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Posts from the ‘Apple’ Category

Dec 29

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LinkedIn for iPhone 3.0 is LIVE!

Just a quick note to say that the new version of LinkedIn for iPhone is now live in the iTunes App Store.

Download LinkedIn for iPhone

I wrote a fairly lengthy piece on the official LinkedIn blog, so no need to replicate the full walk-through here.  In any case, check out this new home screen:

This application represents a huge achievement for the team.  It’s really a complete redesign and re-architecture of the entire stack supporting the application, based on an end-to-end design that was driven by user feedback and business metrics.

Building iPhone apps is a wonderful throwback in some ways to the days of client software, except with the advantage of over a decade and a half of web-based architectures.  There is a richness to client applications that the web still doesn’t replicate, and a complexity and depth to their design that is often under-appreciated.

Of course, the team had fun too.  The “Themes” feature, for example, was never part of the original plan.  It was originally a last minute easter egg that we included for fun in internal testing.  It proved so popular, however, we felt like we had to include it for everyone.

There are hundreds of things I love about this new application.  Even the way it presents a user’s profile is thoughtful, as LinkedIn is designed to allow you to put your best foot forward as a professional:

Of course, I wouldn’t be a product manager if I didn’t also have hundreds of things I’d like to see improved in the application.  It has been fun to watch the Twitter stream all day, as the feedback has been mostly positive.  Still, while this application represents a big leap forward for LinkedIn on the iPhone, it’s really just a beginning.  What’s most exciting about the architecture of this application is that it will let us rapidly innovate and improve the mobile experience through 2010 and beyond.

So here’s a quick shout out to the team – thank you for the hard work and effort in 2009 to produce an iPhone app we can be proud of.   I couldn’t be more excited for 2010, as we change the way people think of mobile business applications.

Apr 20

8 Comments

Mac Pro Crash Recovery: A Tale of 36 Hours

Yeah, it was that kind of weekend.

I went to check email Saturday morning, and was greeted with quite a shock.  My Mac Pro was locked in some sort of grey screen.  No icon, no progress, nothing.

A quick press of the power button confirmed it – simple power down.  No real OS boot.

On Friday night, before bed, I had shutdown the machine.  Some apps had been misbehaving, and I thought a full shut down & reboot was in order.  Apparently that reboot had failed.

I don’t know how “normal people” deal with problems like this.  When I say “normal”, I mean people who haven’t actually developed software on the Mac, who haven’t worked repairing Macs, and who haven’t spent countless hours futzing with their own machines.

Just in case its useful, here’s what I did.  The good news is that it proves out the benefit of using backup software, like Time Machine.  The bad news is that it also proves that this stuff is still way too hard:

1) Tried to reboot. Yes, I know, not rocket science.  But there is always that hope that just rebooting will magically “fix” the problem.  In this case, rebooting went into an endless loop.  Grey screen, Apple logo, spin icon… then grey screen and reboot.  Kept repeating.  Bad news.

The lack of either the blinking folder or the regular boot sequence told me I was on dangerous ground.  It was either a hardware issue, or the system was corrupted.  In either case, the machine was not getting to the normal boot sequence.

2) Tried to boot of DVD. For those “Dodgeball” movie fans, “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.”  For Macs, “If you can boot of a DVD, then your hardware can boot anything.”  It’s not totally true, but true enough.  In my case, it proved harder than you might think.   The machine wasn’t getting far enough in the boot sequence to load Bluetooth, so my wireless keyboard was useless.  Fortunately, I keep a USB keyboard around.  Plugged in, holding down the “C” key (nostalgia: the “C” is for CD, and they never migrated to “D” for DVD.)  In any case, if there is no DVD in the drive with a bootable OS, it opens the tray.  Got the tray opened, popped in the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard DVD, and began to boot.  Total time spent: 20 minutes.

