MR News 141 - July 2007

All the hype reached its climax last Friday when the iPhone finally hit the stores. Some deluded souls had even been queuing since the Monday to ensure they could be first in line to claim their maximum of 2 iPhones. Cynics wondered if they had been employed by Apple to drum up interest. Others, so it is rumoured, were actually getting paid just to reserve a place. In the event you could have just turned up at the appointed hour and waited for 30mins or so since there were ample stocks. Those hoping for a quick profit on eBay were disappointed.

Needless to say in the run up opinion was sharply polarised - the Mac fan club was all for it whilst others claimed it would be a total failure and recycled stories of other Apple products that had not met expectations. The one most mentioned was the Newton, even I queued for one a Mac Show in the States, and which - despite its limitations - was a really great product, it set the bench mark for the PDAs we see today. Its major fault was the high expectations we had for its hand writing recognition, but otherwise....no problem. People are still using them today.

Apple had seeded some favoured journos with iPhones and on the whole their comments were favourable. Yes, there were some niggles but nothing that couldn't really be sorted by tweaking the software. These views seem to be in line with the reports early adopters are posting. Some had activation problems which seemed to be down to the carrier, AT&T, rather than the iPhone or Apple with most involving those changing providers or trying to sign up using corporate accounts. The US EDGE wireless network was slow even though there had been reports that AT&T had upgraded portions of it prior to the launch. Major criticisms were; no copy and paste; no video from internal camera; no hands free or voice dialling; no to do list; no games or custom ringtones; no iChat; big fingers caused keying problems until people learnt to trust the keyboard which, for some reason, only shows upper case characters. Except for these all the reviews I've seem to agree that it does what it says on the tin. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see upgrades fairly soon.

Estimates of the number sold last week end range from 200,000 to 700,000 which isn't bad. Steve Jobs also announced that all Apple employees who had been there a year will get a free one. My guess is that we will see a revised version in the lead up to the Xmas buying season. Further down the line who knows - but if you think how the iPod has evolved then the future could be bright and maybe even Orange in the UK.

More spots revealed

Steve's keynote at the WWDC revealed some more details about the upcoming new OS Leopard. It will be 64 bit but backwards compatible with 32 bit applications without any user intervention - Windows does separate flavours. File Sharing and remote control, even over the web, will be made a lot easier though Time Machine will only back up locally so you can't do off site archives. The Finder is being updated and visually will look slightly different with, for example, a semi transparent menu bar. BootCamp is built in and according to some reports will not require a reboot to switch between Mac and Windows using instead a development of safe sleep mode. Stacks got a mention as being the automatic repository for downloads, attached files and so on though you can achieve the same result today with intelligent folders but without the eye candy.

Games are coming back to the Mac, Harry Potter was mentioned. Initially every one thought that this meant that the publishers were recompiling them to run on Mac OS but it seems that they will be running in an emulation mode using the aptly named Cider. Whether this will give a performance hit remains to be seen.

The biggest shock was that Safari for Windows was announced and a beta version was available immediately. All the hackers rushed to downloaded it and proceeded to try to break it - which they did. But it was only a beta and Apple soon released upgrades which overcame these deficiencies. Rather good I thought, all that research for nothing. You may be wondering why Apple has produced a free Windows browser, well there are a number of theories. One is that they want to raise its profile so web designers no longer have an excuse not to make their sites Safari friendly, another is that they have products in the pipe line which will need a known interface to download software or it could be that they just wanted to show PC people how things should be done.

Beam me up Scotty

Julian Allason shares his experience of using satellite terminals for email and light surfing in areas where there is no conventional broadband access - on a ship down the Turkish coast for example - or where hotel WiFi rates are exorbitant. The satellite terminal itself is about the size of a hardback book and mini dishes such as the Nera Worldo 1000 or the Thrane and Thrane Explorer 500. For more details look at www.inmarsat.com whilst AND Group offer tariffs of around £30 per month for 10MB downloads which can be rolled forwarded. Just don't use them for system updates.

YABU

Breaking with tradition Apple has released OS 10.4.10 - much to the consternation of some who never expected a double digit interim upgrade. There are also some MacBook improvements to the graphics which should be installed.

Is this a clone or backup I see before me?

