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TAG: Desktops and notebooks

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

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 17, 2008 | Comments: (0)

MacBook Air, a detailed preview

The room service menu in my hotel, the San Francisco Marriott Courtyard, is the size and weight of Apple's new commercial notebook, MacBook Air. MacBook Air, Apple's newest, thinnest, lightest, simplest notebook in Apple history weighs three pounds. It's 3/4s of an inch at the display hinge (closed), sloping down aerodynamically to a much narrower snout. You have to hold it and tumble MacBook Air to experience what a three pound, aerodynamically inspired notebook feels like, because it'll be a first for you. You have to imagine carrying MacBook Air everywhere in a slipcase, being able to whip it out, open it and have it ready for note taking, research, order entry, voice recording, podcasting, writing or what-have-you faster than you can jot your first word with that legal pad and pen in your bag.

Apple got MacBook Air so skinny and light by removing everything that the majority of mainstream commercial users don't use when they're not in the office or at home. There is no wired Ethernet and no FireWire. MacBook Air has just physical I/O ports: USB 2, audio output and micro-DVI (the latter for connecting to a digital, VGA or video monitor). These are all mounted on a tiny panel that flips down from the bottom of the notebook. When the I/O panel is closed, MacBook Air is nothing but smooth, sloped aluminum skin all the way around. There are no lumps or access covers to tip you off to component placement.

Many questions remain that require a full review to answer. My encounter was with a prototype, so I didn't get a chance to experience heat or fan noise. The charger is 45 watts, and the clocked-down chips in smaller packaging is encouraging. I also didn't get to see how far back the display tilts. I did find that the microphone is no to the right of the iSight window, though I don't know if the sound quality is improved. Likewise, I did not audition the speakers. A test left to run is to use this machine with Bluetooth stereo headphones. This works on MacBook Pro, but it's buggy. Does MacBook Air fix it?

MacBook Air's battery is sealed inside. It offers no external indication of its charge state. Apple's battery replacement program for MacBook Air is to drop it at any authorized facility, get it replaced, and get your machine back having been charged for the cost of the battery alone. I wouldn't expect this swap to happen while you wait, and I don't know whether Apple will commit to returning your data intact.

The thin lid encasing the 13.3-inch glossy display is astonishingly rigid. With so little distance between the top of the lid and the surface of the display, I felt sure that it would fail my warp test. I pressed hard on the back of the prototype MacBook Air's lid. It did not flex, and the display's image did not distort. It's my feeling that the shape of MacBook Air's case will make it a tougher travel partner than the typical squarish notebook.There isn't anything to cave in.

MacBook Air is gives you only what you need: A keyboard, a 13.3-inch display, 80 GB hard drive, wireless networking and 2 GB of RAM. The 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU (1.8 is an option) is clocked slow by modern standards, but it is cooler and more power efficient than the latest Penryn CPUs. Apple claims that MacBook Air's battery will last five hours, with Wi-Fi. If that's true, then it'll run 90 minutes longer than the much heavier MacBook Pro that I carry. The 45-watt charger makes in-flight and in-car charging cheap and easy.

MacBook Air's keyboard is MacBookish in style with widely space keys, but it is full size and backlit. The prototypes weren't lighting properly, so I can't speak to brightness of the lights or the opacity of the keycaps. The trackpad is massive relative to the size of the notebook. If it worked with a stylus, it'd make a fair tablet. The new trackpad supports a subset of iPhone's multi-touch gestures in bundled Leopard applications. In Safari, for example, you can navigate backward and forward among cached pages by sweeping across the trackpad. To enlarge text in the browser, you make a spreading motion with two fingers. In iPhoto, you can scroll, zoom and even rotate images in the thumbnail view with a single trackpad gesture. The gestural vocabulary will undoubtedly expand, and multi-touch will reach into other Apple software. Apple wasn't ready to address giving third-party developers access to multi-touch.

It goes without saying that this notebook isn't for everyone. MacBook Air's chief drawback is the display. Apple chose a sharp, glossy and bright LED-backlit 13.3-inch LCD panel. It looks marvelous, but it has a vertical resolution of 800 pixels. Pages and applications that are (poorly, lazily) designed to just fill a 1024x768 Windows screen have to be scrolled vertically on a Mac's 800 pixel tall display, while the 900 pixel tall screen of a 15-inch MacBook Pro is a perfect fit. The reason for this is a rant for another time.

Apple's usual thin, slot-loading optical drive would have made the case and the battery too thick, so Apple sells a thin, slot-loading, USB-powered external DVD burner for $99 (beautiful, portable and a bargain for any notebook). MacBook Air also comes with Remote Disc software that allows it to use the DVD drive in any PC or Mac on your LAN. Remote Disc completely bypasses the hassles of fire sharing. The shared disc shows up in Finder as a read-only CD/DVD drive. You cannot use Remote Disc to play DVD movies.