3) Diagnose the boot drive. On the Mac OS DVD, a little known trick is that while the installer is running, you can go to the Menu Bar, and select “Disk Utility” to run diagnostics on your disk.  I did so, and discovered some bad news.  My main system drive, a 300GB Western Digital, had problems.  Worse, Disk Utility basically told me that I was crazy if I thought it could fix them.  Drat.  Time spent: 10 minutes.

4) Get Mac OS X installed on another hard drive. Running the system off DVD is slow, and you are limited in options without a full Finder.  Fortunately, my iTunes HD had a few hundred GB free.  Installed OS X on that drive and rebooted.  While that happened, I went to have breakfast and actually get productive chores done.  Time spent: 30+ minutes.  Who knows, I didn’t come back to the machine for several hours.

5) Assess whether the system drive is lost cause.  I was ready to run down to Fry’s to get a new HD (or better yet, a new SSD.  Why not turn tragedy into opportunity?)  Unfortunately, the disk mounted.  Interesting.  I did get a strange system warning that I’d never seen before, telling me the disk had problems and that I should reformat it.  Never waste access to a dying disk.  I immediately tried to use Disk Utility to create a disk image of the disk, but it failed.  (You do this by dragging the hard drive icon from the desktop over the Disk Utility application).  Some cryptic error.  Fortunately, a Finder copy of my user directory worked, providing an extra backup of files, just in case.  Time spent: 20 minutes.

6) Reformat system drive. Well, Mac OS X told me to, right?  I was surprised, but I tried it.  Disk Utility was able to reformat the drive – I noticed the old formatting was Mac OS X, without journaling enabled.  Wow.  Was the drive that old?  In any case, I reformatted with the appropriate GUID setting for booting Intel macs, and with journaling enabled.  Afterward, a quick Disk Verify confirmed a shocking outcome… the drive was fine.  Time spent: 10 minutes.

7) Reinstalled Mac OS X on System Drive. Tempt fate?  Sure, why not.  This was the first time I had a hard drive crash after using Time Machine, and I was eager to try it out.  When you install Mac OS X 10.5 now, it asks you if you are migrating from another machine.  You can specify a Time Machine backup.  I was pleased to see the last one was from 10:59pm on Friday… less than 1/2 hour before the “great crash of 2009″.  Unfortunately, this process seems to take hours.  160GB of material for some reason took over 3 hours.  No way I’m sitting around for this!  Time spent: 3 hours+

8) Get everything up to date. I came back to the machine that evening.  It booted, seemed fine.  Even had my old accounts on the login screen.  I signed in, and everything looked normal.  All files/folders in the right places… except iPhoto failed to launch, and iTunes complained that it didn’t understand my library.  Whoops.  The DVD installed Mac OS 10.5… but we’re on 10.5.6 these days, and my apps and files had been upgraded.

Brief rant: I’m really wondering why Apple hasn’t tied the update logs from it’s automatic updates to the restore from Time Machine.  It’s pretty obvious that the Time Machine backup has a system on it that has a series of updates installed – would not be hard to boot the OS with instructions to download and install those updates.

In any case, Apple Mail tried to “import” my Mail folder.  I cancelled that and quit.  iTunes offered to create a new library, and I declined.  Phew.  Hope I’m safe.   Ran the System Update system preference, and discovered about 10 updates waiting for me.  Downloading them and installing would take… 2 hours!   Let it run over night.  Time spent: 2 hours + one nights sleep.

9) Get everything up to date… again. In the morning, after breakfast, checked on the machine.  Was booted, looked fine… except now Apple Mail had lost all of my old mail, and iPhoto still wouldn’t boot.  iTunes was fine, though.   Ran System Update again… and there were another 8 updates, clearly waiting for the last 10 to run.  Great.  Fine, let’s update some more.  Time spent: 1 hour + me leaving for the morning.

10) Restore Mail. Thank goodness I’m paranoid.  I copied the “Mail” folder in my “User > adamnash > Library” folder from the “extra” backup I had made to my System drive.  3GB to copy, but hard drive to hard drive over internal SATA 2 bus is wicked fast.  Time spent: 15 minutes.