The other week my hard drive failed, predictably just before I was going to do a clone. Luckily I didn't lose very much except a few emails so if you were expecting a reply to something please resend it. Note the word 'clone'. Most people who bother to backup back up their data which usually means their home folder; applications and OS tend not to be included. The rationale seems to be that these backups are incremental so they are relatively quick since only changes are recorded and don't take up so much room as a clone. Note that a full backup of a disk is not necessarily the same as a clone since many of the system files can not be copied correctly and it may not be bootable

A clone of the other hand makes a bit for bit copy of the drive, to all intents and purposes it is identical to the original. (actually some may not be totally identical since metadata, permissions, Finder flags and similar low level information may not be preserved). Am I glad I did a clone rather than a backup. When the drive started screeching I turned off my Mac, took the external drive with the clone on it and plugged it into another Mac, set the startup disk to be the external and booted. And I was up and running - same OS, all the applications, all my files and even my screen saver. Now if I had relied on a backup I would have had to fiddle around with setting up a new user, transferring home directories, most likely updating the OS and the applications........well that would have been a nightmare, do you know where all your master disks and licence numbers are? OK, I wouldn't have lost any data but the hassle in getting up and running would have been intolerable. Once I had replaced the hard drive in my Mac I cloned the external drive onto it and was back to normal.

I can see the reason why companies prefer incremental backups especially if they are being done over a network but for individuals and smaller companies I would urge that they seriously consider doing a clone. Hard disk space is cheap these days and time isn't really a factor since you can script them to run overnight. I use Personal Backup from Intego, another which gets a good mention is SuperDuper. I know a lot of people use Retrospect but my complaint against it is that it uses a proprietary format to store the data so you can't easily recover a single file and the User Interface is convoluted. I also wouldn't use a free utility since if something went wrong I would have little redress.

If you are not cloning or backing up now then perhaps you should start. An external Firewire drive is not going to cost a fortune and if anything does go pear shaped it will have paid for itself. Also test your clone/backup at regular intervals to make sure you can recover data - better to find this out when its not an emergency.

The fantom flasher

When using one of the USB flash drives Nick Daisley recommends that you read the instructions carefully.

Some of them (notably mp3 players which can be read on, and content written from a Macintosh) will have been formatted to the old 16-bit FAT, which a Macintosh cannot format. Such drives should only be reformatted on a PC, to old-fashioned FAT, or they may be rendered useless....

Netgear HDX101

For those of you using this Ethernet over mains note that there is new firmware available; you will though need a PC to install it.

Techie Tips

• Command-Click in the title bar of a background window allows you to move it around in the background whilst Command-Click in the resize box (bottom right of the window) allows you to change its size with out bringing it to the front.

• In MR News 139 I mentioned the 'pipes' in Column View it now seems that if you hold down Option whilst dragging them all columns will resize and if you hold down Option whilst double clicking a Pipe all columns will right size to accommodate the longest title. Some people claim that right clicking (Control-Click) a pipe produces a contextual menu but I can't get this to work every time.

• Don't forget that Cmd-shift-3 will take a capture of the whole screen whilst Cmd-shift 4 will produce a selection crosshair so you can capture any part of the screen you wish, once you have the crosshair press the Space bar to get a camera icon which will then capture the whole of the window the camera is over. Usually the picture is saved to the desktop but if you hold down Control whilst pressing the other keys it will be saved to the Clipboard ready to be pasted into a document. If you want something more sophisticated then use Grab in the Utilities folder, it does the same sort of function with the addition of a timed capture and a choice of pointers.

• At the top right of Finder windows and some others there is a little button which when you click it will alternatively hide or show the menu bar and side bar giving you more real estate on the screen. Try Command clicking it as well.

Eye Book

iPhoto has the option of allowing you to produce a book of photos and Diana Bailey (diana@peninsulapatches.com) decided to make use of this service. Before placing the order she called in at a local photographic emporium to compare what she thought she would get with what Kodak actually produce. For Kodak’s £39.99 a greatly inferior book is produced, on hard card pages, making it more like a kiddie's first book than even a scrap book. The photographic reproduction in the sample book was really poor.

She uploaded her high resolution photos which was a little time consuming and almost immediately received an acknowledgement of their receipt. She was very impressed with both the service offered and the quality. The hard backs nicely covered in fabric in the colour of one's choice. The inside cover is matched with a textured same-colour paper. The photographic and text reproduction was excellent. The cost for a 22 page book was £27.94 including VAT and P & P and she is delighted with it and would recommend it.

Over loaded shelves

We still have available and you could try a sensible offer

1) Airport Extreme Card, unboxed and pre enjoyed............£18.00

2) AppleCare Protection plan for Mac Pro/PowerMaUnregistered but defaced outer box......................£150.00

3) AcerPower F6 P4 531 3.06Ghz; 512Mbytes; 80Gbyte HD; Combo

Giga Ethernet; XP Pro; mini tower; with kbd/mouse.......£234.00

(Don't ask!!! Good spec. Would be ideal as a home

or office PC. Previously used as a short term loan

machine.)

4) iBook 12" new battery M9337G/A............................59.00

5) Epson Multipack TO441/TO452/TO453/TO454 inks for C64,

C66, C84,C86, CX3600, CX3650, CX6400, CX6600 sealed,

expiry 05/08 plus a couple of Yellows and a magenta.......20.00

and finally

If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.