Getting X11 to work
I can't get the xdm that comes with the Apple X11 to get its XDMCP chooser running. I'm beginning to wonder if Apple hasn't changed a few things inside it without changing the man pages. I'm now considering just getting up and working on my main machine (it's not as if anyone is using it anyway).
Ok, I gave up on the chooser, "sudo /usr/X11R6/bin/X -query 192.168.1.2" is less geeky but at least it works.
Mac gaming, a world of wonders
I looked at the available games for the Mac. Currently they are all excited because Deus Ex has been ported. Not Deus Ex 2 (or 3 or whatever the current version is, the original one, that came out years ago when the world was young). Amazing. I'm sticking with Asteroid for now. Maybe I'll try breakout next.
I think even Linux has more games. So when you start bitching, remember that others have it even worse (and that that privilege comes for a price).
There's a great “switch ad” parody on this topic, look for a file called switch_dg.mov.
The joys of iTune
I looked at iTunes and found that its ripping facility was quite good. Two drawbacks though. By default it rips to the Apple sound file format, and it uses the "stolen" commercial version of the cddb (long story, you might want to look it up if you haven't heard of it) and won't let you switch to freedb. Also when you set it up to rip to MP3, it doesn't use VBR by default. There's also some kind of emphasis on the style of the music (the style being whatever was entered in the corresponding field of the cddb, or in other words a "semi-random" value), it being the first criteria of search, that I didn't quite understand. Luckily, hidden amongst the options is a toggle that disables it. I want to listen to "John Doe", not to "Rock" (the ID3 tags are very US centric anyway, pretty much everything from outside of the US is labelled as "world music", Jacques Brel is NOT world music).
More iShouldButiCan't
I played with iPhoto a bit. Maybe it's me but I don't get it. Apparently you can't display a photo unless you switch to edit mode. Of course you can easily make a diaporama with music and 3D cross fades. Or a PDF book, or a DVD. But show one photo ? Nope. Obviously it's meant for "normal users" who aren't computer-savvy enough to just want to look at one photo and who just want to make DVDs or PDF books. It's great that all those people can do all these things when they know nothing about computers.
OTOH it's a bit of a shame that computer users can't manage to display their photos. Maybe I just couldn't find the damn menu option. At any rate I'll stick with the Linux apps I'm used to and which work as expected.
Or I've spent too much time on complicated Unix apps and can't figure out the simple programs Apple puts out. Or I'm too sophisticated for wanting to watch my photos on screen instead of in a leather bound book.
iCrap
Among all of the i* apps is iSync. It's purpose is to sync your calendar, phonebook, etc. with a mobile device such as a phone or a PDA. Well, I can't sync. My PDA is too antique (Palm IIIx) to have USB connectivity and my phone (Sharp GX25) isn't supported. But then only a dozen of very high end phones are supported. Maybe I can sync with my desktop and have that sync with the rest of the devices… Or maybe I can sync with a CD-RW and get a bluetooth CD drive for my phone… Or maybe I can just recover a few more megs of diskspace…
QuickSquint
QuickTime player. You might have heard of it. The Apple media player that's the best thing since, well, since all media players, and which they push whenever they have the chance… Well, guess what ? It can't play full screen. You have to buy the "pro" version. Pros don't need a magnifying glass, that's how you distinguish pros from dorks in the Apple world.
At least there's a build of MPlayer for OS X. I have to check if it can use the QuickTime codecs. Maybe I can pose as a pro too. At least the Mac OS version doesn't have a fulltime little icon in the dock like the Windows version has. Oh and pros can save media files too. Us dorks obviously run our systems from floppies so we probably aren't expected to have the disk space anyway. Maybe this isn't new to Windows users since Apple released a version of their player for that platform, but let me tell you that it was a major shock to me.
Update, apparently somebody else had the same reaction so he made "Nice Player". Basically it's a wrapper around the QuickTime libs without all the nagging. So it resizes to whatever size you want, including, of course, full screen. The interface is quite nice and unobtrusive. Oh and it's free. Fuck you Apple. Even Microsoft's absolutely crappy media player at least plays the damn things without whining all the time to get more money.