11) Everyone lived happily ever after. It was about 11:30am on Sunday, literally about 36 hours since the crash happened.  And everything was back to normal.  Seriously, I doubt you could have easily figured out anything had happened.  Even little details like my browser history were there.  Firefox re-opened with the same 20 tabs I had open on Friday.  It was if the last 36 hours had been a test, and since I had kept calm and walked through the steps, I had passed.

So, what did I learn from this?  A few things:

  • Keep a Mac OS X boot DVD handy. Most people lose track of this, because it came with their Mac when they bought it.  Don’t lose it.  I prefer the retail disc myself – it’s worth the cost to have one.
  • Disk Utility is your friend. There was a time when Apple utility software sucked, and you had to go third party.  There are still superior third party tools out there (and for serious hard drive crashes, you need them.)  But these days, starting with the standard Apple software is a good bet.
  • Migration Assistant has come into its own. I’ve used it now for work and home.  It’s very good.  Not perfect, but better than hand-crafting system restores.  Very impressed with the Time Machine integration.  If it was smart enough to handle Apple Update history, I’d be truly happy with it.
  • Don’t underestimate the value of an extra hard drive. The reason my restore was relatively painless is that I had another hard drive that I could boot the system off of.  Without that, you have to depend on the DVD.  Ouch.  If you have a tower, and extra hard drive is cheap insurance (and extra storage).   If not, consider a cheap firewire external drive.
  • Time Machine is good. Look, if you care about your files, you should backup.  Period.  Time Machine makes it painless.  I’m really impressed – backup systems are only really tested when you need them, and I needed Time Machine today.  It came through.
  • Beward of hard reboots.  The reason my system had problems is likely due to a software conflict I had been ignoring – XTorrent and my .Mac screensaver.   I would come home to a locked up machine, and would be forced to hard reboot the system.  Hard reboots = increased risk of file system damage.  I played Russian roulette one too many times, and paid the price.  36 hours of it.

Mostly, however, I discovered that after 18 years of fixing/restoring Macs, it’s still stressful dealing with a crash like this.  I just can’t imagine why any normal human being would know or care about all the steps above, or how they would be expected to keep multiple backups, hard drives, and techniques handy to manage this type of issue.  It’s 2009 for goodness sake.  By now the computers should be taking care of themselves.

In any case, I hope the above proves useful to a reader or two.  If not, maybe the story will prove either entertaining or depressing, depending on your perspective.

Mar 14

1 Comment

iPhone 3.0 Event Next Week: March 17th

top

Got the graphic from CNET.  They have some details about the event:

Apple distributed invitations Thursday for a March 17 special event in Cupertino, Calif., to discuss the iPhone 3.0 software and a new software development kit.

Next Tuesday’s event will come a little more than a year after Apple unveiled the original SDK at the iPhone 2.0 software event, setting the stage for over 25,000 iPhone applications to make their way onto the App Store. Speculation about a new iPhone had mostly centered on new hardware features, rather than software upgrades, but it seems Apple has something up its sleeve.

Hoping to see OS-level support for some missing basics:

  • Clipboard (cut & paste)
  • Background processing (some form of mult-tasking where apps can receive updates even when they aren’t front-most)

I’m wondering if we’ll see any significant hardware enhancements or new models announced.  The iPhone currently drives developers to really focus on a single screen size… would be nice to see more robust handling for multiple sizes/shapes to give more flexibility to hardware in the future.  It’s not that you can’t make resolution-independent applications today – you can.   It’s just not encouraged or optimal.

MegaPhone?

Feb 25

iTunes Pass Could Be the Key to Digital TV

Read this news today with great interest:

Apple, EMI unveil iTunes Pass

Apple has just launched a new service called Pass for its popular iTunes music store.  It’s like a season pass for a favorite artist, in this case the electro band Depeche Mode…  Before thinking this is Apple’s entree into the music subscription business, which is something Steve Jobs has pooh-poohed in the past, note that iTunes Pass is quite different.

