Wednesday, October 24, 2007

The Apple Blog (5 сообщений)

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The Apple Blog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
http://theappleblog.com
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  • Advice: Don't state the URL to your web site in an iPhone commercial on national television

    iPhone The Winger
    I was just watching “House, MD” a moment ago on television, and during the middle of one of the commercial breaks, one of Apple’s iPhone ads, “the Winger”, aired. In the bit, the girl recites her blog’s URL, thewinger.com. I can only assume that led to an uncountable amount of traffic slamming into her site after that. I kind of have a thing for cute ballerinas (or cute girls who describe their blog on national TV), so I wanted to check out the site. All I saw were server timeouts and slow loading. Whoops.

    Moral of the story? Don’t announce your web site in an Apple commercial unless your server is ready for the traffic. Especially when you have a pretty face. Ask Justine Ezarik about that one.

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  • (Re-)building the dream home with Live Interior 3D

    Although I’ve been fortunate, many of my neighbors here in San Diego are now finding themselves without homes because of the wild fires raging through Southern California. Live Interior 3D is a great tool for floorplanning and interior design, whether you’re rebuilding the home you just lost or you’re converting a spare bedroom into an in-home office.

    3D Elevation Live Interior 3D provides nearly all the features needed to plan out spaces in two-dimensional blueprints, as well as instantly visualize those floorplans as three-dimensional elevations complete with furniture, carpeting, lighting, and just about anything else you can imagine.
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  • How-To: Upgrade to Leopard

    Leopard BoxThere are some things you can do prior to installing that I sometimes recommend. Many of these things are not guaranteed to work (and some people actually say will do more harm than good). I, for one, don’t see an issue with the basics that some recommend: Start by repairing permissions: either run Disk Utility from your hard disk while in OS X, or do so from the Tiger DVD. Make sure you are currently at Tiger 10.4.10 (as of this writing, 10.4.10 is the latest public version, with .11 on the way).

    Backup

    Like with any other OS upgrade, you’ll want to back up all of your data (duh). The trick I used for my system upgrades/moves previously, and with the Leopard beta, was to run an exact copy to a Firewire disk using SuperDuper. SuperDuper is nice because you can at least make an exact copy of your disk that works well in the demo mode. To get advanced features, you have to buy a license. SuperDuper will also take careful looks at system files, Spotlight info, etc., and is good about copying the correct data while leaving system-specific files behind.

    I’m typing this on my new MacBook Pro, where I’ve used the Migration tool to safely move from my “backup” Firewire drive. Leopard continues the Migration Assistant, and even improves on it, so unless we hear reports that it no longer works, you can most likely safely migrate from a Firewire backup made with SuperDuper. This works well even when moving between PPC and Intel Macs. I mainly recommend this strategy, even though Leopard asks you to back up prior installing. The reason being, Leopard’s backup uses Time Machine, which right now, I’m not sure would work with pre-Leopard copies of OS X. If for some reason, you need to bail out, and are stuck on Tiger, this is the safest bet.

    At this point, with your backup safely in your hand, and everything updated, you can go ahead and stick in the Leopard DVD, and follow the instructions to reboot and start the process. Here’s where you can vary:

    1. Some folks say it’s okay to simply do an “upgrade” install over a previous version. Usually, Apple does a fairly good job at keeping their installs clean and stable (unlike a certain other OS maker - ahem). With Leopard, however, we’re seeing some major changes to core files, and the introduction of dozens of new frameworks, so this may be a case in which it’s wise to not do a straight upgrade.

    2. The next option - if you didn’t use SuperDuper to make a good backup earlier - is to do the old-fashioned “Archive and Install”. I’ve used this in the past, and it’s actually very useful in recent versions of OS X, where you can use the Migration Assistant on your rebooted fresh install to copy the files you want back over from your old archived copy of OS X. Fair warning, though: you’re going to need enough free space (read: a huge hard drive) to handle a copy of all of the data currently on your drive.

    3. If you already have a backup (courtesy of SuperDuper), you can do a clean install of OS X. This is also known as “Erase and Install”, and does as it says - it wipes your drive clean before loading a standard new install of the OS. It, like the archive and install option, will provide the Migration Assistant, so you can get all of your data back from the Firewire disk.