Did I mention Nice Player was free ?
iLocalize
When you localise your Mac OS installation, almost everything gets translated. Including the way directories are displayed. Note that it's only how they are displayed. Because their real names don't change so that the apps won't get confused trying to figure out what the hell /Library is called in Swahili. Some translations are fairly odd. For example in French, $HOME/Movies ends up as $HOME/Séquences (instead of $HOME/Films, or possibly vidéo as one would expect). Luckily the icon helped me figure what the hell that was supposed to be. Since French isn't an especially obscure language, I wonder how much head scratching occurs in the rest of the world among new Mac users.
iMag
For the first time ever, I bought a French Mac magazine (I picked one that appeared to be generic enough) to get a feel for the scene. There's quite a bit of "wow this is so great, the Mac is so cool" going on in there, which I kind of expected, lots of review of software sold at insane prices (lookie this great shareware that lets you change the colour of your titlebars for only $99, this is so great! The Mac is so cool!), the usual review of new hardware (you just have to get this new 35" display, it's so great, the Mac is so cool!), and ads. Lots of ads. In that regard it's just like any PC rag (except the ads are great and the Mac is cool). It did point me towards a few interesting online sources of software though.
Apart from that it assumed that everyone ran photoshop (about 1200€ I think) on a dual G5 connected to a few 25" displays (about 120000.99€ I think) so the tips and tricks section wasn't all that useful. So apparently, Apple users really are filthy rich. Or at least that's what magazine publishers want to believe (or maybe more likely, that's what they want their announcers to believe). At any rate the mag was kind of useless.
The "discover Unix" section which was apparently started some months previously, was now labelled as being "advanced" and covered such complex concepts as listing directories, deleting files and starting programs. Wow, I had to take a lie down after that one. I'm not sure what they did in the previous issues… Presumably something along the lines of "Double-click on the terminal icon… Don't touch anything… close it you fool! Whew! Well, next month we'll have a look at scrolling."
Anyway, that concludes our chapter on magazines. They are just as useless as the PC ones except possibly as ad catalogues. And even then, with the plethora of online offerings, it's not really evident where the advantage of a paid-for catalogue lies. Of course you can't line the kitty litter box with web pages.
Dashboard and Dock
Dashboard is apparently new in OS 10.4. In French, Dashboard has been translated to Dashboard in a dashing (ha ha) display of linguistic creativity. I haven't yet figured if it's fluff or if it's useful. A lot of the applets I have require a network connection which I usually don't have when working on the go. Mostly the applets are cute but not essential. This may change as more people find uses for them (supposing there are more people).
The Dock is the icon collection that lives at the bottom of the screen. You store the icons for frequently used apps in it. Unfortunately on a 12" iBook, you'd better not have too many apps for between the icons for apps you could start and the icons for the apps you did start (one icon per document window most of the time) you're soon out of horizontal screen real estate). Luckily you can set the size of the Dock which helps quite a bit. it still gets crowded pretty fast. Especially if you let it zoom (that's the effect where the icon the mouse is over gets bigger, cute but messy since basically it shoves the other icons out of the way to do so, so you don't really know where the icon you want to click on is going to be next), you can set the zooming factor in the preferences though. Oh and the trashcan is in the Dock as well nowadays.
The joy of X
Now that I've finally gotten X to work, i managed to display my familiar KDE desktop on the iBook. It all ran quite smoothly (got kdm, logged into my desktop) until I found out that because of the Mac menu bar at the top of the screen, I couldn't display the KDE dock which also lurks at the top of the screen (and autohides so I couldn't get it to unhide). I poked around a bit but couldn't find a solution. I think I could use a custom XFCE desktop with the dock thingie on a side (to avoid the OS X Dock popping up at the bottom). I just hope maximised windows won't hide behind the menu-bar. This requires some more testing.
