I Hope Phil's Ass Is Feeling Alright...

Sorry, I couldn't resist...



All snark aside, I'm really glad Apple had their mini press junket on tuesday.  Such a direct mea culpa is staggeringly uncharacteristic for the company, but it was sorely needed among their pro customers.  (Of which, at least according to the Schedule C in my tax return, I still count!)

As others have said, actions speak louder than words, but these words were exactly what they needed to be.  They also helped to explain Apple's recent actions - or lack thereof - in a way that rang true.  I have no trouble believing Apple would bet big on a radical new design, confident in their read that the pro market was moving to dual-GPU systems, only to find that their design couldn't accommodate  the real ways that hardware developed, and that they had backed themselves into a corner when they tried to plot future revisions.  Every company makes mistakes, and this is exactly the kind of mistake Apple would make.

It also should cement (if there was any doubt) the 2013 Mac Pro's place in computer history as the G4 Cube 2.0.  Heck, 10 years down the line the trash can will probably be a collector's item of sorts!

With as much work as they have ahead of them completely redesigning a modular and frequently-upgradable Mac Pro, the wait certainly isn't going to be easy.  But I'm excited to see where this leads...

It's The Little Things...

How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail

This is what I love about many Apple products - not big, impressive features that "revolutionize" a product, but the little, well-thought-out details that, once your realize them, make you frustrated that everything doesn't work that way.

Other favorite examples, from Mac OS, include spring-loaded folders, and proxy icons.

My iPhone Goes For a Swim

Update June 23, 2019: It's worth noting that, nearly a decade later, current wisdom no longer suggests the use of rice.

Ok, so this happened several weeks ago, but I wanted to see how things actually played out before writing this post.

I was getting ready to do some laundry while carrying on a conversation with my mother.  Start the water, soap goes in, shirts, pants - pretty automatic.  I finished the conversation, finished loading, and went upstairs.  I made it as far as my second-floor bedroom.

"Oh FUCK!"

I think you can see where this is going...  I essentially flew down the stairs, continuing the stream of expletives, whipped open the cover of the washing machine, and fished the expensive trinket out of the pocket of my jeans.

Now, for those of you without extensive experience with the havoc created by computerized electronics and moisture, I'll recap:  There's something of a "standard procedure" for giving your prized device a fighting chance in this situation:

1. DO NOT TURN IT ON! No, seriously. Don't check if it works. Turn it off if it's already on.  Electricity can't short circuit if it isn't flowing.
2. Take out the battery!  Again, can't have a short circuit if you don't have any power.
3. Open the thing up as much as you can.  If possible, and you are skilled enough, partially take it apart.  Dry it out thoroughly before doing anything else.  The common suggestion for cell phones is a bed of dry rice, left in the sun for a day or two.
4. Clean the insides if you can.  Once the moisture is gone, corrosion from minerals left behind is your biggest worry.  Be meticulous, but gentle.  A cotton swab with rubbing alcohol works well.
5. Pray.

Back to my situation, I had a soaked-through iPhone 3GS in my hands.  It had only been underwater for maybe 60 seconds, but that's more than enough time for the water to work its way through.  It wasn't fully "off" - just in its usual "suspend" mode, but I didn't want to risk waking it up to properly turn it off.  And with a sealed-in battery, (grrrr...) I couldn't remove power quickly.

As my fellow geeks would probably expect, my immediate instinct was to rush to my computer, fumble around for my set of Very Small Screwdrivers (what, you don't have one?) and head straight to iFixit.com's tear-down instructions for the iPhone 3G/3Gs.  (I eventually had to look at several of their other guides for more detailed instructions on certain parts, but seriously, I can't plug iFixit enough!)  Thankfully, I happened to have the required suction cup sitting around, so I was able to frantically open the phone.  One the major pieces were disassembled, I put them in their rice-y rehab center.

To help with the drying process, I augmented the powers of Uncle Ben with one of the 150-watt lamps I use for my video work...

I also put some saran-wrap over the dish that held the rice and iPhone parts.  This would create a bit of a "greenhouse effect," increasing the drying heat inside.  I also hoped it would let me see the progress of the drying, as the evaporating water condensed on the inside of the plastic. And condense it did...

I let it sit there for about 12 hours, changing the plastic whenever it got noticeably wet. Ideally, you should give a phone as much time as you possibly can, since you really want it to be bone dry.  Of course, like anyone, I was impatient.  Luckily, I was comfortable enough with tiny devices like phones, PDA's and laptops, that I was o.k. with taking the iPhone apart almost completely.  That really helps the drying process, but your mileage may vary if you're less experienced with this sort of thing.