Under an all-you-can eat music subscription plan at a place such as Rhapsody, you have access to the material only as long as you keep paying a fee. With iTunes Pass, you own the content that has been downloaded, even after the pass expires.

I’ve written a bit about this in the past, but it’s shocking to see Apple so close, and yet so far, from what might be a truly disruptive innovation in digital television.

The iTunes Pass is the right idea, but the wrong market.  We don’t need this for music, we need this for digital television & movies.

When Apple launched Apple TV, it highlighted the ability to subscribe to a season of television.  The idea was you pay a fee up front, and then as episodes of that show come out, they would automatically download to your iTunes (and then synch with your AppleTV), allowing you to watch a show with both digital convenience and without waiting until the end of the season to buy a DVD.  This was a great concept for a few reasons:

  1. Ability to easily “catch up” with a season/show that was already underway.  This is a very common problem, particularly with serial shows where you miss the first few episodes before friends/news reaches you with a recommendation.  (This is the reason I didn’t get to watch 24 in real time until Season 3…)
  2. Ability to “own” the shows permanently – not a transient state like a traditional DVR.
  3. Ability to watch on TV.  Let’s face it, that’s where you want to watch the show, not on your PC.
  4. Automatic download, in the background.  Shows would be waiting for you as they appeared.

The problems, however, with the execution were equally significant:

  1. Lack of seasons.  For many shows, Apple provided the current season, but not previous seasons.  Thus, if you wanted to watch “Lost”, you couldn’t “catch up” with Seasons 1 & 2.
  2. Timeliness.  Next day would have been OK, and in the beginning that was the plan.  In reality, some shows would show up days or weeks later.  Ideally, the download would literally begin at the official showtime EST in the US.
  3. Pricing.  They used DVD pricing, which frankly is just ridiculous.  The idea that you’d reasonably pay $30-$50 for a season of TV that can be had through traditional distribution channels for free makes sense in the historical model of buying specific shows/seasons in low volume, but isn’t a mass market play for general television consumption.  If in a given season (Winter 2009) I’m watching 6-8 shows, there is no way you are going to get $200+ out of me for the privilege unless you 100% substitute for my cable bill.

The pricing issue in particular led me to a hypothetical model that could potentially benefit both Apple & the networks by disintermediating the traditional cable/sattelite duopoly.  Basically, every network could attempt to become “HBO”.  HBO pioneered the idea of a premium channel – an extra monthly charge you’d pay for unlimited access to content.  Thanks to the VCR, that also included the ability to “time shift” that content for your own use.

On iTunes, NBC could be as valuable as HBO.   Imagine an iTunes Pass where, for a monthly fee, you could subscribe to The Office.  You would automatically get new episodes as they come out, as well as download old episodes (like a podcast).  These would all be watchable on AppleTV, as well as your iPhone.  That’s something worth paying for.

Now imagine that for a monthly subscription fee, you could actually do that with any NBC show.  The Office.  My Name is Earl.  ER.  30 Rock.   Whatever you want.  You would become an “NBC subscriber”.  NBC would have a premium revenue stream, and would then focus on providing high quality content to lure in new subscribers, and to keep existing subscribers.  They would also have their own “distribution channel” within iTunes – they could now launch new shows and pilots for a fraction of the cost & risk by delivering them to people automatically, and making the marginal cost of subscribing to a new show effectively zero for the user.  Sunk cost.

Subscribing to a network could be an upsell from an individual hit show.  Subscribe to The Office for $5/month.  Or subscribe to all of NBC for $10/month.  Network families could offer the same bundle of channels to individuals that they currently offer to the cable & sattelite companies.  Get the entire family of NBC channels for $15/month.

There is likely some price in that ballpark where NBC would be agnostic between someone watching them on cable vs. subscribing on iTunes.

