Fresh Apple: The Apple Blog (5 сообщений)

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The Apple Blog
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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TAB a Finalist in the 2007 Weblog Awards
Yesterday it was announced that The Apple Blog is one of the top 10 finalists for Best Technology Blog.

We have the honor of being included in the list with classic blogs like Engadget, Gizmodo, and Lifehacker.

If you’ve enjoyed the content The Apple Blog has provided over the past year, we’d love to have your vote.

You don’t need to register or anything of the sort to place your vote. Just go to this page and click on “The Apple Blog” and your vote will be placed.

You can cast your vote once every 24 hours, so if you really love The Apple Blog, you can vote for us every day.

Комментарии к сообщению:
http://theappleblog.com/2007/11/02/tab-a-finalist-in-the-2007-weblog-awards/#comments
JLab iPhone Case
I have always been a fan of the Apple iPod case that came with my 3G iPod when I bought it over 4 years (you remember, those cheap fabric cases that you just slide the ipod into). In fact, I still use the iPod and the case. So, when I received the JLab iPhone case, which is basically the same form factor as that classic iPod case, I thought I would have a winner. The case itself is made from “Deluxe MicroSued” which somewhat resembles leather. Sandwiched between the “MicroSued” is a harder material (probably cardboard or a thin plastic sheet). The case is definitely made exactly for the iPhone, as the iPhone slips right in and fits snugly in the case. It also has your standard belt clip on the back, again, covered in ~~pleather~~ “MicroSued” which you can clip to your belt for the ultimate “I’m a geek that works in IT” look right next to your beeper.

Overall, there isn’t much to complain about when it comes to the actual product itself. It seems to be made with decent materials and the construction/manufacturing quality seems high. In my brief usage testing the product, it showed no signs of wear and came clean when I got some food on it (ketchup). However, looks can be deceiving, and when it came to actually using the case, I discovered some major problems (for me personally).

The first major problem I have with the the case relates to it’s form factor. If you have an iPhone, you know that the speaker that handles all the audio output, including the ringer, is located along the bottom edge of the phone. And if you have ever put your finger over those speaker holes, you know that it’s pretty easy to cover them up, and when they are covered up, there is almost no sound output. Well, what happens when you put your iPhone in the case, and smoosh (remember how tight I said it fit above) those speaker holes up against 2 layers of “MicroSued” and cardboard/plastic? You get an EXTREME decrease in volume. Couple that with having the phone in your pocket and it’s basically impossible to hear your ringer. I “received” 4 calls in the time I was reviewing the product and I missed all 4 because I couldn’t hear them.

The second, and more minor beef I have with the case is it’s thickness. It feels like it doubles the thickness of the iPhone, and for someone that LOVES the thinness of the iPhone, this increase in thickness just doesn’t cut it for me. However, if you were going to keep this bad boy hanging on your belt, this probably isn’t a problem for you. I, however, am a front pocket guy and I just couldn’t handle it.

All in all, the JLabs iPhone case is not “bad” per-se, but I certainly can’t recommend it to anyone, because if your buying a phone case, you’ve got to be able to hear your phone ring.

Комментарии к сообщению:
http://theappleblog.com/2007/11/02/jlab-iphone-case/#comments
LifeShaker
I am so insanely inundated with work that I was happy to see we had a review for a different approach to task lists and reminders. LifeShaker’s approach is to avoid the list-based approach, in favor of grids and boxes. There are color coded categories, which are assigned to goals. The largest area of the app is a 3×3 grid, what I call the shaker grid, where curent goals are shown. If none of the boxes sound like fun to do, click the shaker icon and 9 different goals are shown.

Goals have tasks associated with them, though I found that I never needed this amount of granularity for a goal. Perhaps it is just my style of work but I found myself writing tasks to complete as my goals, and even if they required multiple action items I didn’t need need to store them.

I’ll cut right to the chase, this isn’t a must have application. It does its job well and there isn’t a lot to the application, which in some ways is a strong point. It’s the first version, so I am taking that into consideration for the review.

The LifeShaker interface doesn’t have the Mac experience at all. The uniqueness of the interface is actually a bit of a throw back right away because it feels more like a Java application than a Cocoa/Mac application. Using a full 1/3 column just for categories seems a bit too much when this space would’ve been better suited for the long list of goals a user would enter. Which is the next point, that the goals list was a bit unintuitive for assigning a category to a goal. There is no interface function for it, and just out of pure curiosity I right-clicked on the category column to set it.

Doing this however, exposed a bug that caused the interface to look like this:

This made me have to completely close the application in order to get it to look correct once again.

I gave the application a good solid two week run, and found it had a few issues. On occasion it would freeze when the Macbook Pro was waking up from sleep. I questioned that it might be a problem with Mac OS X, but this occurred on 10.4 and 10.5.

LifeShaker has some polish and work to do. Without integration into iCal or Mail, the idea of manually entering my tasks and goal information into yet another GTD application is no fun at all. It is another goal on top of a pile of many uncompleted goals. Coupled with the interface bugs and the departure from the Mac interface experience, I have to say it is easy to pass on this application for what is now included with 10.5’s Mail and iCal applications. LifeShaker is $29 and has a free 14 day trial.

Комментарии к сообщению:
http://theappleblog.com/2007/11/02/lifeshaker-review/#comments
Leopard's Parental Controls a possible source of resource hogging?

Jon Buys wrote in letting me know of a little issue he’s having with the new Parental Controls feature of Leopard.

He writes in:

I enabled the Parental Controls on my new Leopard install, and after letting my kids play Frozen Bubble and browse to Playhouse Disney for an hour or so I found that the daemon named “parentalcontrolsd” was eating 98-100% of one of my cores (Core 2 Duo MacBook).

Anyone else had this issue with the new Parental Controls? Have certain applications possibly caused the increase in CPU usage?

Комментарии к сообщению:
http://theappleblog.com/2007/11/01/leopards-parental-controls-a-possible-source-of-resource-hogging/#comments
Why I have not installed Leopard (Though I own it)

I was one of the many loyal enthusiasts that pre-ordered Leopard and couldn’t wait to install it on all my Macs. Unfortunately for me, it didn’t work out that way.

If you haven’t heard of the installation problems with Leopard yet, there are a few. It seems the very popular third-party application Application Enhancer does not work well (at all) with Mac OS X Leopard.

I did a quick inventory of my software, and sure enough I had APE installed (along with several APE plugins). After attempting to uninstall APE, I was almost ready to try my Leopard upgrade and noticed a blog post about Logitech Control Center mouse software issues.

Of course I have two Logitech mice, and have the Logitech Control Center installed. It appears Logitech Control Center uses APE in the background. Logitech has instructions on removing the old software and installing a new version. Unfortunately, their instructions are flawed as they reference downloading and opening a DMG file and running an uninstaller, and upon downloading the zip archive from their software download page I only found an installer application.

Their online help mentions a manual uninstall, but does not give the instructions. After several unsuccessful attempts to find the instructions via Google, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I have removed most preference panes and locations that APE or Logitech appear in my hard drive (through the shell) but am still not convinced it is completely removed. When I try to run the updated Logitech software installation, it promptly gives me an error and quits.

So, I’m left to do an Archive and Install which will likely leave me having to reinstall several applications and clean off enough hard drive space to have two concurrent System folders (at least until the installation has completed). With only 10 GB free on my 100 GB hard drive, that will be hard.

I hope to have my backup complete tonight and will remove most of the files (like my massive iTunes collection) in order to perform the upgrade.

Комментарии к сообщению:
http://theappleblog.com/2007/11/01/why-i-have-not-installed-leopard-even-though-i-own-it/#comments