NetNewsWire: the last straw

I've used NetNewsWire as an RSS reader for years. Personally, I don't think it's brilliant, but it's serviceable. A feature I quite like is its ability to sort subscriptions by the "attention" you pay them—the more articles in the feed that you read and open in a browser tab, the higher that subscription drifts over time. After a few weeks, the feeds you pay the most attention to are at the top of the list.

Tonight, my Mac Pro wedged itself somehow and needed a reboot. NetNewsWire was running at the time. I've just fired it up again, and everything has been reset: the historical attention data has been dropped on the floor, and the feeds are now in roughly alphabetical order. It's 2011. How can that kind of user data be so volatile?

So, anyway—NetNewsWire, it's not me, it's you. I'm off to download Reeder.

Lion vs Snow Leopard in daily use

Despite resolving to be more cautious, I usually end up buying and installing new versions of OS X in the week of their release. Since it was distributed on the Mac App Store, I bought Lion on the day of its release. I installed it on my (ageing 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo) MacBook Pro immediately, but for a chain of reasons I've held off installing it on the Mac Pro. (Specifically, my wife needs to run a pre-historic version of some Windows application, so I have Parallels Desktop on that machine. I haven't purchased the last couple of upgrades to Parallels (they're too frequent and too pricey). Parallels Desktop 4 apparently won't run on Lion. So I need to either find an OS X equivalent of the application, or upgrade Parallels before I install Lion.)

Consequently, I'm running Snow Leopard and Lion on two different machines, and swapping between the two on a daily basis. Some observations:

• I don't have a strong opinion on the change to scrolling behaviour. If anything, the new behaviour seems more "natural" in some sense—I think it had always struck me as slightly wrong that the metaphor was moving the scrollbar rather than moving the content of the viewport. Having said that, swapping between them regularly is utterly infuriating.
• There are some even smaller changes that, while far from important or even interesting, serve only to annoy:
  • Mail's Activity window shortcut has changed from Cmd-0 to Opt-Cmd-0. Pointless.
  • There are apparently folders which Finder now doesn't display by default, such as ~/Library. Why?
  • When I take my laptop away from the WiFi LAN at home, it continues to try and connect to the Time Capsule. Ad nauseam. I've dismissed the "unable to connect" dialog five times already this morning.
• Skeumorphism is out of control. Changing the iCal and Address Book applications to closely resemble their iPad counterparts seems inexplicable to me. Two perfectly decent applications now look like toys.

Obviously Lion has upsides, and you can read about those anywhere. Using Lion and Snow Leopard in parallel has been interesting, though I would argue that the difference is more of a modest jump than a quantum leap.

Final Cut Pro X pricing

I saw the news that Final Cut Pro X had hit the Mac App Store earlier today. I've got to say, from where I'm sitting (in the enthusiastic amateur corner), it looks like an awesome product. I bought Final Cut Studio 2 (including Final Cut Pro 6) a couple of years ago, and struggled slowly up the learning curve. FCP 6 is obviously outstanding software, but, from the previews and initial impressions written up today, FCP X looks revolutionary. (It will be interesting to read the reviews from the professional angle over the next few months.)

In Australia, Final Cut Pro X is priced at $A 349, compared to $US 299 in the US. Currently, the Australian dollar buys about $US 1.05—so I can buy $US 299 for just under $A 285. It's really not clear to me where my extra $A 64 is going. I've read justifications for differential pricing on, say, iTunes that involve regional record company deals. I don't see an analogous explanation for the pricing of Apple's own software. I'm pretty sure I'll end up buying Final Cut Pro X, but I'd much rather being doing so for $A 285.

AirPrint doesn't like my printer

After hitting the "Check for Update" button, let's say "several" times this month, I finally upgraded iPhone and iPad to iOS 4.2.1. One of the first features I was keen to check out was AirPrint. I don't regularly find myself wanting to print from either device, but when I do, I really do.

My setup couldn't be more Apple: I have a HP Color LaserJet CP2025 connected to a Time Capsule which does the WiFi for the house. Both the iOS devices use the WiFi network when they're at home. I fired up Mail on the iPhone, selected an email, hit Print and tried to select a printer. All I got was a depressing "No printers found." It seems I don't have the right HP printer.

If the facts in that PC Mag article are to be believed, I'm astounded. AirPrint supports ten printers at launch? Not ten brands but ten printers. Clearly over-the-air printing from wireless devices is harder to implement than it would seem. All I want is text most of the time, nothing fancy: an email, a list, some directions. Evidently it's not just a matter of wrapping some boilerplate PostScript or PCL around that and throwing it at the printer. But seriously, Apple, ten printers?