Per-show pricing doesn’t get you scale.  But owning a customer relationship as a network is incredibly valuable.  These subscriptions could also be platform agnostic long term – no reason you can’t have versions that support Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, etc.

People already are beginning to question their premium movie-channel cable subscriptions in favor of Netflix/Blockbuster service.  Network subscriptions could substitute for the primary cable bill.

Right now, I watch shows on Fox, NBC, ABC, HBO, SCIFI & FX.   There is a price where I’d gladly shift over to a digital subscription to get the benefits of the content combined with the benefits of professional, digital files that I could watch anywhere, anytime (time shifting & location shifting).

The thing that I love about this model is that, from a games theory perspective, there is significant value to the first “defector” – the network that moves to this pricing model first.  For example, if HBO offered this service through iTunes, I’d subscribe immediately.  Obviously, the cable & sattelite companies would fight this tooth & nail – but I’m not sure they have a leg to stand on in preventing this.  After all, Comcast can’t prevent NBC from offering channels to DirecTV, etc.

Feb 24

21 Comments

iPhoto ’09: Fix for JPEG Files Displaying as Pure Black on Edit

I’m sharing this fix with the world, so that others need not live my pain.

Last night, I returned from Lake Tahoe with 451 beautiful shots of our family snow trip, all taken with my Canon 40D SLR.  Each shot was captured in both large format JPG and RAW format.

Unfortunately, after loading all my images into iPhoto ’09, I ran into a real problem:

When I double-clicked any of the JPG files to edit/view them, they displayed a purely black screen.  It was strange because the thumbnails were fine, the RAW files were fine, and when I opened the JPG files in Photoshop CS3, they were fine.

There was no way around it.  Relaunching iPhoto did not help.  Rebuilding the library did not help.  Rebuilding thumbnails did not help.  Reloading the images from the compact flash card did not help.

I shuddered to think about the wisdom of upgrading to iPhoto ’09.  After all, at least iPhoto ’08 could display JPG files.  My only hope: the Canon 40D is a popular camera, and has been out for a while.  This must be a solved issue.

My searches on Google turned up a few articles and discussions, but nothing convincing.  Some threads on the Apple Discussion forums.  A post or two on other Mac sites.

Fortunately, I found the answer.  But let me first tell you what it wasn’t:

  • It wasn’t the PowerPC (I have an Intel-based Mac Pro)
  • It wasn’t file size
  • It wasn’t iPhoto ’09
  • It wasn’t the Canon 40D

Unfortunately, several sites fingered these things as culprits.  All wild goose chases.

Here is what it was:

  • A corrupted install of Mac OS X 10.5.6

Hard to believe, but the auto-update I had done just before leaving for vacation was the culprit.  Thanks to one tip, I downloaded the full combo installer for the Mac OS X 10.5.6 Upgrade from Apple.

A full re-install of the update, a reboot, and all was well.

I hope this tip finds someone out there in good stead.  Seeing your precious photos reduced to a black screen is frightening to the core, even if you know the photo files themselves are not corrupted.

Jan 17

4 Comments

Read Lag Problems on Seagate Freeagent 1.5TB External Hard Drive on Mac OS X

This is one of those quick posts that I write hoping to save others a lot of time.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been trying to diagnose and fix problems I have been having with my external 1.5TB Seagate Freeagent Hard Drive.  I use the hard drive as my iTunes library, which I drive FrontRow using Mac OS X 10.5 on a Mac Mini on a 1080P LCD TV in the living room.

Basically, it’s our video server.

The problem was as follows:

  • Loading Front Row, we’d easily get to the list of movies (I have about 500+ movies on the system)
  • Flipping between titles, however, there would be a 3-5 second lag before the cover art and title of the new movie would load
  • The lag would also occur periodically while scrolling
  • The light on the front of the hard drive would pulse, instead of glow straight, during video operations

Needless to say, with a video library driven by remote, this type of lag is intolerable, and makes navigating a 500+ movie library incredibly frustrating.