In any case, once I finally sat down that night to clean and re-assemble the thing, I didn't know what to expect. Most everything inside looked ok, except for one slightly scorched-looking area on the main logic board (See picture to the right).  I still haven't found solid confirmation on what this is online, but at this point my assumption is that it's a surface-mounted Wi-Fi antenna.

Well, the water sensors were also all tripped, but well... y'know.

After a good cleaning, I nervously reassembled the phone, not sure of what was going to happen. After popping the case back together and twirling home the final two screws, I held the power button, and waited...

Not too bad, all things considered. There was a very noticeable light blotchiness across the screen (as well as some faint diagonal lines that don't come out well in photos), but I had read reports of that elsewhere online. Consensus was that it's trapped residual moisture between the LCD and the glass, and that it dissipates over time. The real annoying bit was the Wi-Fi - it wasn't unreliable, it didn't have trouble locating networks - it simply wasn't there.  Wouldn't even read as a function the phone had.  AT&T's 3G network is pretty fast, but it's still not Wi-Fi fast, and the cellular connection also puts a much higher drain on the battery.

The next day, the Wi-Fi was still M.I.A., but the blotchiness had definitely improved.

It continued to get better as the week wore on.  By two weeks, both the blotches and the diagonal streaks were gone.  The phone looked almost good-as-new, except it couldn't do Wi-Fi.  My dad called it my "iPod un-Touch".  I resigned myself to this being my situation for the foreseeable future. Liquid damage instantly voids the iPhone warranty (standard practice for cell phones) and Apple would charge me $200 to replace it out-of-warranty. Not a bad deal, all things considered, but I don't have a whole lot of discretionary income at the moment, so not something I can take advantage of.  Besides, other than the Wi-Fi, the phone works.  Quite well.  So that's that.

But hold on just a second...

Fast-forward to last week. I had periodically been doing a full shutoff-reboot of the phone, just to see if that would do anything. Some websites had reported seeing lost wireless functionality return after doing this, but it never did anything for me.

Except, this time, it did!

So now my formerly-aquatic iPhone even has WiFi back. Well... kind of.  The range is really limited, and kind of unpredictable (making me more confidant the "scorched" part was, in fact, the antenna). But hey, if I'm sitting 5 feet from the router, it stays pretty reliable!  ;-)

So there you have it. A testament to Apple's engineering team... or my ineptitude. Take your pick.

Valve Announces Steam For Mac OS X

(Image blatantly taken from the WIRED story)

Awesome. Some reading material:

WIRED story: "Valve Brings Hit Games, Steam Service to Mac"

Valve Press Release

Valve Software has announced that next month they will be releasing a Mac client for their popular online video game store and community portal, Steam. With this, comes the news that they have also ported their substantial catalog of games, as well as the Source engine running most of them (as well as a fair number of other 3rd-party games)

There's plenty of info in the two links above, but here's a few takeaways:

• All Source-powered Valve games you've already bought will carry over to either platform - no need to re-buy anything!  (Valve is also encouraging other developers who sell their games on Steam to do the same)
• Games that use the relatively-new "Steam Cloud" services will be able to sync game settings, save files an the like across platforms.
• Full multiplayer compatibility.
• All future Valve games (starting with Portal 2, which looks great) will be simultaneous releases on Windows, OS X, and Xbox 360. (still no love for the PS3)

This ought to make things rather interesting.  Back in early 2005, I got a Mac as an early high school graduation gift. It made a lot of sense - I was going to film school in the fall, and I needed a laptop for college. Obviously, that machine needed to be something that I could run Final Cut Pro on.  I had been a gamer all through high school, even attending QuakeCon the previous year. But if I wanted to keep playing Counter-Strike at Syracuse, I would need to lug up my old self-built PC tower.

However, the specs of my new PowerBook were tantalizing. Admittedly, the 1.67Ghz PowerPC G4 wasn't anything to write home about.  The weaknesses of the PPC had become so severe that Apple would announce their big Intel switch later that very year.  But the hard drive and (upgraded) RAM were respectable, the screen was gorgeous, and the ATI Radeon 9700M graphics card really caught my eye.

It was a generation behind the current cutting edge... but this was a laptop.  And it had as much video memory as my desktop GPU!  I tested a couple games that did have Mac versions (Quake 3 and the demo for Unreal Tournament 4) and they ran pretty well, for a laptop.  Keep in mind, back then very few laptops actually had decent GPU's, unless you were talking about Alienware.  But even lower-end Macs always had dedicated graphics cards, simply because they needed the graphical horsepower to run the Aqua GUI smoothly, especially on anemic G4 chips. It was a real shame I couldn't just fire up some Half-Life on this shiny new machine...