Before pointing to performance as a reason to take MacBook Air off your list, keep in mind that its Core 2 Duo CPU enables OS X Leopard's 64-bitness. With 2 GB of RAM, running Windows, Solaris or Linux as a guest OS under Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion is well within its reach. Given MacBook Air's small hard drive, using Boot Camp to dual-boot between OS X and Windows is impractical. With Intel's integrated graphics, the primary impetus for running Boot Camp--to run games and other graphics intensive Windows apps--isn't a factor for MacBook, MacBook Air or Mac mini.

Making MacBook Air at home everywhere I go would require some additional purchases: A USB to Ethernet adapter to connect to hotels' in-room networks, a DVI to HDMI adapter so that I can use hotels' LCD TVs as eye-friendly monitors, and the external DVD drive, because I get CDs and DVDs, and burn them, everywhere I go. But all of these fit in a sandwich-sized baggie that stays behind in the office or hotel while I fly, attend meetings and sit in conference sessions. I can't strip these things out of a big notebook to lighten it up, and they are among the peripherals that fatten the case and make a large, heavy battery necessary.

You do have to weigh MacBook Air's $1,799 sticker price against the benefits of traveling very, very light. If you run to meetings now with a wheeled bag in your wake because your notebook and charger are too fat and heavy to sling over your shoulder, you need to make a change. If it's such a pain to extricate and pry open your big notebook just to make a note, check an appointment or send an e-mail that you sometimes just don't bother, you definitely need a smaller notebook. If you start shopping with MacBook Air, I'm afraid that touring PC alternatives will prove unfulfilling.

Posted by Tom Yager on January 17, 2008 09:59 PM

January 14, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Macworld Conference and Expo: Why am I here?

I always look forward to Macworld Expo, but this year my expectations are especially high. It may be the bracing San Francisco weather that's got my blood moving, but it's my anticipation of the keynote and the exhibit floor that have me blogging in the shower.

Apple has scheduled two briefings with me this week. One is a keynote follow-up on Wednesday, and the other is a sit-down on Mac Pro and Xserve on Thursday. I've already got the skinny on Mac Pro and Xserve, both quite impressive, but both falling under the category of pre-show announcements that make room for something else. So will the Wednesday briefing be all about iPhone?

I am braced for that possibility. With 3G, a lower price, streaming media and an upcoming software development kit (SDK), I'm prepared to treat iPhone '08 as a new device. I have speculation related to the SDK that I'll relate under separate cover. Suffice it to say that I don't expect to be able to wipe iPhone's system software clean and replace it with Darwin. That would subvert the primary purpose of Apple's mobile platform: To be an iTunes terminal that fits in your pocket and sticks to your dashboard. The only need that I can see for an iPhone SDK is to allow Apple to market signed commercial software on iTunes Music Store. The only justification that I can see for native code is to support games, and to allow commercial code to enforce licenses.

Apple could surprise me. After all, there is no obvious revenue justification for publishing those portions of Darwin that are not covered by GPL, the GNU Public Licenses that require vendors to publish their adaptation of software covered by the license. I can imagine, and I'm sure that others can, too, iPhone and iPod touch being the world's most sought-after robotics controllers and de facto platforms for university courses in embedded systems. I don't expect iPhone/iPod touch to be opened to kernel hackers, but I think that in the long run, Darwin has good potential as an embedded OS.

I hear from my editors that there is still speculation about a Mac tablet. I'm bearish on that; PC tablets aren't hot commodities. With so much low-hanging fruit yet to harvest from the seasonal evolution of Mac, iPod, iPhone, iTunes, Leopard, Pro Apps and .Mac, I can't foresee any bold new lines of business for Apple right now. My attention this year is largely focused on third-party vendors. I am always hopeful for products that I didn't see coming, and I'd be delighted to hear Steve say something that nobody expects.

In any case, this'll be fun. I hope you'll come along.

Posted by Tom Yager on January 14, 2008 01:05 PM

January 08, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Apple ships new eight-core Harpertown Mac Pro and Xserve

Apple has once again taken up Intel's fresh-from-the-fab processor technology to give its two top-end systems a serious performance kick. Apple has reengineered its Xserve rack server and Mac Pro desktop/workstation for Intel's 45 nanometer quad-core Harpertown Xeon CPU with 12 MB of shared Level 2 cache per socket.