MacBook Pro 17-inch Rechargeable Battery Review

The battery in my MacBook Pro was on its way out. (It had developed two interesting (and by "interesting", I mean "highly annoying") behaviours. Firstly, it could barely hold a charge, even when the machine was asleep—it would drop from 100% to 50% in three days of sleep mode. Secondly, it no longer allowed the machine to shut down gracefully. Instead of the orderly warning icon and dialog at low charge, the machine would just spontaneously shut down. And not just at 20% or 10% charge, but at some random point which could be as high as 50%.) So I ordered a new one.

Shipping took longer than I had hoped. I've become accustomed to pretty rapid order fulfilment with Apple, but this took five business days to arrive. The packaging is nice. The battery arrived showing two (of five) LEDs on the bottom surface, and claiming 50% charge once I booted the machine. It seems to be charging. Overall, seems like a great battery. Of course, it's also the only battery available for this machine. And it wasn't cheap at $A 199.

iPad

Not too surprisingly, I bought an iPad. If I recall correctly, the Australian online Apple Store started taking pre-orders on Monday 10 May 2010. I don't know what time on that day orders opened, but I was online at 9.00am, and ordered the 64G version with WiFi + 3G. It was all very smooth. Ordering online has become by far my preferred purchase method for Apple products. The delivery date was listed as 28 May (the first day of retail sales in Australia) from the moment the pre-order was lodged, and this never changed. (There was rumour of TNT Express possibly pushing out deliveries to the following week, but as far as I know this amounted to nothing.) I tracked my order with Delivery Status Touch. My iPad was delivered early on 28 May, as advertised. People queued outside Adelaide's poor excuse for an Apple Store, Next Byte, who apparently had no stock. Outstanding, Next Byte.

I forgot to uncheck music syncing for the first sync, and consequently iTunes started transferring more than 30G of music over USB, so I used the opportunity to head out in search of a pre-paid SIM card. Figuring I may as well stick with the devil I know, I headed to a Telstra Shop. (And, to be fair, their prices are, while perhaps not reasonable, about a tenth of what they ream iPhone users for. A tenth. I momentarily thought about the feasibility of tethering my phone to my iPad...) Naturally, the first store I went to had no stock. That's right: a retail store of Australia's largest carrier had no stock of micro-SIM cards on the iPad's retail launch day. Outstanding, Telstra. Apparently they were expecting some later in the day, but I was on a mission. The next store had some.

Setting up the 3G connection was reasonably painless. I made a redundant phone call to the service number, as it turned out the card had been activated in the store. And then that was it. 3G was on. Data usage has been slim. Telstra throws on 3G for the price of the card for the first month. That is, until June 30, at least, the card itself costs $A 30, for which you get 1G included, and they throw in a "bonus" 2G for the first month. I have in not restricted my data usage in any way: I've downloaded apps, streamed video and audio, browsed the web, read email, you name it, non-stop over 3G all month. With a few days to go until the end of the month, I'm heading up to 250M of usage. I guess I'm just not trying very hard.

Every hyperbole written about the device itself is true. The hardware is beautiful. The screen is large, clear and bright. It's really not "just a larger iPhone"—apps designed specifically for the iPad are an order of magnitude better than anything on the iPhone. I went a little crazy in the first few days, buying a load of apps just to have something to do. Current essentials include Reeder (if you read RSS feeds on the iPad and you're not using Reeder, you're doing it wrong), and Instapaper. I'm using Twittelator, which is serviceable, but frankly I hope there's a version of Twitter's app (or, the app previously known as Tweetie) in the pipeline. Every other Twitter app I've tested has sucked. I bought Apple's Pages just to try it out. It's nice, but I haven't used it extensively.

iPads are not cheap, and maybe there's not a use case for everyone just yet. But if you have an iPhone and you like it, get one. If you even think you might like an iPad, chances are you will. Get one.

Magic Mouse: 7 week review

I bought a Magic Mouse a couple of months ago. I'm still a fan of the size, weight and design. Again, the standard Apple wired mouse always seemed a little light to me. The Magic Mouse seems about twice its weight.

As predicted, I got used to the touch-sensitive scrolling pretty quickly. The (optional) momentum behind the scroll (whereby, if you flick the surface of the mouse, the scroll continues well past the end of your actual gesture) is awesome. Flick it hard enough, and dozens of pages of text will scroll by at a time. I still really miss the side buttons which I had hooked up to expose the Desktop.

Battery life is good: I'm still on the original pair of AA cells at seven weeks, and the mouse tells me there's just over 50% remaining.