After doing a number of Google searches, I found reports of read/cache problems on Mac OS X and Linux with the 7200.11 drives.

Here is an official note from Seagate on the topic, and here is a community thread on the issue.  Thinking I needed new firmware, and since there was no download on the website, I resigned myself to calling technical support.

I called Seagate Technical Support, and after waiting 20 minutes, I got on the phone with a man who had never heard of the issue, had no idea how to get the firmware for an external drive, and no idea what a Mac is.

Fortunately, while he put me on hold for 15 minutes on 3 separate occassions, I had time to think.

The problem cited on line was a read issue with video, but it seemed to focus on RAID setups.  That didn’t sound like my situation.  The light was pulsing, likely because the drive was trying to lower power use.  Why would it do that?

Answer: Maybe it was overheating because I had it in the cabinet with the sattelite receiver, which is warm, and there is poor ventilation.

So, I took the drive out the cabinet, and reattached it in the open air, on top of the cabinet.

Problem solved. Video navigation is snappy, and the light no longer pulses.  Clearly, because of the heat, it was going into low power mode in some way to try and cool itself.  That would lead to lags when it spun up for a read request from FrontRow.

So, if you have a Seagate Freeagent Extreme drive, and it exhibits this behavior, make sure it’s not overheating in an enclosed space.

As a funny aside, not only did I solve this entire problem while listening to hold music with Seagate Technical Support, I also wrote this entire blog post.  The guy is *still* off somewhere, trying to find the firmware revision for my model of drive.  I’m worried that he booked a flight to Malaysia to investigate the manufacturing of this drive personally.

Oh well.  The end story:

Unventilated enclosure for hard drive, BAD.  Seagate Technical Support, TERRIBLE.  1.5 TB iTunes Hard Drive, GOOD.

Update (1/20/2009): Unbelievable.  It looks like Seagate released the firmware patch for the 7200.11 hard drives this week, and it actually bricked the drives.  Not for me.  I’m watching this thread, and I’m not installing anything from Seagate until it’s safe.

Jan 12

5 Comments

Would You Ship a Broken iPhone to Réunion?

My brother dropped his iPhone in the Pacific Ocean.  An original, $399 iPhone.

Needless to say, saltwater does not do good things to an iPhone.  It doesn’t boot anymore.   No recourse with Apple or AT&T.  He had to get a new phone.

As a result, I ended up with my own variant of Pierre Omidyar’s famous broken laser pointer… I listed the broken iPhone on eBay.

Well, it sold today, for $122.50.  However, it sold to an international buyer… in Réunion.

Réunion, as it turns out, is a little island in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Madagascar.  It is a French island, and happens to be the first place in world (due to time zone) to adopt the Euro.

So, would you ship a broken iPhone to Reunion?

They paid with PayPal.  All the info lines up, roughly.  eBay has a hotmail address for the user, but the payment came from a wanadoo.fr email address.  However, the name and address on both is the same, although eBay lists United States for the registered country (with the Reunion address).

That could be a sign of fraud.  Or it could be the sign of a user who moved.  eBay data is pretty messy at times.

He has made recent purchases with positive feedback.  A cheap piece of wireless equipment, and an expensive ($259) piece of tree climbing equipment.  So, not just trivial items.

So, do I ship it?  Not sure.  The worst that would happen is that the credit card would end up being stolen, so PayPal would seize the funds.  And I’d be out a broken iPhone.

But, on the plus side, selling to Reunion is a new destination for me.  I’ve sold to over 30 countries on eBay at this point, and it’s getting harder to attract buyers from new ones.

I think I’m going to ship it.

People are basically good… right?

Nov 25

1 Comment

Handbrake 0.9.3 is Out! A Must Have for Digital Movie Conversion.

Handbrake 0.9.3, the best application for converting DVD video to MPEG 4 just got updated.

