Category Archives: Call Me a Geek

The things I do and think about computers.

Some Thoughts on the MacBook Air

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Not exactly what I was hoping for.

After sweating out the morning, waiting to hear detailed news about Apple’s new products, I finally got my hands on the specs for the product I’ve been waiting for: MacBook Air. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s the product I’ve been waiting for after all.

Wait. Let’s start again. The above is what I wrote on Tuesday, before I laid hands on the MacBook Air. Now that I’ve fondled its sleek aluminum body and hefted its airy lightness, this article may have a different ending.

It’s Friday morning and I’ve been to Macworld Expo and back. And, at the show, I got a chance to look at Apple’s new entry into the sub-notebook field: the MacBook Air.

First, let’s talk specs.

Yes, it’s [currently] the world’s thinnest notebook, at about 3/4 inch tall. That’s thin. It’s about half the thickness of my obese 12″ PowerBook. (How did I carry that fat thing around for so many years?)

MacBook Air

Other dimensions — for those of you who like all the numbers:
Width: 12.8 inches
Depth: 8.94 inches

Since my old 12″ PowerBook is sitting on my desk, let’s measure it up for comparison:
Width: 10.8 inches (estimated; I don’t have high tech measuring tools here)
Depth: 8.5 inches

The screen is a generous 13.3 inches measured diagonally. The PowerBook’s (for comparison) is about 12.25 inches.

It certainly is light, weighing in at only 3 pounds. That fat little 12″ PowerBook weighs a whopping 4 pounds and 11 ounces.

These are the numbers. And they are what disappointed me when I first went through them. Although thinner and lighter, the MacBook Air’s dimensions are also considerably larger than the computer I was hoping to replace with it. Because although “thin is in” and all that jazz, it’s overall size that can determine how truly portable a computer is.

Look at it this way: would the Moleskin people be selling so many of those little black books if they were the same size as the composition book you used in elementary school?

But I got to see the Air in person and touch it and hold it in my hands. And you know something? In real life it looks smaller than I expected it to. And the lightness feels lighter.

My overall impression was very positive. I felt myself wanting one of them, for reasons I couldn’t quite understand.

How does Apple do that? With smoke and mirrors? Hypnosis? Or it it simply the lighting in their Macworld Expo booth?

Now let’s look at what’s crammed in there.

There’s a lot packed into that slim case:

  • 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
  • 2 GB RAM
  • 80 GB ATA hard disk
  • AirPort Extreme (IEEE 802.11a/b/g compatible)
  • Bluetooth 2.1
  • iSight Camera
  • one speaker
  • Audio Out port
  • USB 2.0 port
  • Micro-DVI port
  • 13.3″ (diagonally measured) monitor
  • full-sized keyboard

There are some options — processor and hard disk come to mind — but that’s basically it.

Isn’t something missing?

Yes. It’s the optical drive. Just as Apple led the pack in the phasing out of the “floppy” drive when it released the original iMac all those years ago, it’s removed the optical drive from the MacBook Air.

This is a tough nut to swallow. Apple has built a $99 external SuperDrive that will only work with the MacBook Air, that I believe most people will buy. But Apple has also created “new technology” that enables you to access the CD/DVD mounted on another computer to install software, etc. (This is something I already do in a limited way, since the optical drives on both my 12″ PowerMac and 15″ MacBook Pro are dead; the MacBook is covered under warranty and is making its way back to Apple as I type this.) But what do you do if your Air is the only computer around and you didn’t bring along an external disc drive? Like when you’re on a plane for four hours and the movie is something you can’t bear to watch?

You’re SOOL.

Personally, I think the exclusion of this vital piece of hardware is a big mistake. And it’s what may prevent me from investing in a MacBook Air to replace my 12″ PowerBook.

What was I expecting?

Well, since I don’t read much on rumor sites, I wasn’t expecting anything in particular. I was expecting a “sub-notebook.” To me, that means something smaller than the usual notebook. It doesn’t necessarily mean thinner.

What I wanted, however, was a real replacement for my 12″ PowerBook: a modern version of the same machine that had modern processing power, a decent sized hard disk, wireless, and the all-important optical drive. And I know I’m not alone in that wish.

You see, I believe that the 12″ PowerBook is the best notebook computer Apple has ever made. Perfectly sized for travel, able to display at 1024×768 resolution, all necessary ports, wireless access, optical drive. What else could you ask for? I wish Apple would have brought that up to date by thinning it up a little — hell, it’s only an inch and a half tall! — and lightening it up a bit.