iHype
For all the hype surrounding the iLife software when it came out, I'm not overly impressed so far. iPhoto is completely incomprehensible to me. iSync doesn't work (well maybe it does if you like to spend as much on your phone/PDA as you do on your car), iTunes is more or less ok but the pushing of both the iPod and the music store is a bit irritating until you figure how to switch it off and the default choices for MP3 ripping aren't all that great. Of course you're not supposed to sync with anything but an iPod. Some hacks have been published for a handful of other players but they remain hacks. iChat is really tied into the .mac online thing. iCal is a decent enough calendar although it appears to be a bit flakey when several users simultaneously access the same shared calendar (a known issue it seems). I'll probably use it if I can tie it in with the KDE calendar app (a quick peek through the options of both suggests it's possible).
I haven't really looked at GarageBand (now wiped off the disk) since I had no use for it, nor at iMovie and iDVD (although I kept those around on the off chance that it would let me burn the DVD image on another machine). That leaves the DVD player which is, well, a DVD player. Nothing really exciting there. It just plays DVDs.
So I guess that all in all it's better than what comes with the other big commercial operating system, but it's not the mind blowing experience I was led to expect. Some of the stuff is good, some sucks. Isn't it the way pretty much everything is nowadays?
(on the bright side, there's less than 80% of crap so after all it's fairly positive).
QuickTime Begone!
It took me a while but I finally figured how to change the default file association to an application. In the middle of the "info" window is a little "open with" bit where you can change that setting. There's so much stuff in that info window, no wonder I missed it before. I'm happy I found it though. It means I now have my movie files associated with NicePlayer which I mentioned before (like Quicktime but no limitations and no nagging and a better interface). And it's free.
Hey, it's Unix!
I just had this amazing insight that there had to be some system logs somewhere (this being sortof Unix and all). So I looked a bit and after a bit of searching (a wee bit really, they were in /var/log as expected) I started browsing, using less.
Mac OS logs come in two flavours. They can be uninteresting or obscure. Like "AppleTalk startup" (why the hell am I starting AppleTalk anyway) or "Time to move from MBMigrateYN (Migrate_YesNo) to MBRegisterKeyboard (Reg_Keyboard) was 0.549704s" (yeah, whatever). However, i don't seem to find anything interesting in them. But then I haven't really done anything interesting with the machine either so I guess this explains that.
I'm still glad they kept standard Unix logs. This can probably come in handy when things go astray.
Or maybe they'll just say something obscure like "Warning: Danger: IRQRegister(WMD) has no inspectors(UN) DefineWarZone? TimeToMove(YesNo) 0.434324s (VoteNow) WRLD(next)".
Gimme my buttons back !
All in all, there aren't that many Mac OS apps that handle multi-buttoned mice properly. This is kind of surprising. I would have expected developers to be advanced enough users that they'd take multi-buttoned mice for a given while still allowing for single buttoned users. Because frankly, nowadays, unless you're completely braindead (this Mac user comes to mind who once told me "I have trouble enough with a single button mouse because I miss the button quite often" ; he seemed to be quite normal apart from that), you really don't want anything to do with a single button mouse. Plus I tried every keyboard shortcut I could think of, I can't get to the orthographic correction menu of TextEdit without at least two mouse buttons. And OOo is downright unusable with a single button.
Not really Apple related…
I keep reading about all those people wandering about with their WiFi enabled laptops who surf (how I hate this word, remember when Wired first introduced it and everybody puked?) the network wherever they are. Well either the French are very security aware (whenever I see a couple hotspots they are always at least WEP locked), or WiFi never really made it here, or whatever, but I've been lugging my laptop around for a while now and I can never connect anywhere ! Of course there are lots of places that offer wireless access for a measly 10 € per hour (let me say that again, 10 € per hour, when you pay 30 € per month for a 20 Mib ADSL link with free national IP phone and TV thrown in).
Well, I bought the laptop mostly for writing, so I don't really need network access for that. It still pisses me off though.
OTOH my neighbour 3 floors above has one of those elusive unsecured AP, it's useful when my line goes down. Well my line never goes down (crosses fingers) but I recently switched ISPs and it came in handy during the switch.
Don't tell her ok ?