Xserve's top configuration now reaches to eight 3 GHz cores. Xserve's second socket is empty by default, making the standard config four cores, but the incremental config-to-order (CTO) cost to take the base Xserve to eight cores is just $500. The new Mac Pro elevates the standard configuration from four cores to eight while maintaining the previous Mac Pro's price level. That change is especially significant given that before today, a CTO eight core Mac Pro carried a premium of $1,200 over the standard four core system.

Apple claims that its new Mac Pro and Xserve deliver an impressively linear 1.9 to 2.3 times increase over the compute speed of prior four-core models, and with 800 MHz DDR2 memory (up from 667), 60 percent higher memory throughput. The new systems share support for PCI-Express 2.0 expansion cards, an option to upgrade to multiple 1 TB swappable hard drives, and when 4 GB FBDIMMs (fully buffered dual inline memory modules) are used, room for up to 32 GB of system memory. Both Xserve and Mac Pro are now shipping with 2 GB of RAM standard (previously 1 GB) and a SuperDrive dual-layer DVD burner.

Intel's Harpertown CPU is more energy efficient; Intel claims power consumption of 80 watts per socket, dropping to as little as 4 watts when idle. Apple has swapped out Xserve's redundant power supplies for stronger 750 watt units that exceed Energy Star 80 percent efficiency requirements. Mac Pro's system enclosure is identical to the previous model, while Xserve now has a USB 2.0 socket on its front panel.

Mac Pro and Xserve ship standard with discrete AMD/ATI 3-D graphics processing units (GPUs). Mac Pro's baseline config utilizes the Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256 MB of video memory, while Xserve ships with an on-board Radeon X1300. Mac Pro can support up to four AMD/ATI or NVidia graphics cards, while a 16x PCI-Express slot on Xserve permits the optional use of a standalone graphics adapter to supplant the built-in GPU.

AMD/ATI graphics cards are available now. An Apple spokesman said that optional NVidia graphics cards are "several weeks away."

Apple's systems are engineered in-house, not based on Intel reference designs. Mac Pro and Xserve are thoroughly instrumented for multi-point monitoring of power utilization, temperature and fan speed. Both systems have standard swappable hard drive backplanes--Mac Pro has four internal swappable drive bays, while Xserve has three front-facing bays--and the option to use either Serial ATA or Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives. SAS is new to this generation of Mac Pro, a benefit of the optional hardware RAID controller. The same RAID controller is an option for Xserve, but Xserve is capable of using any mix of SATA and SAS drives without the RAID option.

At $2,799, the standard Mac Pro ships with two 2.8 GHz quad-core Xeon CPUs, an AMD/ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card with 256 MB of video RAM, a 320 GB SATA hard drive, a 16X SuperDrive DVD burner with dual-layer support, Bluetooth 2.0, 2 GB of 800 MHz DDR2 memory, and Apple's wired aluminum keyboard and Mighty Mouse. Mac Pro ships with OS X Leopard and the iLife '08 personal digital media suite installed.

In its $2,999 standard configuration, Apple's Xserve has a single quad-core, 2.8 GHz CPU, an 80 GB SATA hard drive, 2 GB of 800 MHz DDR2 memory and a slot-loading SuperDrive DVD burner. Both systems have a large catalog of configure-to-order options that are factory-installed and tested by Apple.

The new Mac Pro and Xserve are shipping today via Apple's on-line and retail stores, and through authorized resellers.

Posted by Tom Yager on January 8, 2008 09:46 AM

December 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)

MacBook Pro unresponsive keyboard patch. Nick of time, or vain hope?

Apple has done it again. It has released a patch overlapping with my blog entry complaining about a bug, but this time, Apple beat me to posting the entry, so I can't claim credit for the fix. I'm also not the least bit sure that the fix and my trouble are related, but I have a reason to report the MacBook Pro Software Update 1.1 as newsworthy.

The MacBook Pro Software Update 1.1 patch addresses "a temporary suspension of keyboard input which can last a minute or longer." That's familiar.

I've been trying to narrow this bug, or something like it, down to a particular app or kernel extension, or to some newness in Leopard. My best suspect was the recent pairing with a new Plantronics A2DP (Bluetooth Stereo) headset, which did knock my MacBook Pro loaner quite wobbly in other respects.

A2DP is still problematic, as I'll relate to you. But at least now I can tease trouble related to Bluetooth Stereo from a known hardware bug.

Posted by Tom Yager on December 19, 2007 01:00 PM

December 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Time Machine Server, or local external drive?

