This is the last of the things in the series of Computex photos I found that caught my eye. The folks over at Gizmodo also saw it, but have no further information on it. That said, it probably doesn’t need any further explanation, does it?
Update: The folks over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog have a link to a photo of a mac mini being used as a toilet paper dispenser which is pretty cool (check out the previous one in the flickr stream for the version with the Intel logo on the paper too).
Another clear copy from the Computex trade show in Taiwan, this is AOpen’s mini PC. While it clearly looks very much like an Apple Mac Mini, the company claims it is not competing with the Mac Mini. The specs are very similar to what one might expect from a Intel based Mac Mini, and it is claimed that the device was created at Intel’s request. Could this be a prototype for the new Intel-based Mac Mini? There is an intriguing quote from IDC analyst Roger Kay towards the end of the press release (which came out before the big Apple-Intel announcement at WWDC):
“I don’t think the two – Mac mini and whatever Intel puts out – are really in the same market; that is, of course, unless Apple starts running OS X on x86 hardware.”
Now we know that Apple will be using Intel chips, could this be the prototype for a Pentium M based Mac Mini? Or maybe it was a proof-of-concept that Apple asked Intel for to prove that a Pentium M system that small could be made? It is not quite the same layout on that rear panel, but it has most of the same ports, including a Firewire port.
In a collection of photos from this year’s Computex show in Taiwan, there were a number of clear attempts to copy the design of Apple’s products. The photo on the right shows one iPod mini copy; you can see another in image 20 – the IX-440 Audio Jukebox of the collection.
There were also some Shuffle copy-cats: Image 11 is one example, but perhaps the most blatent is image 25, LuxPro’s SuperTangent. The folks over at Engadget have a link to an iPodLounge review that pretty much declares this a waste of money.
I picked up the iPod Photo primarily to use with the camera adapter but I have only just ordered this from the Apple Store online having given up on finding it any of the local Apple stores or other stores where iPods are sold. I managed to get a 40GB model at a clearance price, which was a bargain in many ways. At just a few dollars more than the new 30GB model, it is 33% larger, but most importantly came with all the cables, the cradle and the power adapter. I also managed to get it personalised by MacMall.
Since I’ve not had the camera connector, I’ve been using it as a music player and also, recently, to listen to podcasts. I also have thumbnails of my full photo library installed on it (almost 14,000 photos now). That’s not without its problems though. Unless you have photo albums set up for everything, the library is the only way to access the photos and scrolling through 14,000 photos to find the one you want is not fast. It is a shame that the “roll” information that iPhoto uses cannot be available in the iPod’s interface too.
All of that said, I am very happy with the purchase. It is a little larger (and heavier) than some of the alternatives, but, assuming that the camera connector works well, it is a lot cheaper than the device I was looking at for in-the-field photo storage (mainly to offload the camera while on a trip without having to carry a laptop with me): the Archos PMA400.
I’ve had both the Tiger and the new iLife ’05 on my PowerBook G4 for a few weeks now. Mostly I’m impressed with 10.4, less so with the changes to iPhoto (which is pretty much all I am using from the iLife bundle at the moment).
I was upgrading from Jaguar (10.2), so I had all the new features of the Panther (10.3) release to get used to as well. The upgrade itself was painless. I chose to reinstall clean on the hard drive and then use the migration support software to pull applications and data from my firewire backup drive.
The biggest annoyance I had with 10.2 seems to have gone too: whenever the system became very busy under 10.2 the mouse pointer movement would become unpredictable making it very hard to do anything at all. I was told that this was not a problem with 10.3, so I was expecting it to go away when I upgraded. Still nice to see it did 🙂
Dashboard is great. I tried Konfabulator early on, but was annoyed by its resource consumption (I frequently had to kill it just to be able to move my mouse pointer smoothly again!). It was also difficult to work out which of the stacking planes to associate the applets with. Dashboard’s approach seems much cleaner (and has impressed every Windows user I’ve shown it to!).
My experience with the new iPhoto however is not so good. I have a lot of photos now (almost 14,000 photos, or about 50 GB), but that is only just over half the number it is supposed to cope with. I either need a lot more memory (which might be true), or this software needs some serious reworking! I would also like to see some support in there for multiple photo libraries. That way I could keep some of my older photos on an external hard drive and only open them when I want to (rarely), but keep my commonly used photos on the laptop HD. I have download the iPhoto Library Manager, but haven’t had a chance to try it (expect an update when I do!).
Would I recommend the upgrades? Tiger is a definite yes. iLife is a definite maybe! The reason I upgraded was to get full support for my Canon EOS 20D camera (I could upload the JPEG versions of the photos using iPhoto 4 by setting the camera to PTP mode, but I couldn’t get the RAW images). For that it is useful, but I think that there remains a lot of work to do before this application is really useful.
Under the Grand Intercontinental Hotel here in Seoul is a shopping mall larger than any in the bay area. In that mall I found an Apple Store, called the Apple Experience Center.
