What's it all about, Alfie?

When I first heard this on Twitter, I thought it was a lie, but that's only because it didn't come through the normal channels. OS X (no 'Mac' on the front) Mountain Lion (10.8) is going to be released this Summer, and will then be on a yearly release schedule like iOS. Some of the new things I'm excited about are a more general inclusion of iCloud, the unification of Messages across iOS and OS X, and, of course, Gatekeeper. This is going to make it a lot harder for folks to slip in viruses and malware for my family. It's something I've tried to drill into them, but I'm afraid they still don't see it.

With Gatekeeper, the OS will do it for them. I like that.

I'm sure there will be a slew of other nice little updates, but the yearly updates are exciting too. The Mac is the best platform on the planet. I really believe that. Wonderful news!

I've been reading a bit about Apple's first quarter earnings call today, and I am just stunned. The numbers and the graphs are all impressive, but it's the real scale that's blowing me away. Here's this (supposedly) niche company that had profits in the first quarter greater than Google's revenue. Amazing. Really.

And in my book, it could not happen to a better company. iBooks Author. The iBooks Textbooks. The hardware, and the tools. Simply amazing. Catering to the creative person in all of us has certainly made them incredibly wealthy. And the stories of what they did for their people, and the citizens of Japan after the earthquake - that's a company that's not just about making a buck.

It's good to see good karma generating good outcomes.

Today at their little press get together, Apple released iBooks Author and I have to say, I'm a little envious of my teacher friends that get to use this to make their notes and ideas come alive. When I was back at Auburn University, I taught Electrical Engineering, and every class I taught, I always made really extensive notes to make sure that my lectures all "worked", and fit in the time for each class. Sure, some were a little long, but not too many, and after the first few weeks of teaching, you get to know how much you can cover.

The beauty of iBooks Author is that I could do this same thing on my Mac, give it to the students, and then there's never a reason to take notes. It's all there. Sure, it's maybe not as polished as some books, but it's there, it's free, and students would eat it up because it means never making mistakes in the copying of examples, all the things I might skip through in class would be laid out there to everyone to see.

Plus, it's possible to put multimedia in the books, and I could put simulation results, visualization movies, all the things that I had to hope they'd get form doing this on their own.

I got iBooks Author today because I'm convinced that even if I don't do a lot with it, I want to do a lot with it, and that's the important thing. Who knows? Maybe it'll get me back in the classroom.

I've been holding onto this for quite a while, but it's a really nice component of Mail.app on Mac OS X. If you have entries in your Address Book then Mail.app puts their picture in the corner of your mail messages. It's a neat little way to "see" the people that are emailing you. But what if you have a lot of mailing lists, or stuff like that? You don't want to have them in your Address Book. Well… you don't have to.

This posting reminds us that we can simply create a directory of images, and with properly named TIFF files, we can give Mail.app all the information it needs to match up images to senders. Simply:

  $ cd ~/Library/Images
  $ mkdir People

then, for every email address you want to have associated with an image, make a file in that directory with the name: email_addr.tiff. So if you wanted to have an image for everything coming from yoyo@gimme.com, you'd place a TIFF file in the People directory named yoyo@gimme.com.tiff. Simple.

Restart Mail.app and it'll see the images and you're in business. Very slick.

Already this morning we're seeing the success of the iPhone 4S. At 3:30 am CST I tried to order one, and the AT&T connection was CRUSHED by the volume. Apple's site was fine, but AT&T was dead. So Apple did the very Apple thing - gave me a reservation number and told me that they'd get back to me with an email to complete the transaction as soon as AT&T was back up. Classy. Always.

So now it's 9:13 am CST, and I'm seeing tweets like these:

which tells me two things: first, I ordered at the right time, and second: Steve was right. Grace, Beauty, Elegance, are all things people want. The talk of the App Store review process is gone… AntennaGate is gone… what's really left is one man's vision of what a phone should be.

I'm still reeling from the news, but this makes me feel like things are going to be OK.

Today's Apple iPhone event was, to some, a disappointment. I have to say I don't know exactly what I was expecting - other than the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 5. What I expected in the iPhone 5 I don't know. The 4S has the CPU, the storage, the camera and iOS 5, so what was I thinking the 5 would have other than a different format?