One of the services packaged with OS X Server Leopard (there are so many) is Time Machine Server. If you're running a network of Leopard notebooks and desktops, centralized Time Machine backups are easier to administer and secure than doling out a fleet of FireWire and USB drives. However, if you want to carry each client's protection beyond Time Machine's rolling 30 day window--Time Machine will retain weekly backups until it runs out of space--you might have to set aside twice the size of each busy client's internal hard drive to exceed 30 days' worth of coverage. The headroom varies widely by user, but do you want to try to tailor a backup strategy to each machine?

You have to weigh Time Machine Server's physical server (Xserve or Mac Pro) and storage costs--expenses that can't be avoided in any disk-based backup scenario--against savings in administrators' time ("please mount volume xxx") and user data lost to infrequent backups and cumbersome restore procedures.

For me, what sets aside all arguments about cost and flexibility of Time Machine Server is its catalog. Lots of backup utilities maintain catalogs, but Time Machine's catalog is chock full of metadata and is completely maintenance free. Users access Time Machine with a Finder-like interface that conceals the fact that they're even accessing a shared volume. When using Time Machine server, administrators maintain the ability to do point in time restores, or migrations, without the time or effort of taking full volume snapshots.

With regard to the incremental cost of storage as clients are added to the LAN, someone suggested attaching the USB or FireWire drives that would be on users' desks on the server instead. For five clients in a casual setting, sure. You could unmount any machine's backup drive, hand it to the user and tell them to do their own restore. Leopard presents "restore from Time Machine backup" as an option when you boot from the install DVD. For more than a few clients, or where the purpose of Time Machine is more critical than "undelete," I'd rather see a more robust enclosure, even a dumb backplane, than a daisy chain of FireWire drives.

Keep in mind that Time Machine doesn't absolutely require a server or an external physical volume. You can split local drives into multiple volumes, and use one for Time Machine. You end up with a backup volume that's bigger than the primary, but the average user is none the wiser. That takes care of undelete, and more old fashioned methods can be used at the server to cover worst case recovery.

What would I like to see in Time Machine? My one and only desire is to have Time Machine run only when the client is idle. This is really driven home when you try to use Wi-Fi, even 802.11n, to connect to a Time Machine Server. My strong recommendation is to use copper for Time Machine, at least for the volume copy that it makes as a first step. I realize that RJ-45 sockets, and users who sit still long enough to take advantage of them, are rare these days. If you must use Time Machine Server over wireless, or, heaven forbid, broadband, remember that I warned you against it.

Posted by Tom Yager on December 16, 2007 08:01 AM

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 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Apple issues 23 updates in two days; highlights of Tiger and Leopard updates

200711151902

Make sure your broadband bill is paid up, because Apple's got a crate full of fixes with your name on them.

In a couple of cases, these are the updates we've all been waiting for. I'm hoping that the iMac Graphics Firmware Update will get iMac users out of their work/save/reboot cycle. Such beautiful machines behaving so badly. I still wonder whether Apple or ATI did the brunt of the work on this fix.

The entire Pro Apps suite has gotten significant attention. One of the many qualities to appreciate about Final Cut Studio, Aperture and Logic is the frequency with which Apple tunes and enhances them. TV networks and movie studios deserve a bit of extra attention, no?

All Tiger and Leopard users have gotten major attention. 10.4.11 is the latest scheduled release of Tiger, and high points among its improvements include Safari 3.0, RAW image decoding for a range of new Olympus and Panasonic cameras, VMware Fusion stability fixes, the addressing of a bug affecting port mapping with shared Internet connections, 3rd-party WAN device compatibility, USB hard drive reliability, and security updates.

I'm all in for that USB hard drive update. I wonder if it would have kept my dead MacBook Pro eval unit alive. I just missed it.

OS X Server 10.4.11 has all this, along with some server essentials, like allowing users to belong to more than 16 groups, repairs to the FTP server to handle the LIST command properly, failover between Intel and PowerPC servers, LAN registration of OS X servers via Bonjour, proper handling of aliases on UFS and Xsan volumes, having the chmod command cause corresponding changes in ACL permissions, and fixes for memory panics in servers with 2 GB and 4 GB of RAM.

The OS X 10.5.1 update has some changes that really matter. It puts password-protected AirPort disks in the Finder's Shared sidebar and claims to fix Leopard's annoying tendency to forget wireless network passwords.

Have you used Back to My Mac? It's a simple tunnel to your home Mac from a remote system that works even when one machine or the other is behind a NAT router. The Back to My Mac fix shows remotely-accessible Macs in Finder's sidebar more reliably, and fixes glitches with D-Link NAT gateways. D-Link gear is priced right, but it tends to present challenges, doesn't it?

iCal and Mail have substantial fixes in the areas of the delivery of alarms via e-Mail, the invitation of meeting attendees through CalDAV, attachments inside HTML e-mail, SMTP connection failures in accounts created with Simple Setup, and a couple of significant fixes affecting .Mac users.