This is what I wanted. This is what a lot of people wanted. But this isn’t what Apple delivered in the MacBook Air.

But Don’t Listen to Me

If you’re in the market for a laptop computer, do check out the MacBook Air. For you, it might be a dream come true.

One thing’s for certain: It certainly will generate a lot of computer envy among your friends.

At Macworld Expo

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Are you there? I’ll be there soon.

As this is appearing online, I’m boarding a plane for Macworld Expo in San Francisco. This is yet another one of my quick in and out trips — I really can’t afford to be away from my office for more than two days. I’ll arrive in SF around 9:30 this morning and depart around 3:30 on Thursday afternoon. In between, I’m staying at the Nikko.

I have a lot to squeeze into this trip:

  • Wednesday, 12:00 PM – meeting with two editors, one publisher, and a representative from an online publishing group regarding ebooks and ebook piracy issues. I’m tired of seeing little ebook revenue while copies of my ebooks are floating around on file sharing sites. Armed with some excellent feedback from an ebook reader, I’m going to propose some changes to the way my work appears in ebooks. I also hope to spend some time talking to one of my editors about a book we hope to start next week.
  • Wednesday, 2:00 PM – appearing at the Peachpit Press booth on the show floor. I’m doing a 45-minute presentation and hope to cover some productivity tips and tricks for Leopard users. Peachpit will be videoing the presentation for eventual distribution online.
  • Wednesday, after 3 PM – seeing the show floor. I’ll be walking around armed with my cameras: Treo for instant Web publishing of images, Nikon D80 with fisheye lens for a very different look at the show floor, and video camera for content I hope to put together as a short Macworld Expo movie.
  • Wednesday, after 6 PM – attending one or two parties (depending on how tired I am).
  • Thursday, before 1 PM – see Wedneday, after 3 PM. More of the same.

If you’d like to see photos from Macworld as they are taken, visit my TumbleLog. I expect to start sending photos as soon as I arrive in SF. I’ll try to make them interesting.

Product ImageI’ll also be giving away two copies of my Leopard book during my Peachpit booth presentation. One of them will go to the first presentation attendee who tells me he/she read about the giveaway here.

If you’re at Macworld Expo and want to say hello, drop by the Peachpit Press booth. I usually pop in now and then during my time on the show floor. I’d to meet you!

A Look at OmniFocus

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A quick overview.

I tried OmniFocus for a few weeks to set up and maintain a Get Things Done (GTD) routine. I’m always interested in easy-to-use productivity tools that I can integrate into my workflow.

What OmniFocus Does

OmniFocusOmniFocus enables you to set up any number of projects, each of which can contain specific actions. For example, I might have a project for Flying M Air to send out a marketing letter to travel agents. Within that project might be the individual actions to get the job done: get a mailing list of travel agents, write the marketing letter, print out the materials, stuff envelopes, mail. You can set up a project so its actions must be completed in order (sequentially) or so that they can be completed in any order or concurrently (parallel). Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be any way to set up some actions within a project to be sequential while others in the same event were parallel without creating groups of actions.

Each action can also be related to a context. A context is “where the work happens.” This is a lot less intuitive but, I suppose, it can be useful once you get an idea of how to use it. For example, you might set up contexts for telephone follow-up or errands. Personally, I had a problem distinguishing between context and projects and couldn’t maintain a consistent approach.

OmniFocus offers a number of commands and options that help you “focus” on specific projects or tasks. You can flag things, set priorities, enter start or end dates, and choose from a bunch of different status options. You can then create “perspectives,” which are views of tasks matching criteria. But setting these things up can be time consuming and isn’t very intuitive.

On Intuitiveness

I did not find OmniFocus to be very intuitive. For example, each time I entered a new action, I pressed Return. Return is usually the command programs use to end or accept an entry. In OmniFocus, it starts a new one. That’s likely because of the Omni Group’s experience with OmniOutliner, which this is apparently spun off from. But when I create a list of things to do, I don’t think of an outline. I think of a list of individual items. iCal doesn’t create a new item when you press Return after completing the entry of a new one. It doesn’t make sense to me that OmniFocus does.

