Apple Newbie

Mozilla Firefox 3 has been officially launched today. I use Firefox 2 as my main browser and due to the nature of my work I normally have many windows open, with multiple tabs grouped together within those windows. Firefox 2 with its numerous memory holes usually slowed down to a grinding halt after an hour or so of work, with CPU usage hovering between 60% to over 100% sometimes.

With the knowledge that Firefox 3 was approaching launch, it was getting just too annoying to bear with so I stopped using Firefox 2 for awhile and switched to Safari as my web browser. I was really quite amazed at the speed at which webpages appeared. I don’t think Safari downloaded things any much faster but it is probably more of the way it renders things.

Firefox 3 comes with a new default theme

Anyway today Firefox 3 is out, and although the main site’s access is quite intermittent, I grabbed a copy from Facebook’s Mozilla mirror - you can grab yours there too just by following the link.

I installed Firefox 3 and prepared for it to just take over the 2.0 browser’s job, with the same windows and tabs as the most recent session. I thought this would provide me with a fair comparison on browser speed in the conditions that I work in.

Firefox 3 in action, hogging all the CPU!

I am sad to say that it’s just still the same… really slow and sluggy response! The spinning beach ball icon very frequently pops up and stays there for minutes on and on, and opening the Preferences panel took a good few minutes thanks to the delayed response.

I am only sticking to Firefox because I like the way it renders web pages as well as its keyboard shortcuts that I am very familiar with since I switched to a Mac from Windows, but I think its time to learn how to be comfortable with Safari.

If you were a power user on Windows, you’re probably used to using the keyboard to the maximum so that you’ll get things done faster without having to move your hands to the mouse all the time.

If you’re like me, you probably use the TAB key alot when filling in web forms. Type in a field, use the keyboard to focus on the next field, and type again.

But once I switched to a Mac, filling in forms using the keyboard only on Mozilla Firefox became frustrating. It seems that pressing the TAB key switches between text fields fine, but it refuses to focus on drop down boxes, check boxes, and other types of fields.

Here’s how to fix that behaviour and make the keyboard focus selection behave the way you expect it to behave.

1. Click the Apple icon on the top left of your screen and click System Preferences to open your System Preferences.
2. Click on the Keyboard and Mouse icon.
3. Make sure you are on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
4. Choose the option “All controls” at the bottom of the preferences pane, under “Full keyboard access”.

Pressing the TAB key should now focus on all types of form fields instead of just text fields. Happy filling in forms!

Apple’s iPhone is a 2.5G quad band GSM phone that uses a touch screen interface. It performs the functions of a mobile phone, a camera, an da multimedia player, plus internet services such as e-mail, text messaging, web browsing, and Wi-Fi connectivity.

Many have expressed disappointment that the iPhone is not a 3G device, but Apple says it plans to make 3G phones in the future, and this first generation iPhone was designed to be 2.5G only because of battery consumption and 3G network maturity issues in the US.

In the US, the Apple iPhone is available from the Apple Store and from AT&T Mobility, formerly Cingular Wireless, with a price of US$499 for the 4 GB model and US$599 for the 8 GB model, based on a two-year service contract.

Despite most touch screen devices being designed for use with a stylus, the Apple iPhone’s touch screen has been specifically designed for use with fingers. Because of this, even if you want to use a normal stylus you would be unable to do so as the screen has been programmed to respond to touch by something with the physical properties of bare skin.

Keying in text is via a virtual keyboard on the touch screen which has automatic spell checking, word prediction and a dynamic dictionary which can learn new words. You control interface elements such as scrolling using special touch-drag-lift finger motions, like sliding a playing card across a table. Once you learn the various ways to touch the screen, using the Apple iPhone should be easy as Apple is known to be very good at user interface design.

The camera function uses a 2.0 megapixel camera at the back of the phone but this camera only takes photos with no video recording capability.

Being 2.5G, the fastest internet connectivity it can use is EDGE, supported on AT&T’s network. It uses a mobile version of Safari with special touch control features. The Apple iPhone’s email client supports HTML and can sync with Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Entourage. It also supports IMAP and POP3, as well as special PushIMAP email from Yahoo that works similiarly to a BlackBerry.

The Apple iPhone runs a special mobile version of Mac OS X that takes up 700MB of space on the device. It supports Widgets like Stock and Weather Widgets.