Of course, a few years later a fortuitous run-in with Applecare would net me an even shiner new Intel-based MacBook Pro. It had even better hardware than my now-ancient PC tower, so I wasted little time in installing XP on a Boot Camp partition, and being only a reboot away from gaming bliss.  Of course, the rebooting does get to be annoying...  I'm looking forward to April!

This is also pretty fascinating from a game-industry standpoint.  There are now two major long-time PC developers (Blizzard and Valve) dedicated to simultaneous PC/Mac releases. (id Software fell off that wagon with Doom 3 and Quake 4, but looks to be coming back with Rage? We'll see.) And the Source engine - quite popular among both developers and mod teams - can now, presumably, seamlessly target either DirectX or OpenGL.

Interesting. Very interesting.

The Unsung New Feature in iTunes 9: Video Tutorials!

Along with some modestly (though interestingly) updated iPods, on wednesday Apple introduced a new version of iTunes. They've done a pretty good job of hyping the headline new features of this release - iTunes LP, Home Sharing, a redesigned iTunes Store, and so on. However, there seems to be one new small feature I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else:  video tutorials!

This new window pops up the first time you launch the program after upgrading, but can also be called upon any time by choosing Help -> Welcome to iTunes from the menu bar.

This is genius, especially for people like my mother, who haven't been using the program since (virtually) the beginning, and can barely put together a playlist without some help. My only question is - why did no one think of this, oh... 8 versions ago?

Another interesting note for other geeks like me:  The video playback controls in this new version seem to bear a strong resemblance to the ones in QuickTime X - even on my poor, not-yet-snowy 10.5 system.  Huh.

Newsflash: Computers Crash

It's pretty common knowledge that some people get as worked up over their computer's operating system as others do about, say, religion. (I mean, I really like Macs, but just listen to the caller at the beginning of this web-show where the woman on-screen is installing Vista on her MacBook Air. You want to cry...? My goodness...)

Sometimes, a little perspective is fun:



And I know some have tried to compare me to the caller in that first link. But, come on. As strongly as Final Cut Pro pulled me into the Mac universe, Portal still keeps me pretty rooted in Windows XP... :)

Update: Ok, this one's funny too!

Why Does Apple Have Such a Good Rep? This Might Be Part Of It...

It's no secret that Apple usually gets some of the highest marks for customer satisfaction among computer makers in places like Consumer Reports. But why is that? The value proposition is about the same these days, objectively anyway. And Macs certainly are just as capable of having major hardware mishaps as other manufacturer's machines - especially now that the Intel transition is complete and everybody basically uses the same guts.

So why do people love on Apple so much? A pretty GUI and elegant OS architecture don't make Customer Service any better. So what gives?

I offer this anecdote:

A couple weeks ago, my trusty, almost 3-year-old PowerBook G4 started having a few issues. Namely, Kernel Panics, the UNIX-y equivalent of the infamous Blue Screen of Death. Now, if your PC bluescreens, you just cuss Bill Gates (or Steve Ballmer, your pick) and reboot. On a Mac, if things manage to go this wrong... it means there's something wrong!

Long story short, some troubleshooting of my own narrowed it down to the RAM, and specifically, the actual RAM slots in the logicboard (Mac-parlance for laptop motherboard) as opposed to the sticks themselves. Bummer. Fortunately, this problem cropped up two weeks before my extended AppleCare warranty was set to expire. So I made an appointment and brought the machine in to the local Apple Retail Store, where the guy there confirmed the problem, checked with me to make sure I had everything backed up (I did) and shipped the machine off to the nearest Apple repair center. Zero cost to me, because it was all covered under AppleCare.

It was away for about a week, mainly because they don't keep a ton of spare parts for machines as old as mine on hand. The next week, I get a call.

"We have the machine back here... but it's failing our standard diagnostic test. It says here there's a problem with the VRAM. Now, it does boot, so if there's an immediate need for the machine you can come and pick it up, but I'd just as soon send it back and have them re-replace the logic board."

Ok, so that's kind of crazy... but hell, my AppleCare is expiring soon so yeah, by all means send it back until it gets a clean bill of health.

Another week passes, and I get a call.

"Ok, so the machine is still failing the diagnostic. So... there's two options I'm authorized to give you, but I think I know which one you're gonna take..."

I'm listening.

"First, we can order yet another new logic board, have it delivered here to the store, and install it ourselves to make sure it's done right, and hope that fixes whatever the issue is."

Or...?

"Or... we offer you what's called a CRU Exchange, which would be the closest replacement machine that is not lower spec'ed than your current one."

...meaning?

"You'd get a MacBook Pro."

