Accessories

After agonizing over it for longer than anyone else, once I'd splashed out $2000 for a wireless laptop setup, buying accessories is easy and fun. Musn't get carried away though (mmm, Amazon, click, click).

First, I found the perfect case for my iBook. I didn't get a small laptop that I can easily put in my lap or on the arm of the couch or anywhere just to lug it around in some hideous monstrosity of a bag. However, it would be nice to carry a few things along. Marware's Sportfolio II was the answer, and Other World Computing had a great price. It's neoprene around a plastic protective shell with a stretchy pocket that easily accomodates my power adapter, mouse, VGA adapter, USB phone cable and some small headphones. There's another one on the back that can't quite hold letter paper, but it could be stuffed when extras are needed. The bottom and side edges are a grippy rubber that makes it easy to hold tight when pulling the iBook out and not slip when setting it down on a table, The laptop compartment has a divider that leaves a smaller part that can hold some letter size documents if you are careful, or a few CDs. The larger laptop holding part fits the iBook snugly and the inner partition is offset enough that it won't try to slide into the wrong part. The zipper only unzips the top part which I like since this is easier than zipping and unzipping 3 sides and having other things fall out as well. The carry strap is detachable with easy clips, and the shoulder pad is flexible grippy rubber as well, so it doesn't slip off your shoulder and it absorbs the shock when you are walking fast or down stairs.

I picked up the TV video adapter cable, just because it seemed like a neat thing to be able to do. I got the USB cable for my cell phone, I have the iCurve laptop stand, the JBL Creature speakers and an Apple Firewire cable on their way right now. I could have gotten any old 6 to 4 pin Firewire cable, but now I was getting picky about the color and flexibility of the cable. I looked around town, and could not find anything suitable. Most are these thick, stiff, black things that look like they would easily break off the tiny connector while plugged in. Apple's is white, flexible and actually cheaper than anything I found.

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PDA

Getting my PDA doing what I want, the way I want it is probably going to be one of the tougher things. For starters, I have a Sony Clie, and Sony does not support the Mac. I might not have gotten one if I hadn't checked that people were using them with Macs. The Clie T-665C I have is a wonderfully crafted device that I had to have. I also sync my PDA with Outlook on my work PC. I also got the same model Clie for my wife, and she syncs it with her PC. I would like to switch to both of us syncing with a Mac and iCal with each subscribing to each other's calendar. Not too much to ask is it?

The Palm desktop for the Mac syncs with it just fine. Of course, I had to tell PalmOne that I had one of their Tungstens to download it since I couldn't get the Mac version from Sony or a Sony Mac version from PalmOne. I also knew that I could get Mark/Space's Missing Sync to enable extras like Memory Stick mounting, allowing iTunes to see it as an MP3 player, iPhoto picture sync, and some others. Apparent PDA nirvana for the Clie user on a Mac, right? All except for mail sync. The Apple page talks glowingly about how well a Palm PDA works with a Mac and how well iSync and Palm Desktop work together, but read carefully, and there's no mention of it doing anything about mail sync. Palm's site is the same story. Fine. Some searching a while back turned up a Palm conduit for the Mac that would sync mail with Mac OS X mail, including ClieMail on the PDA, which I was using. When I went to get this software, it had even been updated, but the ClieMail sync had been removed and only ever worked with the Japanese version I think. So, I'm going to switch back to the regular Palm mail program that I was synchronizing with my work mail via Inbox-To-Go, but not using all that much.

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Keyboard

One of the things that I was worried about in getting a laptop was having used some recently. The keyboards were a problem for me since I had built such a muscle memory geared to the standard 101 key desktop layout. I had liked the keyboards on my old Powerbooks, and my new iBook is actually enjoyable. It seems that the problem I was having with many laptop keyboards was that they would take the editing keys and make some done via a "fn" key with an existing key, but give some of them their own key and then sprinkle them around the edge of the keyboard. This would cause me to always run into them when trying to hit common keys. The Apple laptop keyboards take the approach of just removing keys rather than moving them around. If they want to include certain functions, they put them "under" existing keys using the laptop "fn" key. This really only is the pgup/pgdn and home/end keys and some of the function keys on my iBook. Home/end are under the left/right arrows, and Pgup/Pgdn are under the up/down arrows, which is easy. The result is a simple layout that I can type on so well that I'm having a harder time adjusting to the full size Mac keyboard (Bluetooth model), but to be fair, I've spent very little time with it so far, so we shall see.