Some specs:
* Screen size: 8.9 cm (3.5 in)
* Screen resolution: 320×480 pixels at 160 ppi
* Input method: Multi-touch screen interface (the “Home” button is the iPhone’s only physical front panel button)
* Operating System: OS X
* Storage: 4 or 8 GB Flash memory
* Quad band GSM (GSM 850, GSM 900, GSM 1800, GSM 1900)
* Wi-Fi (802.11b/802.11g), EDGE and Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR
* 2 megapixel camera
* Built-in rechargeable, non-removable battery with up to 8 hours of talk, 6 hours of internet use, 7 hours of video playback and up to 24 hours of audio playback, lasting over 250 hours on standby.[31]
* Size: 115×61×11.6 mm (4.5×2.4×0.46 in)
* Weight: 135 g (4.8 oz)
* Digital SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) of 0.974 watts per kilogram[1][2]

Apple’s Airport Extreme Base Station is now on sale in the UK market, but the Airport EXtreme 802.11n Enabler software goes for an additional £1.25. This is because of US accountancy regulations.

“The nominal distribution fee for the 802.11n software is required in order for Apple to comply with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) for revenue recognition, which generally require that we charge for significant feature enhancements, such as 802.11n, when added to previously purchased products,” Apple clarified.

The Apple Airport Extreme Base Station is based on 802.11n wireless, and can also hook up to 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g networks.

It is compatible with the following Macs:

1. MacBook Pro with Core 2 Duo
2. MacBook with Core 2 Duo
3. Mac Pro with Xeon and AirPort Extreme option
4. iMac with Core 2 Duo (except iMac 17-inch, 1.83GHz)

Links:
Apple Airport Extreme Base Station Tech Specs

If you love the Expose feature and would like to see it in a web browser, check out Shiira. Shiira is an open source (under a revised BSD license) web browser for Mac OS X that runs on the Web Kit engine, the same one Safari is running on. It’s written in Cocoa and is compiled as a Universal Binary so it runs on both PPC and Intel Macs. The current version is 1.2.1.

Shiira’s Tab Expose

Some of the features you have in Shiira are RSS support, tabbed browsing, tab expose, page holders for viewing webpages in a sidebar (sort of like a split screen), page transitions if you’re using Tiger, and support for Firefox bookmarks.

Since it’s free, why not give it a shot? Check out the Shiira Project.

DJ Pete Tong, an internationally reknown dance DJ speaks on technology and how it’s affecting the art of making music. He also talks about a piece of software he uses on his Mac called Ableton.

The thing about technology — the same as I learned with the advent of CD — if you stop using old technology and move immediately to the new, your DJing dips. Maybe that’s a good thing, but my thing is to try and blend the two. Everyone I’ve seen who has just begun doing it ends up doing things they would never normally do, just because they can. Endless loops, for example. Ableton invites you to rearrange people’s music.

Apple has done alot for the music community. We have the iPod, iTunes, GarageBand, and at the very base of it all we have the excellent Mac platform on which alot of great production software run on.

Read Apple’s Gone Wrong on Wired.

Apple’s iBook and iMac ranges do not support screen spanning by default although it comes with a graphics chipset (ATI Radeon Mobility) that supports the feature. What’s screen spanning? It’s something like an extended desktop where your desktop area stretches across two monitors instead of both monitors displaying the same thing. They say once you’re used to dual displays you won’t go back. iBook and iMac users can actually experience this, with a tool called the Screen Spanning Doctor.

It involves hacking the Open Firmware to enable screen spanning support, a feature available on PowerMacs and PowerBooks.

BTW please don’t try this on notebooks that run other chipsets like the older ATI Rage, as it will screw up your hardware! The list of officially supported machines and machines that are not supported are available here.

Download the Screen Spanning Doctor by Rute Moeller

Apple has a built in Firewall for Mac OS X, but it’s kind of catered to the newbie, very simplified like most Apple user interfaces are.

For something more advanced, try Flying Buttress, formerly known as BrickHouse. Flying Buttress has some funky features like filtering by host/network address, protocols other than TCP/UDP, the whole range of ipfw options, per-filter logging, graphical log viewer, NAT port forwarding, different filters for different network interfaces, and so on. It basically is a configuration tool for OS X’s built in firewalling system, instead of replacing the firewalling system altogether.

It won the Best System Utility Award at the 17th Annual MacWorld Editor’s Choice Awards and Gold Award, Firewall Protection for the MacFixit 2001 Toolbox Awards.

Technically, it’s not free - the shareware costs USD$25 per machine. But you can use the “unregistered” version for as long as you want, and pay someday when you feel it’s worth it and can afford it.

Check out Flying Buttress.

Apple has launched a new software called Aperture, aimed at photographers.

Aperture has a featureset that let’s you do everything you would want to do with your photographs after a shoot. It catalogs your images, and lets you do processing and touch-ups with it. It supports RAW formats from leading digital camera manufacturers. This means you can edit your RAWs directly without converting it to some other format first. RAW editing is non-destructive. You won’t lose any of your original data that you don’t touch.
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Looks like my Photoshop was pretty accurate, except the actual iSight lense is much smaller!

More updates later, kinda tied with stuff now.