Adam’s Interweb

Well, I finally decided it is time for me to give Apple’s OS X a try. I’ve been interested in seeing how things work on an Apple system, but I haven’t really had a reason to buy an Apple machine. I still don’t *really* have a reason, but I do want to play around with the iPhone SDK since I have some ideas I’d like to try out so I used that as an excuse to buy a MacBook.

I ended up going with a black 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo version. It came with 2GB of RAM, but that’s not really enough since I want to run VMWare Fusion so that I can have Visual Studio 2005/2008 running in unity mode as well as SQL Server 2005/2008. So I had the MacBook upgraded to 4GB DDR2 RAM. Apple wanted $400 extra to add 2GB, but I used Crucial memory and did the upgrade myself for a grand total of $111 including tax & shipping. Not a bad deal since I effectively saved nearly $300 by spending about 10 minutes swapping the RAM sticks out.

So far, my impression of OS X is favorable. I’ve found replacements for everything I typically used on Windows (except development tools and Quicken) and I’m fairly happy with the way things work. For the first week or so, I wasn’t sure that I was ever going to like OS X, but it’s one of those things that grows on you. I wouldn’t make the claim that a lot of people when they say Macs are easier to use than Windows. I think usability (as a whole) is pretty similar between the two. OS X does have some standards that most applications seem to follow which is better than on Windows, but the big difference is that the “graphic arts” background of historical Mac users has resulted in software developers taking more time to refine the user experience to the point that things are a bit more logical than they are in Windows-based counterparts.

I’m really happy with the battery life on this thing. As long as I’m just surfing the net, typing up blog posts, reading e-mail, and other light tasks, I get fantastic battery life. I have a feeling even playing a DVD will still result in good battery life, but it may not be the 4 or so hours I get now. Time machine seems useful, although I keep forgetting to eject the disk before I unplug the backup drive - so I think I’m going to end up getting the Time Capsule before long, but I don’t really want to spend that money right now.

The one thing that is slightly disappointing thus far is that the MacBook gets a little choppy when playing World of Warcraft with everything maxed out. It’s not terrible and I do realize this machine has an integrated graphics card, but WoW isn’t *that* demanding…either way, it’s still plenty playable, but it’s just a little disappointing that it’s not as smooth as I’d like.

After I’ve used OS X for a few more weeks, I’ll post my updated impressions, but so far so good.

I’ve had my 4GB iPhone for about a month now so I thought I would share my impressions now that I’ve had plenty of time to check things out.  Overall, I’m still very happy with my purchase, but there are a few annoying things:

No Tasklist.  I don’t know why Apple decided to include all of the other PIM applications (contacts, calendar, notes), but decided to leave off a tasklist.  I really miss that feature from my Windows Mobile phone.  Hopefully Apple will add this soon.

Random Crashes.  It isn’t clear why it happens, but every once in a while, the iPhone will freeze and I’ll have to reboot.  Most of the time, I can just use the home button to kill the application and things are fine (although you usually lose whatever data you were updating, if any, when you do this).  It doesn’t take long to reset (maybe 20 seconds), but it’s still a bit of a pain.  My Windows Mobile phone and my PocketPC seem more stable (and I don’t have non-Apple applications on my phone).

No local downloading.  You can browse anything you want via Safari, but you can’t save anything.  I had one time when I really wanted to save a PDF document for viewing later or even e-mail it to myself…but the iPhone doesn’t support that.

No copy & paste.  There have been a couple of times when I needed to take a snippit of a webpage (or even copy a URL) and paste it into a note or e-mail, but at present, there is no ability to copy and paste on the iPhone.

Of coure, there are still the original issues of not having Flash support and no Assisted GPS.

But other than these few issues, the phone really works well.  The photo viewer works great, the call quality has been excellent, the EDGE network in my area is certainly speedy enough for everything I’ve needed, and the battery life is better than I expected.  It may not be the perfect phone, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

A while back, I posted that I made the move to 64-bit Vista.  Then I got an iPhone, which doesn’t have 64-bit drivers, so I downgraded to Vista 32-bit.  Well, this weekend, I have had another ordeal - I just finished installing 32-bit Vista again.  My primary hard drive is beginning to fail apparently - it did have a handful of bad sectors.  I’m fine with that, except Vista refused to boot up so I can do a couple of things like de-activate iTunes, check for any files that I may need to save (mainly installers - I keep all data on a different drive), etc.  Well - after trying to boot into Vista in every way I could think of, I decided I’ll go ahead and reinstall.  Guess what - the install DVD fails to startup as well!  It would try to startup, but then it would hang at the loading screen (black screen with the little green progress bar at the bottom).  It appears that Vista’s boot process (from DVD or HDD) can be hung when there is a corrupted partion.  I can understand the HDD install not booting, but come on - why can’t the DVD boot?

I ended up getting an iso of the Ultimate Boot CD, running SeaTools to fix up the drive, and then using the disk partioning tools there to wipe the drive clean.  After that, the Vista DVD was able to boot just fine and now I’m finally back up and running.  This is one of the reasons I keep wanting to switch to Apple though - I know they have issues as well, but I can’t believe the various issues I keep hitting with Vista…granted, I’m a power user so I don’t expect most of the issues I see would cause a problem with “normal” home users, but geez, it’s bad when I’m tempted to downgrade back to XP at least once a week.

A quick FYI on Amazon’s Unbox service.  I had 7 rentals on my computer that I had not been able to watch yet, but I needed to downgrade my Vista install to 32-bit (from the 64-bit version).  So I copied off the Amazon videos and uninstalled the Unbox software.  Then after the new version of Vista was installed, I tried to re-import the videos into Unbox (they provide an Import function).  What I didn’t realize is that the Unbox agreement says you can’t move rental videos from your original download location…  I’m not sure if Amazon Customer Service is going to help here or not, but I think they will this one time.  Something to keep in mind if you’re thinking about getting a video rental.

When the iPhone first launched, I posted about three reasons I would NOT be buying an iPhone…yesterday, I broke down and bought a 4GB iPhone.  So what changed?

1) Price

I have a 5th generation iPod - so I don’t need an 8/16GB+ player - so 4GB is just fine with me.  Apple decided to discontinue the 4GB model, so the price dropped to $299 from $499.  If you look at other smartphones out there, $300 isn’t a bad price at all.

2) Seeing is Believing (i.e. why the on-screen keyboard works)

One of my original concerns was the fact that the keyboard has no feedback at all.  After playing with the phone for a bit, it’s pretty obvious the keyboard is just fine.  There is a large keyboard for use with Safari for web browsing and that keyboard is great.  Then there is a small keyboard for SMS, e-mail, etc.  The small keyboard is usable, but it isn’t quite as good.  But when I thought about it, even the small keyboard is vastly superior to the other non-querty keyboards and it’s really not much worse than the hardware qwerty keyboards I’ve used on a Treo.

3) Did I really need GPS? No.

I originally thought I really needed GPS in the phone - and I admit, I think it would still be a great feature with the built-in Google Maps.  But after thinking about this for a while, I came to the conclusion that I would most likely use the maps to figure out what streets to take, finding where to connect to the interstate, etc and really didn’t need my position or real-time navigation.  I also have a Garmin GPS unit for times when I really do want a true GPS and I have a feeling it would work much better than anything they can cram into a cellphone anyway.

The one thing I’m still worried about from my original post is 3rd party application support.  The included applications are decent overall and I can certainly get the job done, but it would be nice to have the option to extend the functionality easily (e.g. adding a Pocket Quicken application).  I know it’s possible to do a hack on the phone to make this work (or was possible at one point), but this is still something Apple needs to address.