The new version has over 600 feature changes and improvements.  Some of my favorites:

  • A new “Apple Universal” preset to ensure universal rendering of files to play on everything from an iPod Nano to the AppleTV.
  • Ability to encode ANY source file, not just a DVD.  This is huge for people converting video from other formats using other software (like Quicktime).  One step, and hopefully a lot faster.
  • Caching of video queues to disk.  Finally!  I can’t tell you how sad it is to queue up 20 movies for conversion overnight, and then discover in the morning that a crash not only happened during the second movie, but that on restart the queue is empty!  Now, at least crashes will be recoverable.

Go here to read more and download it now.

One small negative – the new version no longer bundles DVD decoding.  It seems that one of the contributors had requested the change.

No worries, however.  If you have VLC 0.9.x installed, Handbrake 0.9.3 will find it and use it’s DVD decryption library.  You can download VLC here.

Nov 10

The Luxury of a 1.5TB Hard Drive

I’ve had the priviledge today to upgrade my iTunes hard drive to 1.5TB, courtesy of the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (currently $149.99 at NewEgg).  So far, no surprise issues.  And yes, the space is truly luxurious.

I’ve been busy this year converting my entire DVD library to MPEG-4, so that I can easily access the movies in iTunes and on any device around the house that is iTunes compatible (AppleTV, Mac Mini, etc).  Each movie takes between 1.0 to 4.0GB, depending on length (yes, I mean you Lord of the Rings: Return of the King Extended Version).

The big surprise for me was learning how many DVDs I actually owned… I would have though about 200, but it turned out to be well over 400.  Yes, that many.

So, last week, just as I was finishing the last stack, I ran out of room on the 1TB drive that I have solely dedicated to iTunes.  The 1TB drive I thought I would never ever fill.

Fortunately, my Mac Pro accommodated the rumba line of hard drive upgrades:

  • My new 1.5TB drive replaced the 1.0TB drive for iTunes.
  • The 1.0TB drive replaced the 750GB drive for Time Machine.
  • The 750GB drive replaced the 300GB drive for iPhoto.
  • The 300GB is going up on eBay sometime soon.

(In case you are wondering, the Time Machine drive is a backup for my System drive (300GB) and my iPhoto drive only.  I use a separate 2.25TB NAS for backing up the iTunes drive.)

So there you have it.  After a night of file transfers, a few alias folders reset, and telling iTunes to use the new location, I’m off an running.

438.67 GB Free.  And loving every byte of it.

Oct 22

Apple Q3 Results: iPhone outsells Blackberry

Wow, that was fast.

Remember when it took more than 15 months for a new entrant to dominate a multi-billion dollar industry with a brand new product & platform?

MacDailyNews has a brief readout of some of the mobile stats from today’s earnings announcement from Apple.  Some highlights:

  • Apple is now the 3rd largest mobile device maker by revenue at $4.6B, second to Nokia & Samsung.  RIM is a distant $2.1B.
  • By units, Apple outsold RIM Blackberry in Q3 by a clear margin, 6.9m units to 6.1m units.
  • Apple has sold more than 10m iPhones to date, which was their 2008 goal.  Clearly ahead of target.

It’s a shocking outcome on multiple levels.  First, the Blackberry is firmly entrenched as the dominant mobile platform in business.  Second, the average unit price of the Blackberry is much, much lower than the iPhone, thanks to the low prices on the Pearl models.

So just a little over a year after launch, Apple is selling more units than RIM, and at much higher price points.

The march goes on, and faster than expected.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Oct 2

1 Comment

Ding Dong, The Apple iPhone NDA is Dead

They’ve been celebrating in the streets all day.  Apple iPhone NDA.  Gone. History. Finito.  Buh-Bye.

Great news and timing for the CS 193P class at Stanford, as this means that forums are likely to emerge quickly for students to engage with, learn from, and help each other.

Here is some text from the Apple Announcement:

We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.

We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.

