Got my AppleTV today

I picked mine up at the Pioneer Place Apple Store - as soon as the folks who had pre-ordered it, it seems.

It's still syncing, and it's gonna take a while since I'm still on wireless-g, but it doesn't seem to matter anyway - I can stream stuff immediately, and it runs smoothly after 2-3 seconds of pre-buffering. I love it so far. There was less setup than with an iPod.

Here's the Appleporn:

Unboxing gallery

Things Windows users don't say

And you know what? He was right back.

Spicing up iPhone's black background

I was wondering why the Home view on the iPhone features a flat black background. It saves battery, I suppose, but it's also a little boring. Here are some quick mock-ups of what it would look like with background images.

Click for full-size.

Nice, but feels like bastardized Mac OS X.



Colorful, but too busy.



Way too busy.

I actually prefer the black. Can you do better?

All images here are Apple's. No hard feelings?

Inquisitor - search box enhancer for Safari

You know how Firefox's search box completes as you type, gives you the option of picking the search engine to use on the fly, and shows suggested search terms? That's a cool feature. If only Safari had something like that.

Well, if you were willing to fork over $5, it did; David Watanabe, a developer of fancy-schmancy Mac apps, created a Safari plug-in called Inquisitor. It replicated the above functionality in a more graphic way than Firefox. This worked well, though not always perfectly, and not everyone wanted to part with $5 (the very nerve of the developer...!)

Ok, no more excuses. If you use Safari, head on over to the Inquisitor website and get a FREE copy of the new version. It has all kinds of sweetness all over it. Here's what it looks like when you search for things with its help. It's completely and fully rad.



Apple should just buy Inquisitor, CoverFlow-style. David deserves more than donations and Safari users deserve Inquisitor.

Enabling the "Edit in external editor" menu option in iPhoto

While iPhoto is neat for basic photo editing, I primarily use Photoshop for serious adjustments (love that Shadow/Highlight tool). I was surprised to find that when I Ctrl-clicked my photos, the "Edit in external editor" option was grayed out. Here's how to set it up.

In iPhoto Preferences, under General, set "Edit photo:" to "External editor" (this controls what happens when you double-click thumbnails). Pick Photoshop (or whichever application you plan to use). Close Preferences.

Now, I normally set this option to "Using full screen" because it's a very smooth, distraction-free environment for basic tweaking. We set the above option just so it would show up in the context menu when Ctrl-clicking a photo. Try it now - "Edit in external editor" will be available.

You can now go back to Preferences and change the "Edit photo" option to anything else - the external editor has been set and the option will always be available.

Why there won't be a red Mac

Almost as soon as the new red iPod was announced, rumors started spreading of other possible product(red) products (in red). Here's why I'm willing to bet my hat that a red iMac, Mac mini, or MacBook will never happen:

AppleInsider MacBook RED poll, with a mock-up

And another one, found via Google.

That thing looks absolutely scary. Both the MacBook's plastic and the MacBook Pro's aluminum would just look very off in red. They're also simply far too big for all that saturated color; a 15" object won't look candybar no matter how you paint it.

Different sections of Apple's website

Describing how and why Apple Computer's design (and design philosophy) is fantastic would be a waste of keystrokes. Just take my word for it: they can put things together with elegance, originality, and consistency rarely seen elsewhere. This extends to Apple.com, which, while always a work in progress (like every website), has been particularly stunning lately.

Page after page, it's perhaps the best adaptation of glossy print design to the web; when I say best, I again mean the prettiest, most useful, and most skillfully coordinated. There are more impressive designs out there; there are technically more involved ones; there are much, much bigger computer companies. But compare, for instance, Apple's notebook portal page to Dell's. It's a fair comparison; both Apple and Dell would agree with that. Maybe I'm just too lazy to spell out what all makes the MacBook page incomparably better, but I really don't think it needs to be spelled out at all.

That said, some key sections of Apple.com are surprisingly unimpressive. I understand why Hot News is stuck in 1996; nobody cares about it anyway. But what about the seemingly very, very important Hardware section? No product images, no flowing, magazine-like layout? The partner section, Software, follows the same underachiever formula. These are key portals to Apple's goodies, and pretty much all other sections look better - including the store locator and Developer announcements (Lord knows most devs don't care what this looks like... but kudos to Apple for not bowing to that stereotype.)

It might be that few people browse the site in this way. The big (and usually excellent) front-page ad and its tiny children below point to what almost all visitors are looking for: the new iPod, the MacBook upgrade, the latest ad or Stevenote. Those looking for something else will go to the Store or the Support page.

So here are my suggestions to Apple (and I'm very aware of the pompousness of that statement):

• make your Hardware and Software pages lickable.


• Compress that scattered footer found on most of your pages; I appreciate the white space, but I cringe at the lack of grid, balance, and composition in it. Also, those default blue links have to go. The .Mac page is on the right track.


• Widen the Store page; it's still in 640 x 480 land, while most of your site has expanded way beyond it.


• Lose the menu pinstripe. I know, I know. They grow up so fast.