Needless to say, I went with option 2! So in a nutshell, my computer started acting up, and now - at no cost to me whatsoever, - I'm going from this:

PowerBook G4 15.2-inch
1.67 GHz PowerPC G4
2 GB PC2700 DDR RAM (upgraded from 512 Meg originally)
120 GB ATA hard drive (upgraded from 80 GB originally)
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 - 128 Meg VRAM
2x DVD Burner

To this:

MacBook Pro 15.4-inch
2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2 GB PC2-5300 DDR2 RAM
120 GB SATA hard drive
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT - 128 Meg VRAM
8x DVD Burner

... Sweet. For comparison purposes, this is my current "gaming rig" PC tower:

AMD AthlonXP 3200+ @ 2.2 GHz
1 GB PC3200 DDR RAM
160 GB ATA hard drive
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 non-ultra - 128 Meg VRAM
DVD... reader.

In short, once I get this new machine (in a week or so.... whatever, I can wait) I'm going to be very interested in seeing how 3D Mark scores match up once I make a WinXP partition (ah, the convenience of Intel chips!).

In conclusion, if you ever wonder why Apple's customer loyalty is so high - stuff like this is a big part of it. Oh, and if you ever get a Mac, particularly a laptop.... get AppleCare!
Update: Corrected the spelling of "CRU." Apparently it stands for "Customer Replacement Unit." Pretty straightforward.

"I'm Not Bruce" - FCP Tip Blog

Found an interesting blog recently.  "I'm Not Bruce" is simply a place used by some editor (who is not, apparently, "Bruce") to record little tips, links, and reminders to himself about various aspects of editing with Final Cut Pro.  I've found a few useful as well.

Apple Previews Leopard & Safari 3 - O RLY?

I am writing this bog entry on Windows XP. I also happen to be writing it in Safari.

Wha...?

Seems Apple has seen fit to release a public beta of Safari 3.0 not just for Mac OS X Tiger, but for Windows as well. Not only that, the new version of the browser has resolved the two nagging issues that I had with it on OS X: The rich-text editing boxes on GMail and Blogger now work, and it now asks "Are You Sure?" when you close a window with multiple tabs open. Nice - Safari's been my browser of choice on the Mac for a while now (it's just much more responsive than Firefox) and those were really the only two annoyances I had with it. (Well, along with the fact that ver. 2 kinda chokes up when you start having 4 windows open, with 8 or so tabs each, and keep the program running for a week solid. Am I asking too much?)

I should stress that Safari 3 for Mac & Windows is still very much in beta. Blogger's rich text form works, but I had to go into Firefox to add the picture to this post because that button seems to do nothing in Safari 3 beta. So don't go dumping Firefox 2 or IE 7 just yet, (Although you might do well to dump IE 6 if you're still using it...) but this is definitely something to watch over the next few months.

It's really interesting to see Apple's strategy here. Since the awesome software (OS X and iLife being the biggies) are one of the big draws go getting a Mac these days, making Windows software doesn't seem to make much sense on the surface. However, the plan becomes clear when you realize Apple is trying to get people used to using Apple software first, so that the thought of switching to a Mac doesn't sound so foreign. it started with Quicktime, especially once Apple got something of a monopoly on movie trailers. Then iTunes for Windows came bundled with everyone's favorite music player. (iTunes is even more important to "switchers" now, since Apple's taken a lot of cues from it in the design of the file browser in OS X 10.5 - "Leopard"). Now they want Windows users to see what an Apple web browser is like, aguably the most-used application on a personal computer today. It's all quite clever really. Although, to be honest, if they're really serious about this Trojan horse idea, they really ought to do something about the performance of Quicktime 7 on Windows. QT-haters do have something of a point on the Windows platform - it's nowhere near as elegant, fast, and seamless as it is on OS X (where it's my default media player for just about everything - even DivX).

There's a lot of other interesting things happening with Leopard too - and they aren't all making front-page news like Time Machine and the just-maybe-do-you-think-inspired-by-Vista new look to the familiar Mac desktop. I'm more excited by the changes to Boot Camp. Today, if you have an Intel Mac, you can dual-boot Windows on it - something I'm very interested in, as it could mean putting all my Windows games on the same Mac I use for Final Cut Pro, and I could finally give up lugging my giant PC Tower to college. In Leopard, you don't have to totally restart to switch OS's: Instead you can go to a menu item in OS X to put MacOS into "safe sleep" mode before switching over to Windows. Likewise, you can make Windows hibernate. That way, you never lose what you were doing in either OS, and you can jump between them in 20-30 seconds - each running totally native (I could use something like Parallels to make it wholly seamless, but Boot Camp gives better performance for gaming).

Update: Boot Camp's hibernating feature was mentioned on Apple's site at the time I wrote this entry, but the feature was later dropped. Pity - seemed like a good idea.

The Mac platform just keeps getting more interesting.