I guess in retrospect, the 4S is all I was looking for, but it makes it harder to spend the $600+ to upgrade when my 4 is doing just fine. I guess the one thing is that Joseph wants an iPhone, and so giving him my 4 makes it easier to justify the 4S.

Great products, incrementally improved. Typical Apple. Thank goodness.

A few weeks ago, yeah, I know, I've been busy, I got Lion (10.7.1) from the Mac App Store and installed it on my main MacBook Pro. The upgrade took longer than I really expected - the downloading was not fast at all. But I will say, it was smooth. Very smooth.

The big issues I found with Mac OS X Lion is that Colloquy 2.3 wasn't really working properly. Thankfully, all the other apps that I depend on day-to-day were working fine. I still have the problem that Twitterrific does not work when the video card is changed and it tries to "pop up", but hey, it's a small price to pay, and it's not just Twitterrific - it's all the pop-up Twitter clients I've tried. Kind of disappointing.

Anyway, Colloquy had a new build that does support Lion, and it's available from the Colloquy Downloads Folder. Go there, get the latest, or at least 2.4, and you're in business. Kind of surprised that they aren't more responsive as Lion has been out there for a while, but at least they have something that works for me.

Other than that, Lion is working just fine and the look and feel of the OS is very nice. I especially like the vanishing scroll bars. On Terminal.app, I've been asking for those for ages, and I now have them. Good. Fantastic.

When I got my new MacBook Pro (early 2011), I got the program gfxCardStatus and it allows me to control the integrated/discrete graphics very nicely. What I noticed right away was that Unison and Twitterrific didn't like the discrete graphics, and so I emailed the respective authors and asked if they'd heard of this problem. Interestingly enough, they hadn't. Well... today I got a lot closer to figuring this out because one of the guys at Panic thought to ask about the console output.

Interestingly, it says:

4/19/11 3:47:05 AM Unison[1069]	unknown error code: invalid display
4/19/11 3:47:05 AM [0x0-0x20020] Tue Apr 19 03:47:05 peabody.local Unison[1069]
       .com.panic.Unison2[1069]  <Error>: unknown error code: invalid display

Well now... isn's this interesting. Unison (and Twitterrific) are reporting that the AMD Radeon HD 6570M is an invalid disply. That's certainly something that you don't see every day. It also seems to remove the question of bad hardware from the table. If the libraries are seeing this as an invalid display, then it's the interpretation of what they are seeing that's the problem.

I sent this into both places, and we'll see what comes back. I'm hoping a fix for both of them.

[4/25] UPDATE: I got a response saying that an Apple engineer said it was the Flash Plugin. Since I'm not using Flash, that can't be it, but I did take a chance that it could be some plugin. So I removed the following plugins:

• AdobePDFViewer
• Cortona Plug-in
• O3D
• RealPlayer Plugin
• freewrl
• nsIQTScriptablePlugin.xpt

and when I restarted Safari, MarsEdit, and Chrome, the problem went away! So it's a plugin, allright, and one of these is bad. I don't really need any of these guys, so I'm leaving them all out, but it's nice to know I can find out the bad boy by putting it back in and seeing when things break.

This morning I wanted to hook my new MacBook Pro up to the existing TimeMachine backup stream that I've had going for quite a while. The problem is that in the past, it's been a someone manual operation, and with the loss of the ACL control app in Snow Leopard, nearly impossible. But I was being silly, wasn't I?

Turns out, that in Snow Leopard, if you just hook up an existing TimeMachine drive to a new machine, it'll ask you if you want to continue with this backup set on the new machine! This is exactly why I love Apple. They think of these things, and plan for them. In the past, it was manual, but now it's automatic.

Gotta love these guys!

I looked at the tracking for my new MacBook Pro from Apple and noticed that it was out on the FedEx truck for delivery! I like tracking it from China, but I like even more the idea of getting an amazing new laptop! This guy has the fast i7 processor, with 8GB RAM and the 512GB SSD. I know that my existing Core 2 MacBook Pro will seem very slow in comparison.

Quad core... I've been waiting for that for a long time. And even the memory is faster. This is going to be a major upgrade. I'm really jazzed about it.