The perspectives view looks and works just like the main OmniFocus window. Great. Except that a perspectives view contains a subset of all items and, if the View bar isn’t showing, it’s not clear that you’re looking at a subset. You wonder what happened to an event you’re looking for and maybe, like me, you think it’s been eaten by a quirk in the software. So you re-enter it and wind up with a duplicate when you finally realize you’re just looking at a subset of all actions.

Some items don’t appear at all, depending on how options are set and how the item is coded. That makes you think twice about whether you want to set sequential items as sequential — they might not appear in some views.

And I’m still not sure how OmniFocus applies color coding to tasks. I understand the red, but blue, gray, and purple? What does it mean? Without documentation during the beta process, I couldn’t be sure. (Now I don’t really care.)

Syncing…Sometimes

One of the features that attracted me to OmniFocus was its ability to sync with iCal. I had a heck of a time doing this with the beta versions, until tech support suggested that I turn off the Birthday’s Calendar in iCal. Evidently, there’s a bug in iCal and that was messing things up. When I disabled it, syncing worked okay.

But OmniFocus syncs based on context, not project. So I needed to not only use the context feature, but set up corresponding calendars in iCal to properly sort out the tasks. Then, when I manually synced with iCal — automatic syncing is not an option — each task’s project was appended to the task name in brackets. This made the task names in iCal unnecessarily long.

OmniFocus syncs only iCal tasks, not calendar events. I also had some trouble when I marked off tasks as done in one program, it would not consistently sync to the other. So tasks didn’t “go away” when they were done.

I should mention that I need iCal syncing because I sync between iCal and my Treo to have a complete list of events and tasks when I’m on the road. My memory is bad (and steadily getting worse) and I rely on my Treo to remind me of things I need to do when I’m away from my office.

What OmniFocus Doesn’t Do

OmniFocus is supposed to make it easy to “capture” tasks from other applications. This is extremely limited. For example, although I can capture a task from a mail message, there’s no way within OmniFocus to easily link to that message — even though each message in Leopard has a unique URL. Instead, I found myself copying and pasting message text into OmniFocus.

OmniFocus falls short as an outliner in that it only gives you three levels of outlining: projects, actions, and “sub-actions” (created when you group actions within a project). Four levels, if you also create folders to organize your projects. But I suppose that if you want an outliner, you’d use OmniOutliner.

There’s no easy way to relate one action to other actions because contexts are not like keywords and you can only assign one per action.

Printing is also extremely limited, so if you want to print off a list of actions to take to a meeting or on the road, you’re stuck with standard formatting with large fonts.

When Productivity Software Reduces Productivity

My main gripe with most of these GTD software “solutions” is that they make you do so much work to set them up and implement them.

OmniFocus is a prime example of this. I wasted an entire morning trying to get my iCal events into OmniFocus , sorting them into projects, and applying contexts. And then, when I synced them back to iCal, I wound up with a bunch of duplicate items in both programs that I had to weed out. While this might be due to buggy beta software, I can’t be sure. I could be a problem I’d be dealing with every time I completed a sync.

It’s far easier for me to simply open iCal and look at my task list, which is already sorted by my existing project-related calendars, to see what needs to be done.

I was hoping that OmniFocus would introduce features that were not in iCal. It did, but none of them were features I needed or even wanted. The ones I did want — primarily calendar and task list printing flexibility — were missing.

At the introductory price of $39.95, OmniFocus was a program to consider. I might have sprung for it and made it work. But when the folks at The Omni Group upped the price to its regular price of $79.95, they made the decision for me. I’ve already paid enough money for software I don’t use regularly.

OmniFocus simply isn’t the solution I’m looking for. It isn’t intuitive enough to be a good productivity tool for me.

I only wish I could get back the two to three days I spent trying to make it help me get things done.

On the Edge, Looking In

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One geek’s look at Macworld Expo and the state of the Mac.

Next week, I’ll be heading to Macworld Expo in San Francisco, mostly to do a presentation at the Peachpit Press booth.

For a 10-year period starting in 1992, I went to every Macworld: San Francisco, Boston (and then New York), and even the little-known Toronto shows in the mid 1990s. I was part of the Macworld Expo Conference Faculty and did a presentation in the Conference hall. One year, I did a solo panel and was on two other panels, too.

