Don’t see that much, these days. I wonder why?

• Some of my complaints about the OS X dock have been addressed by a nifty app called HyperDock. HD adds Aero Peek and Aero Snap to OS X, effectively co-opting the best gizmos MS added to Windows 7.
• OS X’s means of organizing apps (such as it is) blows donkeys. I’m really looking forward to what OS X Lion delivers on that front.
• The Mac App Store is 9/10 of the way toward awesome. The process of finding and installing apps is nearly identical to doing the same stuff on iOS, which means it is a giant improvement the traditional methods of acquiring and setting up new software.
• Best thing about the Mac App Store: thanks to Apple’s standardizing on a single DRM model across devices and media, every App Store app comes with a five-user/machine license. Yeah, DRM sucks, but that’s positively generous compared to the licenses on 99% of the apps/games available on other platforms.
• Worst thing about the Mac App Store: even as a stand-alone, non-iTunes-based application, the MAS is sluggish as hell. Not as painfully slow as, say, the iTunes store on the iPad, nut annoying.
• The 27″ iMac has pixel-density issues for people with shitty vision. This thing is natively 2560×1440, but in order for me to be able to read really comfortably, I need to drop it all the way to 1600×900. I’ve got it at 1920×1080 at the moment, and everything is just a touch too small for me. Apple really needs to get its ass in gear and make OS X resolution independent.
• On a similar subject, I have to give Apple huge props for their accessibility system. The Mac’s built-in screen magnifier is so much better than the one in Windows… I use it all the time, particularly sense I can manipulate the zoom just by holding down CONTROL and swiping one finger up and down the surface of the mouse.
• Finder is no Windows Explorer. Okay, fine, it’s better than Explorer circa WinXP, but it isn’t even close to the stuff MS is shipping in Windows 7. There are plugins and replacements you can use to fill the gap, but again, this is something Apple needs to address.
• I’ve come to appreciate the One Menu Bar To Rule Them All approach in Apple’s UI. It ultimately saves lots of little bits of screen real estate, and gives all those little tray icons somewhere (mostly) unobtrusive to live.
• Built-in VNC is nice.
• Apple’s uninstall process for non-App-Store apps is both cool and slightly irritating. Basically, uninstalling is as simple as right-clicking an app’s icon or folder and clicking “Move to Trash”. Can’t beat that. But in a move designed to protect the average user and keep the process as logically pure as possible, doing such an uninstall does nothing about any cache material and other data the app may have been using on your machine. To get rid of that stuff (which, mind you, is unnecessary 95% of the time) you either need to buy an app, or dig through the Finder manually. It’s still better than the Windows Way, but decidedly sub-optimal.
• When you get down to it, you don’t really notice that the Mac software market is so much smaller than that of Windows; whatever you’re needing, there’s probably a Mac equivalent that will do the job. What you notice is that about half the time, there is no free equivalent. I suspect the Mac App Store will eventually change this, but at the moment, small utilities that would be free on Windows are $19.95 on the Mac.
• Even on a quad-core, 6GB machine, running a Windows XP virtual machine inside OS X is annoying. Everything works as expected, but it quickly makes an otherwise speedy Mac rather sluggish. Thankfully, I’m pretty much completely weaned off Windows apps… I’ve got everything I need running natively in OS X.
• The more time you spend with a Mac, the more you start to appreciate Apple’s industrial design. And OS design, for that matter. They pay attention to details that other manufacturers and developers ignore.
• The wife’s Macbook is a delight. It has the longest running battery either of us have ever seen in a full-sized laptop, which is a huge deal. But perhaps even bigger is the simple fact that it is a laptop that virtually never gets hot. You can get it to heat up if you bury it in blankets or something, but if it’s sitting on your actual lap, it stays pretty much room temperature at all times.
• In contrast, the top of a quad-core, 27″ iMac? Near the exhaust vent? Don’t touch that. Trust me.

I fought it for so long, primarily, because Apple stuff was always so expensive. It may have been cool, well designed, stable, and so on, but the most defining description for me was always “too fucking pricey”. There was always that feeling that I could get more raw mega- (and later, giga-) hertz on the Windows side of the world, and after finally abandoning my Amiga fanboydom in my early twenties, I was after all the pure, cheap power I could get.

But then things changed. First, I was just getting sick of Windows. I mean, Win7 is easily the best iteration of that OS ever distributed, and I’m really quite fond of it… but even now, when Microsoft has their OS as stable, secure, and usable as can be expected, it’s still a mess. Nothing they do can make the experience of using random assemblages of commodity hardware, vendor-specific drivers, and quirky manufacturing. Few things ever seem to work as they should, and when stuff fails, it fails in grand, show-stopping fashion. (Note to self: never, ever buy anything from Gateway, ever again.)