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Trackpad

I've been quite surprised by how little I really need to use the right mouse button, but perhaps that's not really all that hard to understand given the system is made to primarily support a one button mouse. I was missing my scroll wheel terribly. I have a small notebook mouse to attach until I find a suitable Bluetooth mouse, but that's not practical for when I'm using the iBook in my lap rather than on a table or desk. I came across a neat replacement driver for the trackpad called Sidetrack. This gives the feature of using the side of the trackpad as a scroll wheel like many PC laptops can. It also allows for some othe things like tapping a corner for a right click. I am loving it. Hopefully, when the beta expires, it gets developed some more.

I am having some issues with the trackpad's tracking of my finger. It can be quite jumpy at times. Sometimes it's obviously that there's some dirt or a crumb on the pad, but it can still be tricky at other times sometimes jumping wildly. I'm trying to see if it's my touch, and if I just need to maintain a consistent pressure and finger orientation.

After a liitle playing around, it seems the problem is when my other fingers get close to the pad surface but don't actually touch it. There seems to be enough of whatever the pad is detecting before I tought the pad for it to think I'm pressing it in two places, which causes it to not really know where I'm pressing it at all, so the cursor moves around wildly. This is not easy to avoid since both thumbs want to naturally rest in the area. Even the fingers adjacent to the one I'm using to point with have to be kept at a distance. I'll see if I can develop a finger posture to minimize the problem.

Update: it seems that the scroll wheel emulation of the trackpad may be giving me pain in my finger I use for the feature. I'm not 100% sure that's the cause, but it seems likely. I suppose I do use it a lot, even when I shouldn't, like scrolling many pages down quickly when I should use page down.

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Address Book

I had noticed the nice touch of the address book initially using my login picture as my address book picture, but I decided to try to change that from the gingerbread man in the address book. I had an HTML e-mail that had a linked picture of me that was a suitable head shot, so I opened address book, edited my entry, and dragged the picture from the e-mail window onto the existing picture in address book. Up popped a picture adjustment window that let me zoom and center my head to my liking. Nice. Even better was finding out that this is linked with my login picture, and so that changed as well. I have yet to have iSync take over my Palm address book and calendar sync to populate the Mac address book, but that's coming soon.

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Cell Phone

I remembered a page I came across a while back soon after I got my current cell phone, a Sanyo 8100 from Sprint. It was about using it under Mac OS X. I was able to find it, and with a USB data cable from Radio Shack that had a sticker warning you to first download and install the USB drivers, I just plugged it in to my iBook, and it was recognized without any problem. The networking settings had it in the list of devices to connect with. I just had to set it up as a Sprint Vision modem with just the data access phone number. Worked like a charm. Now I can connect with wired Ethernet at work, wireless ethernet at home and some hot spots, and cell phone anywhere else (in a digital area). The only one left out is through a cell phone via Bluetooth, but then Sprint seems to be Bluetoothless, and if they continue, I may reluctantly have to switch carriers.

Although I can use the phone as a modem, of course, it doesn't do anything fancy like sync with iSync. I did manage to find a sourceforge project of a phone utility program to upload and download the phone book, pictures, etc. It even had an OS X version. It didn't work though. Maybe someday soon. No biggie for me though.

Update: the phone is sometimes not recognized as being plugged in to the computer. The workaround noted on the helpful site that showed me how to connect it up and that it was possible, is to plug the phone in before turning on the computer. This seems to work.

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Chat

So far, I haven't tried out iChat, but I did set it up to connect to my old AOL IM userid. My brother is using Yahoo Messenger, which is not compatible with iChat. I went to Yahoo's site, and much to my surprise, they had a Mac OS X version! I was soon sending IMs to his mobile phone. I tried the PC webcam that he was using with Yahoo Messenger, but it appears that you need OS support as well as application support for a webcam to work. I've found a few that are indeed Mac compatible and Yahoo compatible. It's interesting that iChat seems to only support Firewire cameras, and Yahoo Messenger only supports USB cameras.