It’s interesting to note the phrase I bolded above… given Apple’s history with the Mac & Quicktime, it always seemed possible that the iPhone NDA was a reaction to those bitter lessons.

The San Jose Mercury has a funny write up here.  Ars Technica has a more verbose post up as well.

I think we’ll see a measurable increase in the number of applications and the relative quality and pace of innovation from this change.  It was shocking how much this simple legal protection was stifling the growth and development of developers new to the platform.

Sep 29

1 Comment

Beyond Cool: Striped 120GB SSD RAID in a Macbook Pro

From time to time, I post the technical exploits of my friend Eric here.  I remember the attention he got a while back for hacking his MacBook Pro to support a RAID configuration.

Well, Eric has managed to extend that experimentation to a pair of new OCZ 120GB Solid State Drives (SSD).

Two OCZ Core Series v2 SATA II 120GB SSDs in a MacBook Pro

The blog post is here, with detailed photos and benchmarks.  A must see for any digital photographer and/or Mac geek who is into performance-pushing customer expansion.

My favorite part of the walk through is the brief commentary on the Apple-like packaging for the SSD drives:

The OCZ drives arrived in a plain package, but once the outer cardboard layer was removed, it was clear that OCZ had taken some packaging cues from Apple. The inner packaging was beautiful, and made it clear that you had just purchased a quality product.

That was the part I expected.  This is the part I didn’t:

Even though it was pretty, I don’t like excessive packaging and would have preferred something simple and biodegradable.

For some reason, I have a distinct mental image of Eric’s facial expression when saying this, and it made me laugh out loud.  :)

Sep 23

3 Comments

Stanford CS193P: iPhone Application Programming Launches Tomorrow

A little too busy tonight for a long blog post, but thought I’d share how excited I am to be helping assist the launch of a new course at Stanford this Fall:

CS 193P: iPhone Application Programming

The class website is still a work in progress, but it will come along.  The course is open to Stanford undergrad and graduate students, as well as through the Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD) on video.  Enrollment is limited, and my guess is that it will be oversubscribed.

A wonderful opportunity for me to dust off the old Objective-C skills, and help give back to the Stanford community.  Launching new courses is always exciting, and I feel very lucky to be involved with this one in particular.

It might sound crazy to take this on in addition to the full load at both work and at home, but I’m excited to get back involved with teaching, and that’s worth the potential sleep deprivation for the quarter.

Sep 22

Cool Blog Find of the Day: Mac Pro Made of Legos

From Macenstein:

On a scale of “1 to Awesome” this LEGO Mac Pro rates a solid Awesome. Not only is it a faithful scale model replica of a real Mac Pro (designed using Lego Digital Designer 2.0), the thing actually houses both a Hackintosh PC running OS X AND a Mac mini.

Awesome, indeed.  If they sold this as a $200 lego kit, I could be convinced to buy it.

Sep 12

7 Comments

How Apple Should Handle NBC

Just read this piece on the “he-said/she-said” debate between NBC executives and Apple executives:

Apple Refutes NBC’s Pricing Policy Claims

80/20 Apple is right here, of course.  They did not give NBC any pricing priviledges that they didn’t also give to all video content producers.  However, Apple did introduce it’s first pricing variation for HD with the AppleTV rentals earlier this year, and that’s more than it had last fall when NBC pulled its content.

I think, of course, that Apple is avoiding the most obvious solution to its problem:

  • Buy NBC off General Electric for a fair price
  • Fire at least the top 2-3 levels of executives at NBC
  • Set in place a modern digital content strategy
  • Execute non-exclusive, but solid digital content contracts with Apple
  • Take the new NBC public or sell it

As a side benefit, they could really have some fun with MSNBC.

What’s the point of Apple having a $135B market cap if they don’t use it?   My guess is that if executed properly, the above strategy could increase the value of both NBC and Apple.  Worst case, the upside on Apple is likely greater than the downside for NBC, making the “investment” worth it.

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