greenthinks

Is it just me, or does leaving your iPod (I’ve got a 6GB mini) plugged into your mac cause quite the slowdown in iTunes? I feel like anytime I’ve got the iPod loaded in there, iTunes hangs every time I click on something. Even scrolling through my library doesn’t work well – but only when the iPod is plugged in!

I’ve got my mini set to not use disk access, so it mounts just to sync, then unmounts in the Finder, but stays in iTunes until unplugged. This actually brings up two other problems I have with the way iTunes (at least until 4.9) works with the iPod mini.

First, the lack of autosync. Yes, if you have a large-HD iPod or a small music library, then iTunes and iPod do autosyncing quite nicely, but if like many of us, you have an almost 30GB music library and you carry around a subset of that on an iPod mini, then it only syncs your selected playlists upon connecting. After that, if you make changes to those playlists, import or download new music, even rate a song, the only way the iPod will see those changes is if you manually click “Update,” which is hidden in the File menu. At least, the “Browse” (which gets grayed out for autosyncing iPods) should change to “Update” when you’re on the iPod, like it does for Podcasts. But really, why can’t any change to the selected playlists cause the iPod to resync?

Second, since we mini users need to configure what is going to end up on our iPods, we would also benefit from the iPod shuffle feature of leaving the iPod (really a ghost version) in the Source list for editing, even when the device itself is not plugged in. This way I could make the decision to pull a playlist or album off the iPod, and then only plug in and sync when I’m ready to leave. The way it works now, setting up my iPod is not a natural iTunes activity, but something that requires pulling out the iPod, getting and untangling the cable, and waiting while the mac figures out that the mini is plugged in, then locks up while it connects iTunes with the mini. Really not optimal.

Apple, the iPod is clearly the best out there, but we can do better.

David Pogue today in the Times:

Ever since Steven P. Jobs returned to Apple Computer in 1997 after a 12-year absence, his company has thrived by executing the same essential formula over and over: Find an exciting new technology whose complexity and cost keep it out of the average person’s life. Streamline it, mainstream it, strip away the geeky options. Take the credit. So far, Apple has worked this kind of magic on digital video editing, wireless networking, online music selling, R.S.S. feeds (a kind of Web site subscription) and other technologies. Its latest attempt, however, will be music to an awful lot of ears. With its release of the free iTunes 4.9 software for Mac and Windows, Apple has just mainstreamed podcasting.

Pretty accurate, if a bit snide.

Back towards the beginnging of July, Jon Udell wrote a piece on the dominance, nowadays, of typing into a text field on the web. He discussed the reasons why TEXTAREA is not optimal, and put forth some potential successors to the web typing mantle.

Yesterday I was reminded how much we really do need something better. A friend of mine was typing something up on Yahoo! Mail for over an hour, and by just accidentally hitting the wrong button, entire pages worth of work was gone. What about undo, I said—but alas, Internet Explorer 6 on Windows does not support Undo or Redo in TEXTAREA (or any other kind of text field). I decided to investigate what happens on the Mac…

Click here to see what happens in Safari or Firefox (sorry for the crappy quality of the video).

I have yet to check to make sure that this works on Firefox on Windows as well, though I think that’s a safe assumption.

Update: I checked, and it does indeed work fine on Firefox running on Windows.

The new Flash 8 beta breaks Flickr, but does improve performance considerably on Nikeid, and other heavy flash sites. Flickr uses flash for its slideshows, which v.8 will not show at all.

The beta does not improve performance to the extent that I was expecting from the earlier Macromedia demos. Also, since Apple insists on having Safari continue to loop flash ads, movies, and sites while a Safari window is minimized or hidden, flash still bogs down the OS much more than on Windows IMHO.

Anyone who manages a website knows that you spend quite a lot of time in your FTP client of choice. This is one of those few areas where I simply must have my mac, because the FTP clients out for Windows are absolutely horrible. (well, except for Windows’ built-in FTP in explorer, which is really quite good for basic tasks and puts Apple’s similar efforts to shame) All the Windows clients are a mess of buttons with no labels, and feel like they were designed by someone who couldn’t decide what he loved more: DOS or UNIX. In absolute stark contrast, Fetch has been the mac client ever since ever and it is really quite a nice program. Nowadays, though, with Mac OS X and modern Cocoa software, there are some great options like FTPeel and Interarchy. My personal favorite though, is Panic Software’s Transmit.

With all the public angst around spyware, worms, viruses, and trojans, and with all the negative reactions to Microsoft’s “Trustworthy Computing” attempts, it’s nice to see someone who not only reacts to what goes on on the net with an updated product that works, but also finds a way to make the system both secure AND usable.

Enter Apple. Tiger was released with a bit of fanfare, touting Spotlight and Dashboard as the two most important—and most valuable—features. Dashboard, however, quickly became marred by the realization from outside Apple that it was quite the security risk. Safari automatically downloaded and installed widgets and there was no built-in way to manage widgets. Many on the net proposed that this would usher in a flood of spyware and other malware via Dashboard on the OS X platform. Well, that hasn’t happened. Not only has that NOT happened, but Apple has solved all those problems while keeping Dashboard the friendly development platform it was built to be, all in the new 10.4.2 release.

Yes, there’s not a built-in widget manager. No, it’s not a Preference pane (the Mac equivalent of a Windows Control Panel). Instead, it’s actually just a widget itself, but it works just great. Widgets now prompt the user to be installed and upgrading prompts the user to replace—both good improvements.

The best improvement by far, though, is the “test drive” mode into which all new widgets launch. It looks like this:

Visually the user can understand that this widget is closed off, though perfectly usable, and there are clearly marked buttons to keep it or delete it. Underneath that though, Apple has adjusted the dashboard engine so that these widgets that are being “test-driven” cannot harm the system in any way. Score 1 for Apple.

According to a story on Appleinsider,

If reports are accurate, Mac users have a lot to look forward to in regards to web browsing under Mac OS X for Intel. According to sources, web browsing in general is much faster under Mac OS X for Intel than it is under the shipping version of Mac OS X for PowerPC. Web pages snap to the screen, the same way they do in Internet Explorer running on a new Pentium system, they say.