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Music

When I had the iBook connected to the network at work, I copied the music files from iTunes on my work PC to the iBook and imported them into iTunes just fine. I had been using iTunes at work since I was using Windows 2000 there and only Windows98 and ME at home - iTunes only runs on Win2000 and XP. I had some purchased music and some from a few of my CDs. I just authorized the iTunes on my iBook and I'm good to go. I need to test if the iTunes "authorizations" are really per-computer or per-user. If they are per-user, then I'll need one for me and one for my wife's login as well as the one for work, which would only leave two more, and those would be me and my wife's logins on another computer. I still need to sort out how to do our music library at home. Ideally, each login would point to the same Tunes library in a shared location. The iBook could access this over the network, but it would then not have music files for when you had it away from home, so some kind of library sync would be in order. I've got a similar situation for iPhoto to solve.

Update (31 July 2004): The iTunes authorizations are indeed per computer as it is worded and not per user. So the other accounts on the same computer can play the purchased music from my library.

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Mail

Once I got the network to the PC going, I went into Mozilla on the PC and imported my e-mail from Outlook Express. I then copied the imported mail folder from the Mozilla profile over to the iBook. I had installed Mozilla for the Mac earlier, and I placed the Mozilla mail files in the Mac Mozilla profile folder, and Mac Mozilla saw the mail just fine. I then went into Mac OS X Mail and ran the importer to grab the mail. The problem was that the Netscape/Mozilla importer didn't want to work, so I used "other", which imports mail folder that are of the Unix "mbox" form. When pointed to the right folder, this worked fine. The only problem was that all my mail was now marked as unread, but that didn't take long to fix.

The mail program is nice so far. One thing that was different than what I was able to read about it beforehand was the inbox structure. What I read seemed to indicate that if you had several e-mail accounts being retrieved into Mail, they would each go into subfolders in the inbox, but in reality, they all go into the one inbox (which is how I was used to with Outlook Express). The subfolders of the inbox for each account are there, and you can click one to see just the mail from that account, but otherwise, the inbox is a composite of all the messages from all the accounts.

The message rules are nice. I can simply have messages from certain people or mail lists colored to easily spot them. The rule creation is slick too, because if you highlight a message and then create a rule, any criteria you set up are automatically filled in with the values from the message you had highlighted as default values. A small nit is to apply the rule to existing messages, you need to select all in the inbox, then go apply the rule.

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Windows Networking

I had taken the iBook to work, and I had it on the network in no time with it seeing my Win2000 shares and the Windows machine seeing my printers and home folder. My home network was another story. I had managed to FTP into the iBook, but it would not see either PC and the PC would not see the iBook. I tried many things, including some superuser edits of the smb.conf file and some commands from osxhints.com, but nothing worked. There were countless "fixes" for getting Windows and Mac peer networking going, but it seemed that each person had a different problem. I finally found one that worked. In my Windows networking setup, I had purposefully not bound the TCP/IP protocol to the Windows sharing and the Microsoft Networks client thinking that might be a security risk, but it wasn't really with my firewall and router setup. Changing that made everything work fine.

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Printing

I had tried to find out beforehand if my Canon s500 printer was supported by the base station's USB printer sharing. It is listed as an OS X compatible printer, but is not listed in Apple's printer sharing compatibility list, although the s520 is. I first connected it via USB directly, and OS X recognized it and had a Canon driver ready. I connected it to the base station, and the base station recognized it after all, and I was able to add that and print wirelessly. For now, one PC still connects to it through the parallel cable and shares it to the other PC as I had it before. Presumably, I can get the PCs to use the printer over the network by connecting to it as if it were served by an HP JetDirect print server. This would be nice, but we'll see since PCs aren't supposed to be able to connect to it. It was part of why I went with the Apple base station rather than another, because the built-in print server is worth a good deal, and not many other wireless routers have them.

After much searching, I found a post on macosxhints.com that had a link to a Fuji/Xerox page for a driver utility for one of their printers, which is just an LPR port driver for Windows95/98/ME (2000 and XP have this built-in). You set this to the JetDirect setting, which appears to be just LPR over port 9100. It worked fine.

I have noticed some alignment errors in printing. I've mostly just printed from Safari, so I don't know if it's just Safari or the printer driver itself. Some of the graphics are shifted in vertical alignment on the printout, like the round edges of buttons are not aligned with the middle part that contains the text.

