Lycra-clad Miltonic Angel

Play Digital from Channelflip TV. I'm ... simply speechless. I love it, and I don't even play video games.

The Tablet Mac (again)

So the rumours of a tablet-format Mac portable have surfaced again. I gave up expecting one a while ago (although if I ever come across a cheap Sony UX I'll definitely have a go at getting one of the OSX86 hacks running on it). The twist this time is that it may be using the iPhone branch of OS X rather than the full Mac version. I have both doubts and reservations about this. Successful as the iPhone's software keyboard seems to be (and I must admit I haven't tried it yet), I wonder how well it would cope with driving the kinds of productivity apps a larger device would need to support, as opposed to the iPhone's information-grazing "applets". With any luck, time (and Apple) will let us find out.

Maxtor OneTouch III

I purchased the Maxtor OneTouch III 500Gb hard disk, not because of Time Machine (I remain a user of the oh-so-2005 Tiger), but because of this post on TUAW, which had me scurrying off to System Profiler where I discovered that, yes, my first generation MacBook Pro did have a Segate drive with v7.01 firmware. Ho-hum.

First impressions of the OneTouch III (which, coincidentally, works just fine even if you haven't used the first two) were good. Skipping the glossy green box with its stock photo of an attractive young family creating the kind of happy digital memories you'd want to safeguard with regular backups, you get to the drive itself, which is probably best described as substantial. It's about the size and weight of a house brick -- despite having an external power supply -- and has a rubberised coating on its two largest faces which helps make holding it feel safer than if it were shiny plastic or aluminium.

Substantial is not, however, an adjective you could apply to the printed documentation, which runs to two pages each of installation instructions for both Mac and PC in about a dozen different languages. More in-depth documentation is provided on one of the three bundled CDs, the others holding Mac and Windows, and -- a latter addition -- Vista, drivers.

For a while now I have been trying to find a decent NAS backup device, the complicating factor being that I need to use it for both Mac and PCs. As the OneTouch is basically just an external hard disk, using it for both platforms proved a simpler affair. While it comes formatted as NTFS, it took only a few moments for Disk Utility to partition into two: HFS+ for the Mac and FAT32 for Windows. While OS X will see both partitions as separate drives, Windows will see only the Windows partition.

Installing the bundled software on both platforms was straight forward, as was configuring it, which was a simple matter of choosing which folders to backup, after which the initial backup is created. Here I ran into problems on the PC, with the backup failing to run, instead flicking back to the configuration screen with no error message. On a hunch I reformatted the FAT32 partition Disk Utility had created to NTFS (something I should have remembered to do anyway), after which backup ran without a hitch.

Actually, I should really mention something that had me stumped for a little while, mostly due to my failing to read the instructions and expecting things to be harder than they were. I spent a while on both computers, going through the set-up application looking for the "Backup Now" command. While it's in there, what I was missing was the eponymous OneTouch feature. A single press of the button on the front of the drive is all if takes to start a backup.

So what else is there to mention? The drive is both Firewire 400 and USB 2.0, and comes with nicely flexible cables for each. Backups are written straight into a folder on the drive, with no form of compression, which means that you can delve in at any time to recover your files.

The real test of backup is firstly, whether it is simple enough that you don't see it as a problem to backup regularly (which is apparently where Time Machine scores), and secondly how those backups perform in the unfortunate event that you need them. Only time will tell on these scores; all I can say is that so far I couldn't be happier with the OneTouch III.

The Maxtor OneTouch III 500Gb Firewire 400/USB 2.0 is available from amazon.co.uk for £113.98.

It beats "foo, bar, baz"

From the example code for componentsSeperatedByString: in the NSString Class Reference:

NSString *list = @"Norman, Stanley, Fletcher";

Well, it made me smile (even if I went on to use a NSScanner instead).

whyPhone

A couple of months ago, in a iPhone-inspired fit of making-do with what I've already got, I installed Google Maps and Opera on my K750i. Both were impressive (I have to keep reminding myself that my phone is more powerful than the first five or six computers I owned[*]), but I haven't used either since. The lack of need is one factor, but the other is... well, there's really no other way of putting it: I can't find them. I've been through all twelve of the icons on the menu screen and I swear there's no sign of them. Not a sausage. Maybe it's me. I just don't know.

[*] On the off-chance that you're interested, these were: BBC Model 'B', Spectrum +2, Atari 520STFM, Atari Falcon (yes, really), PowerMac 8200/100, and PowerBook 5300cs.

FECoder

I was thinking about pointing my three-weeks-worth of cocoa expertise at the Ironcoder 7 next week. I didn't honestly think I stood a chance, but I thought that it would be a fun experience and that it would force me to explore some interesting new corners of the API. Then I read the spoiler: You should expect the API to be new to Leopard. Well, that's me out, since I haven't upgraded yet, and it probably also rules-out anyone who isn't a paid-up ADC member, since the rest of us only got access to the 10.5 docs last week. Yes, I know it's called "Ironcoder" for a reason, but there's setting the bar high and then there's putting the bar in a locked room and only letting a few people have the key.

Jackarse

Bill Thompson on that OS X trojan:

At the moment the fake codec is being spread via porn sites, but it will quickly spread to more mainstream sites, and that's when it will get dangerous and could affect a lot of Mac users who believe that they don't need to worry about system security.

Wrong. The codec doesn't accidentally turn up on sites, it has to be placed there by the site's creators. And since doing so would constitute a criminal act, how likely is it that any "mainstream" site will do so? Does he really think that Steve Chen and Chad Hurley are going to try to supplement their Google millions with a little credit card fraud?

2b || !2b

So we're at UK iPhone day -4, and I'm wondering what to do. Should I get one? I can just about afford it, but can I justify it. Wearing my new Indie Developer hat I could pretend that it's an investment: I can begin hacking together some apps as soon as they jailbreak 1.1.2, which would give me a couple of months head-start on the design of something before the proper development kit comes out... and I would be able to say that I was there on the evening it was launched (although I can't imagine there being queues outside either the Weymouth or Dorchester O2 shops). Oh, what is a boy to do?

Babies

There's this semi-concious thing I do whenever I find out someone's date of birth, which is to count back nine months. (Yeah, I know...) Listening to the last couple of episodes of tWiT, I couldn't help noticing how many babies have been born over the last few weeks (Merlin Mann, Patrick Norton, Robert Scobel -- congratulations all round). It's been about nine months since the iPhone was announced. Eeew.

Why?

Smultron, previously my text editor of choice (because I like the single-window interface and because it's free), has, it tells me, a new version available. For Leopard only. Why? It's a text editor! What feature of Leopard does it need so desperately that it can't edit text without it?

I think that we may be on a slippery slope, where the extra ease-of-use from Objective-C 2.0 and the pressure to shoe-horn core animation into applications combine to force programmers to move to Leopard. Apple may have sold 2 million copies in a few days, but think how many Tiger (and earlier) machines that still leaves out there. For my first project (look for it early next year, details to dribble out soon) I'm aiming for 10.3.9, and so far all I've had to sacrifice is outline view bindings.