• RSS is orange - that's been decided. Drop the blue and ride with it. This applies to Safari and the rest of the desktop as well.


• Spice up the Retail pages; they're not bad, but they just don't make me want to visit and shop as much as pretty much everything else on the website does.

iPod Shuffle sync speed problem (2G version)

My friend Dino wanted a small, no-nonsense music player for jogging and such and I recommended the new Shuffle, out today. It's tiny, it's simple, it's beautiful.

Dino also asked me to show him how to work this in iTunes (he's got a PC and listens to CDs). We hooked it up, picked a playlist of about 20 songs, and hit Autofill...

...and spent the next 10 minutes staring at the "Updating..." screen. It took about 20 seconds to transfer a single song! This definitely smelled fishy, so I resynced the Shuffle with my PowerBook (thinking it was an issue with Dino's USB port), but the slowness persisted.

I found the answer on Apple's support forums, and here it is in case you don't find it there yourself:

When you connect the iPod and click on it under Devices, under the Settings tab, there's a checkbox to "Convert songs to 128 ACC", meaning, to reduce the quality and filesize to fit more songs on the cute li'l thing. Nifty, but also quite unexpectedly slow. Unless you absolutely need loads of songs for your gym run, you'll probably prefer better transfer speeds.

New Pizzle

I treated myself to a new iPod Nano (PRODUCT) RED (which is a red iPod Nano product) and I'm loving it - the thing is hilariously small, light, and thin, the battery lasts forever, and the screen is sharper and brighter than Mark Twain.

I'm also liking the new iTunes, version 7. I haven't experienced any problems reported by many others, so I can only recommend it. The new iPod options interface is a very welcome change - the gray dialog box of v.6 was getting very, very cramped. I hope they play with the looks of it a little more to make it less webpage-like (I suggest making it more like the beautiful Apple product pages), but it's a nice little iPod Central.

Another welcome addition is a nice, big picture of my iPod. However, I was ever so slightly disappointed to find that it was a generic gray instead of red like my actual iPod. Couldn't this be figured out from its serial number? C'mon, Apple....

...And sure enough, with yesterday's iTunes 7.0.2 update, this feature was added. Here's what my wine-red little toy looks like in iTunes now:

Tangerine awakening

Tangerine is a trendy new Mac app with a simple and useful premise: generate "mood-based" iTunes playlists. This is done by analyzing the iTunes library and picking songs in the user-selected BPM and intensity ranges. If I want a rock-out or exercise playlist, I pick high BPMs and intense beats; for chill-out time, I would pick the opposite.

Most non-Mac users will mock our appreciation of nice application icons, but I honestly don't care - let me profess my love for the Tangerine icon here and now. It's superb. The app itself looks pretty swanky too, though for my taste, it mimics too many iTunes features I might as well use in iTunes (if Tangerine were, say, a plug-in instead of a standalone app). But that's not really a complaint, just a side note.

Analysis of my 3,800-song library took about an hour and a half on a PowerBook G4. That's not stellar, but it's also not like I needed that punk playlist immediately. After this I went to create my first playlist - something fast and intense, my weapon of choice for dishwashing, dusting, and other household chores. I went for a BPM range of 130-200bpm and above-average intensity. I was surprised to find only these two settings (including a distribution curve).

The results were sorely disappointing. Included were a number of scratchy 1930s jazz cuts, and some of the mellowest tracks by Tricky, Can, and Beck (trust me, they were pretty darn mellow). I pushed both the BPM and the intensity up and got similar results - while some of the tracks were what I would put in the "fast and intense" category using my cerebral analyzer, they made up 10-20% of the generated mix.

Just about the only way I was able to create playlists that matched my expectations of fast/slow and mellow/intense was by picking from one of my carefully assembled iTunes Smart playlists. Which had me wondering why I was using Tangerine at all - a quick comparison of purely random iTunes lists using a somewhat selective playlist and Tangerine playlists seeded from the same pool with the added BPM and intensity revealed no appreciable difference between the two.

Maybe I was doing something wrong. Or maybe my music library is wacky somehow. In any case I found that Tangerine, while pleasant to use, did next to nothing for me - and not because I'm not in its target market. I have dozens of Smart playlists I regularly use. They were one of the things that impressed me the most about iTunes.

Sorry, you sexy citrus - maybe next time.

Kodak CX7430 pictures crash iPhoto...

I've never had this problem in iPhoto, and I've been using it for years with dozens of different cameras: when I tried importing pictures from my friend's Kodak CX7430 today, it silently crashed every time. It didn't matter if I imported one picture at a time or many, and each picture did it. Moving the pictures from the camera to the Mac and then importing didn't fix it either.

I tried re-saving these in Photoshop. No dice - if the problem was with EXIF or other metadata in the files, a simple re-save wouldn't have changed it anyway.

My solution was to create an action that saves an image in the TIFF format, then run it as a batch action on all the images. The TIFFs were imported fine (same thing if I now converted them back to JPEG).

The funny thing is, I've imported pictures from this camera before. The only thing that's different now is that I ran the fifth 2006 Security Update just last night.