In security and firewall (which have been combined in Leopard), Apple has arranged to allow unsigned third-party applications through the firewall if they're whitelisted in either Application Firewall or Parental Controls. Apple has changed some confusing wording in the Firewall tab; instead of Block All, which sounds like your machine is cut off from the outside world, Apple has inserted the wording "Allow only essential services." Apple's idea of "essential" may differ from yours; dealing with that is your problem.

One potentially serious squashed nasty regards the risk of dropping data when moving files across partitions using Finder. Time Machine no longer shrieks at huge, single-partition MBR (master boot record) drives and NTFS volumes.

Posted by Tom Yager on November 15, 2007 05:03 PM

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 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 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Getting started with X11 on Mac

Now that you know what X11 is good for, it's time to play with it. First, launch /Applications/Utilities/X11.app. If this doesn't exist, install it from an OS X DVD.

If you give keyboard/mouse focus to any X11 window, you'll get X11.app's menu bar. X11 software puts menus inside client windows. It's the price of portability.

Unlocking the Mac's X11 applications and documentation
To get to OS X's standard set of X11 applications and man pages, you need to edit either ~/.profile or ~/.cshrc to alter your PATH and MANPATH environment variables. I use bash, so I added these lines to the bottom of ~/.profile:

export PATH=/usr/X11R6/bin:$PATH
export MANPATH=/usr/X11R6/man:$MANPATH
export DISPLAY=localhost:0.0

Without DISPLAY set properly, X11 won't function. if you run into trouble, this is the first thing to suspect. DISPLAY won't match the value shown above if you're attached to a remote system. I'll explain that in my next post.

Launching applications automatically when X11 starts
There's one more file you want to change or create: ~/.xinitrc. Here's where you put the commands you want to run every time X11.app starts. At a minimum, this should read:

quartz-wm &
xterm

As a rule, launch interactive X11 applications in the background, as with quartz-wm above. That's as true for the command line as it is for ~/.xinitrc. Let the last command in ~/.xinitrc run in the foreground. When that last application exits, X11.app will either quit or wait for you to launch a new client application. Other X11 servers may reset or log you out.

X11's workhorse, xterm
Now you're ready for your first X11 app, the one in which you'll likely spend most of your time. Open up an OS X Terminal window and type:

xterm &

xterm isn't much to look at, but it has tons of command-line options; see the man page. Learn to love xterm, because it's the only terminal you can count on across all X11 implementations.

If you can't pull up a context menu in an X11 app like xterm, it might be triggered by mouse button 3. You can map virtual mouse buttons in X11.app's preferences. You can also set shortcuts for frequently-used clients in X11.app's Application menu. And you can always launch a new xterm instance by typing "xterm &" in an xterm window. Remember, launch X11 clients in the background.

Everything you just learned about xterm applies to X11 clients in general. It's not rocket science.

In the next and final part of this series, you'll learn how easy it is to use X11 to connect to remote hosts. In the meantime, rummage around in /usr/X11R6/bin. Most of the commands there have man pages, and any local client can be launched from an xterm window.

Posted by Tom Yager on October 10, 2007 09:21 PM

October 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Why Mac users should love X11

If you're not pulling X Window apps down from Fink or DarwinPorts, you might never have noticed /Applications/Utilities/X11.app. Or perhaps you've noticed it, but consider it a throwback to the 90s, one evolutionary step beyond the green screen. Give it a fresh look, because it has many qualities that other remote GUI methods, like VNC and Apple Remote Desktop, lack. For some purposes, like software development, X11 can reduce your dependence on Parallels, VMware Fusion and Boot Camp.

X11 is an elegantly simple client/server GUI protocol that allows any X Window application to run in one place but use the keyboard, mouse and display of any system. Using an X Window app from the console or from a hotel delivers precisely the same experience.

200710101527

An application needs to be compiled to use X Window; it doesn't make arbitrary client sofware, like Aqua apps, remotable (I wish). But you'd be surprised by the range of X11-enabled applications that work seamlessly over remote links with their rich native GUIs: Firefox is a great example, as is openoffice.org, but any GNOME or KDE application is inherently remotable via X11, as are all command line apps.

X11 works like magic. Any command you launch in a remote terminal connection to a host pops up a new window on your desktop, complete with Aqua trim. Grab the title bar of any X11 application on your desktop and shake it; it updates in real-time. X11 has extensions for 3-D, smooth fonts, video and most all of the GUI features you'd want. Software runs over there with the compute speed and capacity of the remote host, but the GUI renders on your display at Aqua's native speed.

