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Friday, December 27, 2013
Lightning, the Epitome of Apple is one of the best things John Gruber has written all year.
The Lightning adapter epitomizes what makes Apple Apple. To the company’s fans, it provides elegance and convenience — it’s just so much nicer than micro-USB. To the company’s detractors, it exists to sell $29 proprietary adapters and to further enable Apple’s fetish for device thinness. Neither side is wrong.
Of course Apple wasn’t always this way.
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Sunday, November 17, 2013
On November 5th, 2010 Apple killed the Xserve.
At the time I thought killing the Xserve was a mistake. Like so many thousand Macintosh IT Professionals I thought Apple’s future in the Enterprise was tied to the existence of a shiny 1U rack-mountable Macintosh server. Without it how would the PC System Administrators ever take us seriously?
And what about all of the core Mac OS X technologies the Xserve was supposed to bring us?
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Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Apple has a long history of including Java in its desktop operating systems. The Macintosh Runtime for Java included a JIT compiler developed by Symantec, the standard Java class library from Sun, additional classes providing Macintosh-specific functionality, and the Apple Applet Runner for running Java Applets on the Classic Mac OS without the overhead of a browser.
Macintosh Runtime for Java 1.5 works on computers with 68030, 68040 or PowerPC microprocessors.
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Friday, May 3, 2013
Fusion Drive, we barely knew you. Announced as part of an Apple event held on October 23rd, 2012, Fusion Drive combined the large capacity of a conventional hard drive with the speed of a 128 GB flash storage to create a single logical volume with the space of both drives combined. The operating system automatically managed the contents of the Fusion Drive so the most frequently accessed applications, documents, photos, and other data are stored on the faster flash storage, while infrequently used items moved or stayed on the hard drive.
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Tuesday, July 24, 2012
A lot of people have been displeased by the skeuomorphic design elements appearing in Apple’s latest operating systems. Some attribute these design decisions to the tastes of Steve Jobs. I don’t think anyone could clearly define the tastes of Steve Jobs, not even himself. One minute he might be appreciating the craftsmanship of his Bsendorfer grand piano, the next he might be observing the minimalistic teachings of Zen sitting cross legged on the floor of his unfurnished home.
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Friday, May 11, 2012
Steve Jobs came back to Apple to save the company, not to kill the Newton. Killing the Newton was a sacrifice that had to be made to save Apple. It is pointless to think if things had been different, if the Newton had survived. Because if it had we would not have the Apple we have today. I am glad Steve made the choice to kill the Newton if it meant saving Apple.
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Monday, April 9, 2012
You have heard it on The Talk Show. The loud clickity-clack of John Gruber’s Apple Extended Keyboard II. The keyboard that Daring Fireball was written upon. Known for its massive size and generous weight, the Apple Extended Keyboard II is a behemoth compared to the minimalist “Chiclet” inspired keyboards made popular by MacBooks today. Its mechanical key switches produce a reassuring sound that has not been heard by most Macintosh users for more than a decade.
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Thursday, April 5, 2012
While attending Macworld 2012, I met John Gruber. I was waiting outside the men’s room in an upscale hotel lobby. I was not alone. Stephen Hackett, and Pat Dryburgh were with me. We were all waiting for Shawn Blanc and Ben Brooks who were attending a private get together in the hotel bar across the room. We should have been having a drink ourselves, but instead we were sitting on a sofa outside the men’s room looking rather lame.
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Monday, March 5, 2012
When I was a Mac Genius, and the Genius Bar was new, a red phone with a direct line to Cupertino used to sit behind the bar. The phone didn’t call anyone important, but it did get you AppleCare Tier 2 support if you got stumped by a customer’s question or needed to ask a inquiry of your own. I never picked up the red phone to ask a technical question, that’s what the internet is for, but I did use it a couple of times to ask procedural questions on pending repairs.
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Monday, January 16, 2012
By July 2002 Mac OS X was just over one year old, Safari was still several months away, and very few web browsers took advantage of the innovative new features and bold aqua interface of 10.1 Puma, the latest version of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system. Opera looked like it belonged on Windows. iCab looked like it belonged on Mac OS 9. OmniWeb was the first Mac OS X browser developed in en.
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Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Even at training (Early 2009) our instructor warned us about ‘Old School vs. New School’ Geniuses. His emphasis was that the needs of the business change.
Today’s Mac Genius are no longer required to have the same deep understanding of the Mac OS, its UNIX roots, or classic past. They can no longer troubleshoot the same impossible set of hardware symptoms with ease while working with multiple customers bar side.
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Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Now that 2011 has come to a close, we are able to look back at Apple’s greatest year. Not only did 2011 show record profits and important product updates, but new technologies were released, and brand new versions of all of Apple’s operating systems were unveiled. Customer’s experienced new ways of purchasing products, while taking advantage of innovative cloud-based storage solutions. Developers learned a new integrated development environment for coding applications across all of Apple’s state-of-the-art operating systems.
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Tuesday, July 26, 2011
I have had a Mac.com email address ever since I had a Mac that could send email. iTools, the predecessor of .Mac and MobileMe, has been part of my online identity since the summer of 2001. I remember when the only way to access my iTools’ IMAP email was through Outlook Express. When sending files to iDisk’s 5MBs of storage required AppleShare. When one of the perks of owning a Mac was the ability to send tasteful electronic greeting cards with Apple’s branding all over them.
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Friday, June 3, 2011
With the unveiling of Lion just days away it is easy to look back at past releases of Mac OS and see how we arrived at Apple’s latest system software. Over the last 27 years Apple has introduced more than 17 major releases of its premier desktop operating system. Some releases such as System 7, and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger brought revolutionary changes to the Mac while making the transition between hardware architectures.
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Thursday, February 10, 2011
Apple released four distinct Newton form factors containing eight different models between August 1993 and February 1998. Each form factor was an evolutionary step forward for the platform, and introduced design considerations and features that were different from past and subsequent models. Choosing a Newton requires understanding each models benefits and weaknesses and applying that knowledge towards selecting the Newton that best meets your needs.
Original MessagePad & 100
The OMP was unveiled and released on August 3, 1993 at MacWorld Boston.
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Friday, February 4, 2011
A Newton MessagePad, the grandfather of all PDAs, is a funny thing to carry around with you when most people are sliding super slim, constantly connected, application-rich smartphones into their pockets. Compared to the iPhone a Newton MessagePad looks like a green brick, and I have been accused more than once of stealing the rubberized signature pad from a UPS delivery man. Despite what my Newton lacks in portability, connectivity, and applications it makes up for with a unique set of features no other mobile computer can match.
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Friday, December 3, 2010
iTunes can tell you a lot about a song. It can tell you the title, the artist, the album, and the genre. It can tell you the year a song was released and when it was added to your iTunes library. iTunes can even tell you the bit rate of a recording, and how many times you have played or skipped a particular track. What iTunes can’t tell you is what a particular song is worth to you.
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