More importantly, the pricing structure changed in Cupertino. They got me on the iOS platform with a $299 smartphone, and locked me in as a passionate fan with a $499 tablet that is better than any $1000 laptop I’ve ever owned. (I could burn up thousands of words about how much I love the iPad, but that’s not the subject at hand.) And now, the $699 Mac mini, with it’s exquisitely designed case and ports, it’s adequately (though unspectacularly) outfitted CPU/GPU, and it’s familiar-yet-strange-and-beautiful OS has pushed me off the biggest ledge of all. I’m in OSX free-fall, and it’s pretty interesting.

So starting here, I’m gonna document my random thoughts as a new Mac user… the stuff that impresses, the stuff that, annoys, and the random things that just flat-out perplex.

• For the first two weeks, I was convinced that Mac users must have the most powerful index fingers on the planet… my Magic Mouse was painfully difficult to click. I couldn’t even manage to consistently click-and-drag with it, leaving me thinking that switching my OS was going to be a bigger task than initially suspected. Until, that is, I happened to touch a Magic Mouse on a display machine at Best Buy, and knew instantly that my mouse at the house was just plain broken from the factory. A quick return to the store, and I’m happily clicking like a normal person.
• I have several PC laptops with HDMI ports, and have tried hooking them up to my A/V receiver, and in every case, the result has been nothing but frustration. In one case I might get audio but no video, in another, I’d get video and audio, but only in stereo. It was seemingly impossible to find the magic combination of hardware, software, and drivers to make it all work. Meanwhile, I plugged the Mac mini into the receiver, ran Plex, and everything Just Worked. First time, no problems. If I wasn’t sold before that, I would have been at that point.
• Subtle but pervasive irritation: OS X isn’t as good as Win7 at providing “hold on a second, dude, I’m busy” feedback via mouse pointer animations. Yeah, you get the occasional stopwatch and spinning beachball, but you also spend a lot of time staring at a standard pointer that appears ready to accept your input, but really isn’t. I’ve never missed Ye Olde Hourglass so much in my life.
• The Mac version of Evernote is so much better than the Windows version, it’s ridiculous. From small touches to the overall UI, it’s just a superior product. As much as I depend on Evernote, I might have switched sooner if I’d known this. (P.S. to people with memory problems: get Evernote, and use it constantly.)
• It feels like OS X is actually a bit more RAM-hungry than Win7. A 2GB Windows machine is pretty solid… not great (you don’t get consistently smooth performance until you hit 4GB), but it’s wholly acceptable. A 2GB Mac, on the other hand, can get sluggish pretty quickly when trying to multitask with non-Apple-written apps. I suspect I’ll be jacking this thing up to 8GB pretty soon.
• iTunes on the Mac? Okay, so now I see why Apple sticks with this app. On Windows, iTunes is easily the biggest piece of shit on my machine… it eats RAM and CPU cycles like crazy, making it impossible to use the thing as intended. I frakkin’ hate it. But on the Mac, it’s… totally decent. I can leave it running in the background and not even notice it’s there most of the time. Honestly, anyone tied to iOS devices should probably just jump to OS X, simply to save themselves the inevitable Windows/iTunes headaches.
• The OS X dock is inferior to Win7′s taskbar. It just is. After years of people (including me) installing Mac-alike system utilities to make the Windows 95/98/XP/Vista taskbar do something useful, Microsoft finally came along and perfected the concept. In fact, just about everything in Win7′s Aero toolbox is missing or half-implemented in OS X. I’ve got an applet called BetterTouchTool running on the mini that gives me a clone of Aero Snap, but I’m still a long way from content.
• Windows Home Server is easily one of my all-time favorite Microsoft products… it works very well, and can be administered by anyone with a decent geek rating. But for pure backup functionality, Time Machine has got it beat. It’s tough for WHS’s daily backups to compete with TM’s hourlies. On the plus side, the Mac works quite nicely with all of my WHS shares.

More to come!

But there’s always been one nagging issue with the iPhone, relative to my tremor: its size. The thing, lightweight form factor that everyone else loves so much turns my hand into a trembling, shivering claw when I try to use it one-handed. It probably seems counter-intuitive to people without ET –especially in light of what I just said about muscle activity– but when it comes to holding stuff, small, delicate items are a real pain in the ass. Most of us take for granted how much control it takes to hold something gently until you wake up one day and “gently” has become a matter of concentration.

Anyway… for reasons having nothing to do with ET, I picked up a Mophie Juicepack Air the other day. It’s a case/battery-pack combo that doubles the battery life of the iPhone while also providing it with a bit of protection. I’m constantly letting my phone run low, and I already had it in a semi-bulky case anyway, so I figured it’d be worth it.

What I didn’t realize is that, by doubling the thickness of the device and adding several ounces of battery and plastic to my phone, the whole thing would become so much more comfortable to use. Yeah, it’s no longer as sleek and beautiful a device as it once was, but I use my iPhone constantly, and having it feel so much more secure in my grip is a blessing.