If your curiosity isn't piqued yet, consider these points:

Launching a remote X11 app like xterm, X11's command window, requires only a single command from your desktop
Authentication with a remote X11 host is secured and vastly simplified by an SSH tunnel
Complex GUI applications like Firefox, along with all GNOME and KDE applications, have intrinsic X11 support and can be run remotely, as can all command line software
X11 is transparently cross-platform. It's literally everywhere, and it's usually part of the standard OS distribution
No daemon is required on the remote side. Each application makes the connection
If a network link to a remote X11 app is lost, X11 reconnects automatically. That's nice for notebook sleep/wake. By default, the connection won't survive a reboot at either end, but there's a solution for that, too
Unlike VNC and Apple Remote Desktop, X11 doesn't resend the entire display, just the changes within each window. Common operations, like scrolling, are accelerated
X11 is faster than VNC and Remote Desktop, but it doesn't preclude their use

Is X11 sounding better now? Hang in, because in part two, I'll tell you how to use it. You'll be surprised by how easy it is.

Posted by Tom Yager on October 10, 2007 01:25 PM

October 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Apple acknowledges iMac graphics glitch; my suggested workarounds

Lynn Fox, Apple's Director of Mac PR, rang yesterday to deliver the company's statement regarding a bug that is affecting some iMac users. According to Apple, a small number of iMac users have reported GUI lock-ups--the system keeps running, but the screen stops updating--that require rebooting the system. Apple isn't saying anything more about the cause than that it is related to graphics, and at present, it appears that rebooting is the only way to restore the iMac to a usable state. Apple apologizes to its customers for the inconvenience, and it will issue a fix as soon as possible, hopefully before the end of the month (this is meant to be reassuring? --TY). In the meantime, Apple is inviting customers that are affected by the bug to contact AppleCare for the latest status on workarounds and fixes.

That concludes what Ms. Fox shared with me, and it's all that Apple has to say on the matter until they issue another official statement. What follows are my personal thoughts on the subject.

If you're personally affected by the iMac bug, I empathize completely. "As soon as possible," much less "by the end of the month," is an eternity when you're waiting for a critical fix, but keep your perspective. This isn't the first time you've had to wait for something to get fixed. I have some suggestions to tide you over while you're waiting for Apple's definitive patch.

There are several techniques that I use to restart, or even operate headless Macs (Macs without monitors). These also work to do a clean shutdown when the MacBook Pro display fails to wake from sleep, so they should work if your iMac GUI freezes.

An ultra-clean reboot sequence, meaning one that doesn't lose any unsaved files, can usually be activated by tapping Power, then R, then Enter repeatedly, with a second or so between presses of Enter. This should cycle through open projects and documents and save them, giving them default names like "Untitled1" if they haven't already been saved at least once. You can usually locate files saved with default names by using File, Open Recent within the app.
Always leave Universal Access turned on (System Preferences, Universal Access). Command+F5 activates Voice Over, which guides you around applications. It's pretty amazing. With very little practice, you can literally drive the entire Mac interface with your eyes closed. Don't forget to turn your sound on.
Enable Remote Desktop (System Preferences, Sharing, check the "Apple Remote Desktop" box) on your iMac. You may be able to connect to your Mac GUI from another computer using Remote Desktop, Apple's commercial remote management tool, or a VNC client (like Chicken of the VNC on the Mac; there are many choices for Windows, UNIX and Linux). When you first check Apple Remote Desktop, you'll need to click the Access Privileges button, check the "VNC viewers may control screen with password" box, and enter a password. This one password will connect to your Mac no matter which user is logged in, or even when no user is logged in. Make sure you assign a password that's easy for you to remember but impossible for others to guess.

Universal Access and Remote Desktop need to be set up in advance. It's important to practice flying blind before you're actually forced to do it.

Posted by Tom Yager on October 5, 2007 07:29 AM

October 01, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Santa Rosa MacBook Pro review: The green and gold standard in high-end Intel notebooks

I got stung by my last MacBook Pro review which went to press before the unit started showing problems with build quality and durability. I would not have pronounced it so with confidence any sooner than this, but I can state now that today's MacBook Pro stands head and shoulders above Apple's prior flagship Intel notebooks, and sets a standard for performance, features, durability, eco-responsibility and quality that any PC vendor will find difficult to approach for a similar price.

The Santa Rosa MacBook Pro (named for the Intel Core 2 Duo chipset used in the notebook), perhaps also known as the LED backlit MacBook Pro, has earned its stripes. If this notebook had a frequent flier account of its own, it would have racked up enough travel miles in my carry-on bag to qualify for Gold status. I figure that this is a fitting milestone for writing this machine up, because by this point, most notebooks, including some from Apple, would be showing their age. This machine looks, feels and runs like it did when it came out of the box. Considering how sweet it was new, that's saying something.