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Internet access

I had some trouble with Internet access initially, but I expected that since I already have a two computer network with a Linksys 4-port router. I initially just connected the iBook to the router with a cable before I did the registration thing when first turning it on. However, I forgot about the DHCP settings on the router - my LAN is set up with static IP addresses and the DHCP function is turned off on the router. I didn't manage to fix it for the initial registration, so it saved the info to send later. I finally sorted the router settings, and later connected the Airport Extreme base station. That took more fiddling, and I settled on giving it a static assignment on my LAN and letting it use DHCP for the wireless clients. I also changed it's IP assignment scheme to use the same IP subnet as my router, and things seem okay. However, I cannot get sharing with the Windows machines going yet. I managed to turn on FTP on the iBook and FTPed in from my PC to upload my Mozilla bookmarks.html file to my home folder. Safari help said I'd missed my chance at importing my bookmarks, as it does this the first time you start it. However, I didn't have anything else installed anyhow. I grabbed Mozilla for OS X and used it to import my bookmarks file. I then poked around my home folder figuring that there should be at least a Safari settings file I could delete to make it think I hadn't run it yet. Indeed, there was a Safari plist file, and much to my surprise, it opens in the Property List Editor! And what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a setting named "NetscapeAndMozillaFavoritesWereImported". I set it to "no", saved it, then opened Safari. It imported the bookmarks from Mozilla in the background. My first OS X hack!

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Arrival

I had finally ordered my iBook and it arrived yesterday. It is the 12" model with a 40GB hard drive, 768MB RAM, Airport Extreme and Bluetooth. I also got the AppleCare, an Airport Extreme base station and the Bluetooth keyboard. Today, my Marware sleeve case arrived, and it's very nice. Not very big, but that's what I wanted - no point in getting an ultra-portable laptop, if you tote it around in a giant case. I eventually got the Internet access set up, and I'm typing this entry in bed via Airport into my LAN and out the cable modem. I took it to the Albuquerque Mac User Group meeting, and easily joined the wireless network that had in the meeting room, and at the gathering after the meeting at the Flying Star cafe they also had a wireless access point. I've noticed that there are two near my house that come on late at night as well, but they are closed. I've got mine hidden.

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Decision

I'm notorious for taking a long time to make a decision. I totally understand why Steve Jobs wears the same thing to work every day. I waste considerable time in my closet in the morning optimizing my clothing for the day. I had really been wanting to get a laptop, but that certainly wasn't an iMac. However, since I'd become hard-over on a G5 iMac, that meant that was going to be an uncertain wait. I thought about getting a PC laptop, but like when I thought about upgrading the PC desktop, I just couldn't bear thinking about spending money on something that was going to run Windows. Once the recent updates to the eMac and iBook came along with the improved G4 chips, it made it much easier to decide on getting an iBook now to make the wait for a G5 iMac bearable. I thought some more about the G5 iMac as a non-upgradable all-in-one, and realized that not only is OS X itself getting faster with each release, but as more G5 optimized and 64-bit software appears, that G5 iMac (and other G5 Macs) will seem to get even faster, giving them a much longer useful life, which is a good thing for an all-in-one machine.

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Pecking Order

With the release of the G5, there was finally hope for a real up-to-date CPU for the iMac, but the problem was when that would become a reality. After following Apple closely for a while, you become very aware of their product pecking order: PowerMacs, PowerBooks, iMacs/eMacs, and iBooks. This was a policy of product feature positioning, and basically a lower Mac could not get faster or better than any higher Mac. This meant that even a desktop (iMac) had to wait until they got the feature in a laptop (PowerBook) first. This arrangement runs in to problems easily. When Motorola couldn't increase the top speed of the G4, it created a product log jam since the lower machines couldn't get very close to the top end machines in clock speed. Once the G5 was released, this created some breathing room again, so when Moto finally produced better G4 chips after feeling the heat from IBM, the logs could move again.

The current situation is back in log jam mode again since IBM was having yield problems, causing the G5s to not increase in speed on schedule. If PowerMacs have no faster G5s, then PowerBooks have no slower G5s to move up to, etc. And certainly, according to history, the iMac will see no G5 before a PowerBook will, which could take quite some time given the G5's heat production characteristics. However, recent developments seem to indicate a change in policy. The iBooks and eMacs were updated with better G4 chips than the iMac has. Only the eMac has equivalent speed, but the new G4 chips have twice the level 2 cache memory, putting the eMac notably above the best iMac in performance. It would not be unprecedented for this to happen with an upgraded iMac coming a few weeks after, but it's been several weeks. If they were going to just do a G4 upgrade for the iMac, it would have been easy and out already. Unless there was some technical issue with a G4 iMac update, this points to them getting a G5 iMac ready as the next iMac update. However, there's no way that it'll come until the G5 PowerMacs get their update, but that should be very soon.