Check out the Korean version of Tiger, the newly released Mac OS X 10.4, that was onsale in the store, and installed on all their machines as far as I could tell. My copy of the US version shipped from Amazon yesterday – hopefully it will arrive early next week.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog and TechDigest are both carrying articles pointing out that the Apple Store now lists the iPod Photo Camera Connector (see Extras under the iPod Accessories section). This makes the whole iPod photo a very interesting proposition since it will be much easier to carry on trips than my PowerBook G4. I hope it can cope with the raw format images from my 20D.
There’s a rumour going around the internet that claims to be a photo of a cable that would allow an iPod Photo to be connected directly to a digital camera and download the photos from it. That would make the iPod Photo much more interesting. It would be even more interesting if it would work on the less expensive iPods as well (since I don’t need another tiny screen – I just need a pocket sized hard drive).
Thanks to Gizmodo for the heads-up on this one.
I have three rants today, all about poor quality desktop software and none of it from Microsoft. Since two of them are free software, I probably shouldn’t complain too much, but it worries me that this lack of quality is indicative of the overall level of quality that the software industry is accepting. The third was paid-for software and really should work as advertised. So, on to the problems:
iPhoto:The problem is simple, it refuses to export photos from my library to a folder on the hard drive where I can burn them to a CD that a friend with a Windows box can read, claiming that the drive is full (“Caution: Not enough disk space to complete current operation”). Only I have 33GB free and only 250MB of photos to export. Turns out that this is a known issue, supposedly fixed in version 4.0.1 (I have 4.0.3) and there are numerous workarounds on the internet for it. The best though came from one A. Dieckmann and was posted on the MacInTouch reader forum – basically, ignore the export option, select the photos you want and drag them to a finder window. So, I have a workaround, but not a fix. I am going to try to rebuild the “database” (hold down shift when starting the application I’m told, rather than an easy to find menu option), but somehow I don’t hold out much hope there.
Firefox: This one has been bugging me even before Firefox when using Mozilla. The thing leaks memory like a sieve. From the moment you start it, all it seems to be doing is eating RAM, and it carries on doing so until there is nothing left. Now, this is a common feature of software written in OO languages, like C++ and, even more so, Java, that have a tendency to hide the mechanics of memory allocation behind language features. The result of this abstraction appears to be badly written software that leaks memory. I suspect that using Java as a teaching language will make it worse too – there will be a whole generation of programmers who don’t even know that they have to release the memory they allocate (assuming they could recognise a memory allocation in the first place). Carefully written C++ can be memory efficient and not leak, but that will only happen if the engineers writing it understand where what they write will allocate memory, and that they are responsible for releasing that memory when they are done with it.
Also, shouldn’t somebody have seen this already? I cannot be the only user out of all those millions that downloaded it who leaves it running all the time can I? To make it worse, it also has a bug that sometimes causes it tol go off into the background somewhere and consume 100% of the CPU. The visible windows it has still work, just very slowly. Opening a new window and closing all the old ones doesn’t fix it either. The only fix is to re-start the whole program. Oh, and this happens on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X – at least it is consistent!
Zinf: A free shoutcast stream player that is actually not bad (doesn’t have as many features as iTunes, but it does run on Linux). The only problem is that around 17 minutes into a stream the music goes all jittery. The workaround is easy: stop the stream and restart it. Don’t even need to close the program. But surely people out there listen to a stream for longer than quarter of an hour at a time don’t they?
A hard disc failure at work (luckily the OS drive and not the data one), made me think a bit about backing up my MacOS drive in the PowerBook G4 I am using more and more. The most critical data on there, my photo collection, is backed up onto DVD and also (mostly) cloned on my Windows XP box. But there are an increasing number of little utility apps and documents that, while not going to be the end of the world to lose, would be annoying.
Hardware
So, while in Fry’s Electronics picking up a replacement drive for my work machine, I picked up a new Western Digital 250 GB drive kit (for $109 after the mail in rebate) I then picked up a Metal Gear Box (with a “light bar”) to put it in. This is a dual USB 2.0 and Firewire/IEEE1394 external IDE drive box, which meant in theory that I should have been able to use it on both my PowerBook and my Windows XP box.
Sadly, WinXP would not talk to the drive once a MacOS extended partition had been created on it. I could create a number of FAT32 & NTFS partitions which MacOS X would see, but they were not useful for my backup needs, so the drive has now become a backup drive and an external storage drive for the PowerBook – I’ll get another one for the WinXP system perhaps. None of that is the fault of the enclosure though – it works perfectly on both systems.
Software
While in Fry’s I had been debating getting one of the pre-assembled USB/Firewire drives because they came with backup software. In the end I went with the enclosure and drive because of the price (around half the price of the equivalent size pre-assembled drive units). Back home I found an excellent donation-ware backup solution for MacOS X: Carbon Copy Cloner. I have made a complete clone of my laptop’s internal HD onto the firewire drive, and then tried one sync operation to update it. All seems to be working well.
Recovery, if I ever need it, should be trivial too since the external drive is bootable; I just boot off of the external drive and sync back to the internal drive. Let’s hope I never have to test that theory though 🙂