Summary

Apple has transcended PC notebooks. The Santa Rosa MacBook Pro doesn't look or feel like any notebook you've ever driven, even if your present notebook is a Mac. It's built.

The aluminum case isn't just for style. It's armor in a meaningful way that practically begs to be used on a film set, on a seat-back table, on an international trip, in a photo studio, in a radiologist's lab, in an elite developer's lap or in the field for on-site news edits and Webcasts. The LCD panel doesn't show rainbows when you press on it from the front or the back. The magnetic lid latch and AC charger connector won't wear like spring and friction-fit alternatives do. The new LED backlight has wider extremes of dimness and brightness than common fluorescent panel backlights, and the glossy display is sharp and contrasty.

The keyboard is springy and the keys are firmly fastened; there's no hint of a clatter when you sweep your fingers across the keys. The trackpad is clearly redesigned to eliminate feedback from palms rested on either side. The display hinge holds firm in any position until you intentionally move it. With a higher memory capacity of 4 GB of RAM--I suggest that you take advantage of it, especially if an upgrade to Leopard is in your plans--making MacBook Pro your only computer is quite reasonable. When pricing next to a PC notebook, keep MacBook Pro's all-important discrete graphics processing unit (GPU) in mind. Integrated (chipset) graphics that use system memory for video RAM are ubiquitous almost everywhere but in MacBook Pro, but frankly, my dear, chipset graphics suck. Try smooth-scrolling a Web page that's jam-packed with Flash animation on a system with chipset graphics, and then do the same thing on a machine with a GPU, like MacBook Pro. Try doing anything in 3-D (OS X's awesome GUI is entirely 2-D, so it doesn't suffer) with chipset graphics. That kind of work will make any notebook run hot, but even when MacBook Pro heats up, it always keeps up. That's my standard.

There you have it: A true tale of "third time's the charm" producing a notebook that is the best that any non-tablet notebook vendor could create with Intel parts. You can read on for more details and insight, or stop here and know that the summary resulted from weeks of use in demanding production conditions. I am a MacBook Pro customer.

For those of you who prefer it short and sweet, this review has ended. Go in peace.

Screen time
Like another frequent flier of lore, MacBook Pro is practically perfect in every way. The LED-backlit display is more power efficient, although not as dramatically as I'd hoped, but is infinitely more eco-friendly. LEDs hit their configured color temperature and brightness immediately; there's no warm-up period. The LED backlight is radiant, paper white at its top brightness, and conference room friendly at minimum brightness. LED is simply a win over fluorescent all the way around.

This MacBook Pro has something else I've been bugging Apple about for a long time: A glossy display. I believe that gloss should be standard fare for LCD displays. Matte scatters light in both directions. It doesn't reflect, but it also blurs fine detail; a matte display, like a photograph viewed through matte-finish glass, never looks quite focused. The combination of white LEDs and a glossy surface give MacBook Pro's LCD panel the crispness, contrast and color purity that one associates with a perfectly-focused photograph. I can go on and on about the spectacular image quality for photography, video and graphics, but I'll touch on practical ergonomics instead. I often dialed back the resolution of the previous 15-inch Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro to compensate for eye fatigue after eight or ten hours straight at the keyboard. I haven't done that since switching to the glossy LED-backlit MacBook Pro. My eyes don't get tired because they're not constantly trying to fix focus on a subtly blurry display.

Put more concisely, the combination of the gloss and the Cinema Display-grade panel add up to two things I've never seen in an LCD: Black and white. Aperture on this display has reawakened my interest in product photography. I shoot for gloss, but with a matte notebook I waste a lot on preview prints. Now Aperture shows me exactly what a glossy print will deliver.

The LED backlight is brighter and darker than fluorescent. It's true white. If there is a downside to gloss, it's the lack of privacy. The display is viewable at any brightness and from any angle.

Build
I had bad luck with the build quality of two MacBook Pro models before this one, primarily related to the keyboard, trackpad and battery. The preceding MacBook Pro, Apple's first Core 2 Duo model, was most un-Apple-like in its construction, even the battery, arriving with problems and showing extraordinary signs of wear after no more hardship or usage than this MacBook Pro has endured. I'm pleased to report that the MacBook Pro that Apple is selling now is built tight.