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Hard-over-ware

The new switching barrier that cropped up while Apple was working on the software barrier was the hardware. First was the fact that Motorola was really sucking mud on G4 improvements, and this was causing the G4 to really get old. The G5 seemed to spur Motorola's G4 development, and there were finally some improvements that made it a respectable laptop processor. The other problem was all the cool form factors that Apple had been coming out with. The flat panel iMac was perhaps the most brilliant thing in computing hardware I think I've ever seen. Except that it intrinsically has the same problem any all-in-one has: the fixed display choice. Initially, the 15" screen was nice, but certainly too small for me. They quickly came out with the 17" widescreen model, and that was way better. However, the iMac suffers an additional problem: in being a very small all-in-one, it has very little expansion capability. To make matters worse, one of the few expansion options, one memory slot, was going to get filled from the get-go since it only starts out with 256MB of RAM. That just left the Airport card slot and whatever you want to dangle off the Firewire and USB ports. At least the Cube had an AGP slot to upgrade the video card. Indeed, I had fallen in love with the iMac, and wanted it as my Mac, but I was hesitant about the no expansion thing. I wanted to have certain capabilities in the box if I was going to lay down that kind of money on a machine with limited expansion options. I then got hard-over on wanting a G5 iMac.

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The X Factor

In the late 1990s, I had been following Apple only a little because there was talk of them shopping around for some operating system technology. Be, Inc. was the favorite. This was understandable since it was run by an ex-Apple guy and was very new, so it was in the computer press a lot at the time. My Spock ears really pricked up when I heard that they were considering Next as well. Later, when it was announced that they were not only going with Next, but that they were buying the whole operation and getting Steve Jobs as CEO, then my Spock eyebrow went up with the requisite uttering of "fascinating". This really changed the game. I knew Apple was serious since they had chosen the more mature system over the clearly incomplete BeOS. Or maybe Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field had just hypnotized the Apple people - it didn't really matter. Suddenly, I saw that Apple would have a huge leap in capability, and it could very well meet my high standards. The only problem was how long would it take. I had already decided to wait things out using Windows, and kept a watchful eye on Cupertino. After some initial hiccups, OS X was finally taking form. It was pretty rough in its "dot uh-oh" release, but I think getting something out the door was ultimately the right thing to do. Of course, it was still not for me. 10.1 was quite a bit better, and the trend of new releases getting faster had begun. I probably would have been able to use 10.1 knowing it was going to get better soon enough, but the jury was still out on the OS X applications. By 10.2 that was looking really good, but unfortunately there remained a problem with the hardware.

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War on My Desktop

But for all the things that are nice, there are several things that are annoying as hell. I tried many photo management programs for Windows for my parents to use. I finally got what was supposed to be one of the best, but it's just adequate and still not terribly easy to use. I really was getting sick of the media player war on my desktop. I had finally decided to buy one of the "deluxe" versions of a player to just get it to quit bugging me and be able to rip good MP3s. So I got a good deal on MusicMatch. I was trying to rip a CD, so I insert the disc, MusicMatch starts to look up the CD track info, and then Real Player leaps in front wanting to play the CD I had just put in. I didn't recall changing my preferred CD player program from MusicMatch to anything else, but apparently Real Player had. So it tries to look up the CD info as well, grabs the CD resource, MusicMatch complains it can no longer access the CD, then Real Player crashes and locks up the machine. But hey, at least Windows gives you the choice of several total crap media players to choose from, unlike other less popular operating systems. Let's not also forget it has a better selection of OS fixit, anti-virus and anti-spyware as well.

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Sleeping with the Enemy

With nothing really addressing my needs, I went to Windows 98 to get by. This was good, in that it let me be more objective in my assessment of operating systems. It let me not get blind to what improvements had been made to Windows, especially since my only recent Windows experience had been NT at work, and it lacked things the consumer Windows had. However, Windows 98 certainly lacked the stability that NT had. It wasn't long before failure to shutdown was a regular occurrence. However, once I got a Palm handheld, it was clear the emphasis of synchronization ability was for Windows and Outlook. I reluctantly had to switch to using Outlook Express because it was the only mail program that would reliably sync with my Palm in the way I wanted. I figure this is because Palm spends more effort on their Outlook Express sync conduit than any other, but that's the thing: it's not whether I like a particular mail client; it's whether Palm likes a particular one and makes a nice sync with it.

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