    Sure, you can use a second hard drive in your Mac Pro, but everybody knows you’ve already filled that up with your illegal downloads of the last few seasons of “Lost” and “Star Trek: Voyager”, right? It’s okay, I won’t tell anyone.

    The Easy Part: The actual install

    After you select the type of install you want, you’ll be asked a few other easy-to-answer questions, and you’ll be guided through the rest of the process before it just copies the files. After that, you’ll restart the computer, and you may or may not need to run through the Migration Assistant before you can be on your merry way, enjoying your new copy of Leopard with all of your old stuff still intact.

    Make an updated backup

    Once you’re confident with your Leopard install, you can erase that Firewire drive, and activate Time Machine. Unfortunately, as I was writing this, MacRumors discovered that Apple may have pulled the feature allowing Time Machine backups to Airport hard disks. I guess we’re back to plugging in the drive the old-fashioned way.

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  • iTunes Gets The Led In

    itunes Gets The Led InWhile the world was clamoring for Apple to add the Beatles to its offerings on iTunes, another classic digital music holdout, Led Zeppelin, has extended its Stairway to Heaven to Apple in an exclusive box set offering announced this morning. (iTunes: Led Zeppelin)

    On November 13th, Led Zeppelin will make available both a new “best of” album, titled Mothership, and a massive “The Complete Led Zeppelin” discography, with 141 tracks, for $99, a discount of roughly 40% off the standard 99 cents a track price.

    If you’re a big fan of “Kashmir”, “Misty Mountain Hop” and “Whole Lotta Love”, or you have posters of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham on your wall, rather than trying to figure out how to get your old LPs inside your Mac, Apple now has an answer for you. You’ll have to wait a few more more weeks, but “Your Time Is Gonna Come”.

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    Комментарии к сообщению:
    http://theappleblog.com/2007/10/23/itunes-gets-the-led-in/#comments



  • LifeBoat Review

    LifeBoat ReviewLifeBoat, from Martian Technologies, is a really cool idea. Automatically back up particular files to USB drives whenever I plug them in? Oh yes, please! However, in execution - well, it was a bit problematic.

    Let me talk, first, about what it does, and does well.

    You, the user, plug in a USB key. LifeBoat asks you if you want to update the backup, you tell it yes, and it zips your files right over to the key. (Actually, you just fail to tell it no in less than five seconds.) After it updates, it then pops up a dialog asking if you want to eject the drive or keep working with it. When not in use, LifeBoat perches in the menu bar, convenient and tiny, waiting.

    picture-1.png

    This is great for a certain market. I’ve been trying the GTD thing lately, and I put an Inbox and Outbox on my desktop. LifeBoat is amazing for sucking the contents of those off at the end of the day to take home with me if I’m using a Mac wherever that backup is going.

    Which brings me to my big gripe with LifeBoat: it stores its backups as .dmg’s. Last I checked, nothing but a Mac reads .dmg’s. I had this clever fantasy that, when I plugged in my LifeBoat drive, I could slurp off all the files that I needed to take to the mailroom and print, wander down the hall, and print them, simply by making a LifeBoat out of my Outbox file.

    Ah, nope.

    Oh, and you should really stay away from any LifeBoat that backs up more than 1 GB of stuff, at least if you have any plans to do work on your computer in the next half hour. I know, I know, to some people that’s a really big backup, but I’m a TTD-type person, and I tried to back up my iTunes library to an external drive. Man, was that a bad idea. Of course, so was backing up my Experiments folder, which weighs in at about a gig and a half.

    To recap: LifeBoat is great, if you want to back up small amounts of vital data every time you pop in your thumbdrive. Not so much, though, if you need substantial backups or if you want to take your backups to another platform.

    I tested LifeBoat on a 2.16GHz C2D MacBook Pro with 2 GB of RAM, running 10.4.10. External drives were a WD myBookPro, using both the FW800 and the USB interfaces, and a 1 GB Verbatim Store’n'Go non-U3 flash drive.

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    Комментарии к сообщению:
    http://theappleblog.com/2007/10/23/lifeboat-review/#comments





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