only, but an HTML page in Mail can use IMG hyperlinks just fine.

Posted by Tom Yager on July 10, 2007 10:38 AM

July 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)

iPhone Web app development speeds ahead

If you want to create perfect iPhone Web apps, or see examples of sites that make the grade, you only need to study this magnificent page at iPhoneWebDev.com.

The iPhoneWebDev site, like most good things related to Web development for iPhone, is a by-product of iPhoneDevCamp, a flash-mob gathering of iPhone coders that convened right after the device's launch.

There are already some marvelous iPhone app/sites out there--check out appleopolis.com. Many of these app/sites are listed in multiple Appleopolis' directory categories, so the count looks higher than it really is. I've got a column to file, so I'll check back in with the gems from this collection. You don't need iPhone to see them. Grab the Safari 3 beta and use iPhoney. iPhoney isn't a simulator--Apple really needs to do one--but it does create a properly-sized window for accurate display of sites that want to look like native iPhone apps.

Posted by Tom Yager on July 10, 2007 10:01 AM

July 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)

iPhone SIM works in any non-iPhone handset for calls, but not for data

As I expected, you can pull the SIM card from an activated iPhone and place it in any phone you wish. However, all you'll be able to do is make phone calls. Any Web or e-mail access you attempt with the other phone will be billed to you at $.01/kilobyte, or $10.24 per megabyte. Information Superhighway robbery.

I tried attaching a generic AT&T data plan ("MEdia Net") to the SIM. It seemed to work at first, but then AT&T's automated daily sweep of subscriber records removed it. The company's policy stipulates that if an iPhone Data Plan is active on an account, no other data plan is allowed.

This is probably no big deal for anyone else, but it's a show-stopper for me. I need to be able to swap that SIM between phones in order to do reviews. If I want to pay the extra $19.95/month for a non-iPhone data plan, AT&T ought to take my money, don't you think?

Posted by Tom Yager on July 4, 2007 08:37 PM

July 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)

The unofficial Apple TV SDK is a model for white hat iPhone hackers

"Harmless" is the operative word.

Posted by Tom Yager on July 4, 2007 08:08 AM

July 02, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Commentary on Jefferson Graham (USA Today) iPhone interview w/CEOs Jobs and Stephenson

Jefferson Graham's interview of Steve Jobs and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson (USA Today, 6/30/07) is the only non-technical piece written on iPhone that's worth reading. So go read it. I intentionally pulled as little text as possible from the piece, so this is not a summary or "best of" cut of Graham's work. My thanks and kudos go out to USA Today and Jefferson Graham for an excellent interview.

Graham: The critics were effusive in praise for the iPhone, but had issues with the iPhone and the EDGE network, which they say is slower than others. How do you respond?

Stephenson: With a device like this, you need a broad based network that covers every nook and cranny of the country. That's EDGE. It does a nice job.

The AT&T 3G device I have here falls back to EDGE, so at least one 3G device qualifies for "...every nook and cranny."

Stephenson: (cont'd) It [iPhone] also has Wi-Fi, which is better than anything you'll find in any handset.

This is incorrect and unfair to other handset manufacturers. There are many handsets in iPhone's price range, some in AT&T's own catalog, that are equipped with Wi-Fi.

Jobs: [...] What we've found is that Edge is terrific for e-mail and basic Internet usage. When people need more speed, there's Wi-Fi. The nice thing about Wi-Fi is it's way faster than 3G. People are in areas with Wi-Fi much more than they think. I walk into work with the iPhone, and it instantly switches to a Wi-Fi network. If I'm walking down the street in downtown Palo Alto, the iPhone will switch from EDGE to Wi-Fi. It's very fluid.

I apologize to USA Today for pulling this long passage intact, but Graham's question drew Jobs into an answer that's his most relevant and telling statement on iPhone to date. Jobs' pitch that Wi-Fi is commonplace supports the use of iPhone as a handheld PC (like MS Windows Mobile Pocket PC Edition). A consumer who already has a phone would find iPhone well worth its cost in this capacity, but Apple has explicitly blocked that option. I believe that's bad business. I understand that its contract with AT&T makes it dicey to open iPhone to other carriers, but Apple can remove immediate AT&T activation as a requirement for making iPhone function as a handheld PC, and it must be pressured to do so.

Jobs also describes a usage scenario that positions iPhone as a mobile professional's handset, so it deserves to be judged against other devices in that category.

Graham: What about corporate e-mail? I understand that's an issue for many consumers, who may not be able to hook up to their company networks?

Great question!

Jobs: You'll be hearing more about this in the coming weeks. We have some pilots going with companies with names you'll recognize. This won't be a big issue.

Might this be the first of the third-party software developed with an unreleased software development kit? Perhaps that which will hit the fan is already in mid-flight.

Graham: When will the iPhone go on sale overseas?

Jobs: We have no announcement to make now.

I'm guessing that the deal with AT&T makes this dicey. For iPhone to be sold overseas, it has to be opened to multiple operators, including AT&T competitors that operate in the US and international operators that have roaming agreements with AT&T competitors. This would also create a gray market for re-imported iPhones.

Graham: So many analysts have suggested that with the expected success of the iPhone, Apple is about to be transformed into a different kind of company. What's your take?

Jobs: Working together with a partner like AT&T is a change for us. [...] By working together, we can come up with innovation