If you’ve got ET and a Jesus Phone, definitely look into Mophie’s wonderful little add-on. It does everything it claims on the box, and then some.

My first thought was that I hadn’t received a “payment due” notice from Shell in a month or two. From a company constantly hounding its customers to switch to paperless billing, this seemed odd. A quick search through my email confirmed that I’d received nothing from them since January.

Next stop: logging in to the site. Right up front, they insist that I fill out new security questions. “Fine,” I think, but not for long. Soon I’m reaching new levels of irritation.

One of the questions is “What’s your ____’s middle name?” I provided the answer, an extremely common name shared by millions of people. The app promptly errors out, informing me that “Answers must be at least four characters long.” Are you kidding me? That’s the name! So I try a different question: “How old was your father when you were born?” Given that my dad (like most men) fathered his children long before he reached 1000, I assumed it would be okay to give the expected two-digit answer. Oh but no… error! I had to spell the number for it to be accepted. Who did the QA on this shit?

So I finally make it into the system proper, and find that I’m way overdue. Needless to say, this is not the kind of thing I want happening in a credit-tight economy. Despite having set up email alerts with them years ago, they hadn’t given me a heads-up of any kind.

Clicking around, I find the alert management section of the site… and discover that they no longer even know my email address. All alerts are turned off. WTF? Right there on the page next to a “paperless statements are awesome!” ad, they’re telling me that they don’t even remember how to contact me with vital account info!

But hold on… it gets better! ‘Cause I also have a Citgo card, and like Shell, Citgo outsources its online accounting to Citi. Guess what I discovered? The exact same thing happened to my Citgo account! All alerts turned off, my email address deleted.

At this point, I’m reminded that, years ago, I was a regular user of the Mycheckfree service. It collected all of my online bills into a central interface and made keeping up with everything a breeze. Until, that is, almost every bank-owned business pulled out of Mycheckfree, demanding that everyone use their individual, dedicated sites for account management. When things like this happen, I bitterly ponder how these companies (many of whom are directly implicated in our economy’s current decline) screwed up my customer experience to save themselves a few cents per transaction, only to screw me again and again years later.

Frakkin’ lovely.

Yeah, I know it would be nice if a user could download a free demo and then upgrade it to a paid version in-app, but Apple is spot on in recognizing how quickly that could degenerate into a wave of angry users wailing “I didn’t mean to buy it! I was just trying it out!” Far better to play it safe and make users confident that they can try out a freebie without getting themselves into trouble.

Besides… the “MySuperApp LITE” convention seems to have caught on enough that it is probably unwise to change things now.

• 4GB of RAM makes Vista downright zippy.
• The 64-bit version of iTunes (I didn’t even know one existed) is a huge improvement over its little sister. Way, way better at handling large music libraries, iTunes64 has made me reconsider my boiling hatred for Apple’s music app.
• Mozilla doesn’t have a 64-bit version of Firefox, and Ye Olde Firefox 32 is a touch buggy when it comes to Jscript. Nothing that amounts to a deal-breaker, but some definite annoyances.
• Matching my results with iTunes, pretty much any data-intensive, memory-gobbling app that has a 64-bit version seems night-and-day faster.
• Had some problems installing the latest version of Logitech’s SetPoint 64, ended up using the preceding iteration for now.
• Quicktime in Firefox seems a little hosed… transport controls refuse to appear, although video plays just fine.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the setup. The inconveniences haven’t proven to be too bad, and I find the speed increases in native apps more than compensate for the occasional Firefox quirk.

For each of the near term reporting requirements major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports agencies are required to provide a feed preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription.

from the Initial Implementing Guidance for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

Each agency has the freedom to either stuff the feeds with raw data or just link to static HTML, so it isn’t a perfect system yet… but wowza! Talk about making life easier for amateur journalists and watchdogs!

(hat tip to Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought)

For each of the near term reporting requirements major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports agencies are required to provide a feed preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription.

from the Initial Implementing Guidance for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

Each agency has the freedom to either stuff the feeds with raw data or just link to static HTML, so it isn’t a perfect system yet… but wowza! Talk about making life easier for amateur journalists and watchdogs!

(hat tip to Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought)

So while I’m still using PC for those plugins that can be reliably auto-activated during blog creation, I’ve turned to Plugin Filter when giving individual users access to potentially problematic or premium plugins. PF allows me to turn back on the stock Dashboard Plugins menu (which, let’s face it, is a smoother experience than the PC replacement) while still restricting users to activating a limited set of safe plugins.

To make PF work, just drop it into mu-plugins, and then open each of your restricted plugins in a text editor. Look for the line that reads something like:

Plugin Name: My Random Plugin

…and change it to:

Plugin Name: My Random Plugin: SiteAdminOnly

From that point on, only the site admin (you) will be able to (de)activate that plugin. Of course, every time you upgrade the file(s) in question, you’ll need to make this change… but it’s a relatively simple tweak that takes just a few seconds.