Apple doesn't talk about the things it changes from model to model, but I'm an ergonomics wonk, and this keyboard and trackpad feel nothing like the two preceding MacBook Pro generations. The new keyboard is stiffer, requiring a much heavier touch, but the loose, misaligned keys of feather-touch MacBook Pros past have been replaced by a perfect grid of keys that support the full weight of your hands between keystrokes. The look of the keyboard hasn't changed a bit. The legends are still large and the backlighting is perfect, illuminating only the legends and not the rest of the key or the key bed. Keyboard backlighting is no gimmick. You realize that its ergonomic necessity once you have it, and I've seen no other notebook or add-on keyboard that gets it right.

The new trackpad fixes a problem I've found constant all the way back to the final two models of PowerBook. Resting your palm on either side of the trackpad used to result in spurious taps and pointer motion. Apple's goal of making the trackpad flush with the top surface has been abandoned, and you can now rest your palms anywhere you want.

I get a number of remarks from readers and gate lounge passersby that Mac notebook display hinges are too loose. Apple fixed that with the first MacBook Pro. It remains fixed, and so does the display until you intentionally move it.

Performance
No one on the planet can feel a 200 MHz difference in CPU clocked at over 2 GHz, so I wasn't floored by the goose from 2.2 to 2.4 GHz when I upgraded to Santa Rosa MacBook Pro. What I did feel, and quite dramatically, is a drop in performance for the loss of 1 GB of RAM. The previous MacBook Pro had 3 GB. My workload is rougher than average, but not atypical for power users. I discovered that for my usage patterns, 3 GB is the sweet spot for Macs. That's pretty much where Vista sits as well. If you walk away with nothing else, get at least 3 GB of RAM for your notebook.

What most people associate with computer performance is actually GUI performance, and that's where Apple has always excelled. MacBook Pro has a desktop-grade graphics processing unit (GPU), an NVidia GeForce 8600M GT with 256 MB of dedicated VRAM (video RAM). It's wickedly fast and unexpectedy power efficient. You cannot get MacBook Pro to drop a frame while playing HD video from disk. Final Cut Studio, which is extremely GPU-intensive, runs beautifully without pushing the CPU to its limits. Unique to OS X, as well as the applications written to use Apple's Acceleration Framework, is the offloading of selected non-graphics-related math to the GPU. NVidia is pursuing GPU as coprocessor technology on its own.

I did say practically perfect, and that brings up my single complaint with Santa Rosa MacBook Pro. Its power management skills are inferior to my own, which is to say that I can extend running time per charge manually to a far greater extent than MacBook Pro is able to do automatically.

The machine takes a long time to transition in and out of sleep mode, and it sometimes won't wake at all. Waking is an art for any Intel system. I've got a Toshiba tablet that wakes from sleep in one second flat and never fails, and a Fujitsu notebook that's catch-as-catch-can about it. This is the first MacBook Pro I've had trouble with, but then I've been through several OS X updates on this machine as well. Software? Hardware? I don't know, but what instabilities there are I'm sure that Apple can fix it in OS X or firmware.

Running time on battery is the last measure of notebook design excellence, and here, MacBook Pro turns in a top-tier performance compared to most PC notebooks. I judge the average running time, with a productivity workload and Wi-Fi turned off, to be right at four hours. With some careful pruning of unnecessary background processes, such that the CPU is effectively zero percent utilized between keystrokes, I can eke out five hours of typing and reading. MacBook Pro's power handling of its AirPort Extreme Wi-FI and Bluetooth wireless interfaces is poor enough that manually turning them completely off is a necessity for power conservation. Fortunately, with icons right on the menu bar, shutting down wireless is easy. Apple offers users no control over Wi-Fi transmission power or power saving modes other than an "enable interference robustness" checkbox.

The reach of AirPort Extreme, especially running in draft-n mode and paired with Apple's current AirPort Extreme base station, is exceptional. A problem that I was having early on with nearby base stations dropping in and out of sight was fixed by an automatic Software Update.

Coarse-grained power management that is largely dependent on direction from the OS is another trait common to Intel systems. I've documented the steps I take to extract five hours of battery life from a MacBook Pro. It isn't easy, but unlike Windows, the UNIX layer transparency of OS X gives users more control over CPU load. And it is entirely scriptable.

One last testament to Santa Rosa MacBook Pro's excellence is that short of tablet models, MacBook Pro is the best Windows carry-on I've got. If Dell made this machine, MacBook Pro would be that vendor's flagship Vista notebook. Power users who buy PC notebooks ought to look at MacBook Pro even if they're dead set against OS X because it runs Windows XP and Vista natively, with no compromises, and even with backlit keyboard, special hot keys, frame-mounted Web cam and gaming-grade GPU. I invite you to buy Santa Rosa MacBook Pro (get the optional 3 or 4 GB RAM), and get a copy of XP or Vista. Once you boot Windows the first time, your MacBook Pro can boot it by default.