Those were the good old days of Macworld, when the speaker lounge was hopping with lots of friendly Mac “experts” and the attendees really did want to hear what we had to say about using Macs or specific applications. Everything was new and cool and even a writer who writes about something as ho-hum as operating systems and productivity applications for “end users” could put together a dynamic, interesting presentation in a room that was filled to standing room only.

Things change. Changes in show management and theme a bunch of years ago have left me feeling a little out of it. As Apple’s market share shrunk, only the Mac faithful and the Mac core user base — designers — came to Macworld in significant numbers. Productivity software and topics were out; design software and topics were in. I’m not a designer and I had little of value to share with conference attendees. I couldn’t come up with good ideas for conference sessions, so I just dropped out of the conference faculty.

Then, after a while, I just stopped coming to Macworld Expo. It didn’t seem worth the bother. I’d settled into a routine, writing revisions of a relatively large collection of books — mostly Visual QuickStart Guides — and that kept me busy. I didn’t need to go to the show to see what was new.

Instead, I’d tune into the live Webcast of the keynote address and learn about all the new products and features as Steve announced them while sitting at my desk, working on a book or another project.

Then Apple stopped doing the live Webcasts. I’d visit the Home page of Apple’s Web site after Steve’s gig and learn about the new stuff there. A while later, I’d download the Webcast and watch the show.

Things change. Apple’s introduction of innovative new products — starting with the original Bondi blue iMac all those years ago and the iPod much more recently — has gotten the Mac faithful excited about using Apple products again. Tiger was great; Leopard is pretty darn good, too. The ability of Intel-based Macs to run Windows effectively — either booted to Windows or while Mac OS X is running, as is possible with Parallels desktop — has gotten the attention of Windows users who are pretty unimpressed with the long-awaited Vista operating system. (Can you blame them?) Now Macs can run their Windows software. People are switching from Windows PCs to Macs. The Mac market share is growing.

This is great news for me. Although I write about Windows topics, I much prefer working with and writing about Macs. And with more Mac users comes more Mac-compatible products. In fact, there are more than a few software products that I use daily — TextWrangler, Scrivener, ecto 3 (in beta), EvoCam, iShowU, and Time Palette come to mind — that are only available for Mac OS. This not only gives me more great software to to choose from, but it gives me more Mac software to write about.

And that’s a good thing. Back in the early 90s, there were still lots of new computer users, people who needed step-by-step instructions for using software like Microsoft Word and Excel. Nowadays, these programs are old hat. Kids use them in school, for heaven’s sake! They don’t need books. And many of my old productivity titles are starting a slow spiral down to the backlist, never to be revised again.

So I’m going to Macworld. And I’m speaking at the Peachpit booth (on Wednesday, January 16, at 2 PM) about my new Leopard book and the cool things I’ve done with Leopard and Mac OS X.

But I’ll also be looking around at what’s new and exciting, ready to grab on to something different, something that’ll drag me deeper into the Mac community again.

It’s good to be a Mac user.

Microsoft Flight Simulator X For Pilots: Real World Training

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A surprisingly good training aid.

I just want to take a moment to heap some praise on a computer book I’ve found very helpful with my recent Instrument flight training studies: Microsoft Flight Simulator X For Pilots: Real World Training by Jeff Van West and Kevin Lane-Cummings.

The book is, on the surface, a user’s guide for Microsoft Flight Simulator X (FSX), a Windows PC program that supposedly simulates flight in different aircraft. (I have issues on the realism of its simulation, as I reported here.) It takes you through the pilot ratings, one at a time: Sport Pilot, Private Pilot, Instrument Rating, Commercial Pilot. But instead of flying a real plane, you’re flying a simulated plane in the software.

What’s amazing about this book is its ability to communicate valuable and real information about flight training and knowledge required by pilots. I’m concentrating on the Instrument Rating chapters in the second half of the book. I read the first two chapters of that part yesterday and learned more about making departures and planning en route flights using real FAA charts than I did in three days trying to decipher the same charts with other study material.

The book’s text is clearly written and easy to understand. Best of all, it doesn’t put me to sleep — which is always a challenge, since I do most of my reading in bed at night.

While I can’t comment specifically on the exercises to be followed with FSX since I’ve been skipping them, if they’re half as good as the background information, the book is an excellent source for anyone interested in learning to fly using FSX as a training aid. I look forward to finishing the Instrument Rating chapters. And, with luck, I’ll be able to try a few of the exercises myself using the FSX software.

From one computer book author to others: Good job, guys!