dangerouslyawesome

It’s bound to happen to the best of us, no matter if we’re on a Mac or a PC. At the worst possible time, computers crash. It’s as if they know how to destroy our most productive weeks, or weeks that need to be our most productive. That was this week, for me.

Coming back from Seattle on Monday left me with an already shortened week, 4 full days. Tuesday was mostly lost to prep for the brainstorming session. Wednesday was going to be a very busy day of development for a new project as well as some redux documentation from the brainstorming session (that went really, really well, by the way).

It occurred to me that I was coming up on the 1 year anniversary of the purchase of my primary (and only, really) computer, my Macbook Pro. It had a sunken power button for a long time, and really I wanted it to get one more pass from support before the guarantee ran out. Furthermore, my battery/power management performance had been on the fritz, and this was the 2nd battery i’d had in less than 12 months. Hardly a lemon of a computer, it put up with a LOT of hard work, but some general 1 year tune-up work.

The problem is, being that it was my only computer, being without the computer for ANY period of time is absolutely destructive to my ability to get a damn thing done. So I was between getting a loaner and wasting time getting it set up only to get my computer back OR….squeezing in one more end-of-the-year writeoff and buying myself a new rig for the office. Realistically, my needs have changed. I do almost all of my work at IndyHall, so a laptop is only useful when I stay home or travel. And I shouldn’t be working in either of those situations.

So I resolved to treat myself to a Hanukkah Present:

The crazy part is, my Macbook Pro immediately got jealous. It must not have realized this computer came in preparation for sending it to the spa, not the showers!

While I was copying the files from the old computer, i started to get some strange asian characters in app title bars. I wrote it off to a weird finder glitch because I was moving so much crap around, and restarted. Unfortunately, that restart became more of a permanent shut-down.

The MBP started up with the usual mac chime sound, but a dimly lit background. It got to the Apple logo but the spinner just kept spinning. And spinning. And spinning.

Luckily, I had 2 sets of backups so I was not in a panic, just frustrated. I set those backups aside and attempted to get a current snapshot of the offending computer’s drive. A quick boot into target disk mode and slaving it off of the new iMac, along with a 250gb external drive, and a copy of CarbonCopyCloner gave me a full backup of the computer as it was before it tanked. And that was that. Off to the Apple Store the lappy went.

Mind you…this is all <1 week from the end of the built in 1 year AppleCare. Luckily, everything that was wrong (from the sunken power button to the shitty battery) was covered. Furthermore…I was still able to buy the AppleCare to cover it for the next 2 years AFTER this round of repairs. I’m pleased, really, that the process that could have been really awful ended up being relatively painless. I only lost one full day, and some slight bumps in my workflow for the week. Some people complain about Apple service. Others complain about Dell’s service. I think they all suck, but in this particular situation, I’m pleased with the outcome so far.

What’s most amazing to me is that I was able to buy the AppleCare so close to the end of the built in Care, AND while the computer was not functioning.

That’s like…having your be in the middle of burning down, and calling the insurance company to take out a fire policy BEFORE you call the fire department. In that situation, I don’t think you’d get very far.

In the mean time…I’m anxiously waiting to get my laptop back. The plus side is, I’ve rationalized my way into buying a new computer! [tags]applecare, imac, macbook pro, service[/tags]

Update: we’ve made lifehacker, which is a first for me. Way cool. Also I’ve now added some heavy duty caching and ajax callbacks to make our feeds work quicker.

Just in time for iPhoneDevCamp, Chris Messina and I have launched exPhone.org!

This little mashup site is not only a photo graveyard for photos of old phones that have been pushed out by shiny new iPhones, but also a resource for how to properly get rid of those old phones…either by donating or recycling!

If you’ve got an iPhone, you can use the builtin camera to snap a photo of your old phone. Then you can send that photo as an attachement to myexphone@exphone.org, straight from your phone, and it will show up in our flickr stream AND on the site!

Do you have resources to add to the list? Email us!

Thanks to TUAW for the sweet writeup, and Dan Burka for officially Powncing on the link.

[tags]exphone, apple, iphone, recycle, greenmyapple, donate, sustainable, phone[/tags]

A couple of days ago, there were some very upset people. Steve Jobs announced that there was a “sweet” solution for development on the iPhone. Then he suggested that building web apps that work in the safari browser that comes on the iPhone was a great opportunity for people to build whatever they wanted for apps.

People were pissed. “This is a copout!”. “What about the cocoa developers?”. “I want XCode/CoreAnimation!”. All kinds of greedy, greedy behavior.

Now…had His Steveness said, “The phone’s coming out in a few days and we don’t have a developer kit built yet, but our browser kicks ass and you can build web apps for it”…I think the response would have been different. But it seems that over the past few days, now that the dust has settled around the disappointment with the keynote, people are remembering, “oh, yeah…we’ve been building these really sick web apps…there’s a set of tools out there (incredibly powerful javascript libraries) that make building things that dont look, feel, or act like a web app possible. Maybe we can live with this for now.

For now. That’s the key. I can’t really believe that past the first version, there won’t be a more advanced SDK. Maybe it’ll be licensed like it is for video game developers. You’ve gotta buy some special hardware or software in order to build tools for the iPhone. That’d seem like a reasonable method for keeping cruft out, things that make for buggy, unstable phones. Sure, it’s not 100% “open” like we’d like it to be, but neither is OS X, apple hardware, or a LOT of things that come out of Apple. Really…what did you people expect?

Another good point is that even with a nominal fee for the developer tools, you’re going to keep the quality of our oh-so-precious mac apps high. When you’ve got everyone and their sister who knows enough code to be dangerous building apps, the market becomes saturated with crap. Creating this artificial sandbox between pros and amateurs…pros can have the big boy tools but they gotta pay for ‘em, while amateurs need to start off working with safari-based apps, MIGHT not be a bad thing.

So for now, we’ve got this crazy Safari web browser that’s popping up all over the place (though it’s clearly a beta in the desktop formats, I hope it’s more stable on the phone). People are so willing to speculate what they can do before even being able to do it, that they’ve built add-ons for their favorite apps that MIGHT let them use it on the iPhone.

The last thing I want people to think about is the precedent being set for mobile “browsing”. With the exception of screen size (and we dont even know how thats going to work, exactly), we’ve got a single browser that supposedly works exactly the same on 3 platforms: Mac, Windows, and a mobile device. Using the powers of web standards, microformats, and tools geared towards format portability, shouldn’t we be able to build an app ONCE and have the browser be able to understand the data there and best format it for the viewport? Basically, since its “the same browser”, why build a mobile version and a regular version? The mobile version should be able to automatically be gleaned from the regular version when the device detects that it needs to be in .mobi mode. Rather than have a device centric app, you’ve got an app that does stuff and the portal through which it is used is able to take a little virtual putty to it’s face on the fly and make it more mobile friendly.

I’m sure that Apple has a bunch of things up their sleeve as far as what we can do with the iPhone. Remember, they’ve done 180s on us before, when we least expected it.

I love my Apple gear. I’ve been a happy Apple customer for over a year now and won’t look back to windows except to browser test in IE (and to test WinSafari since I don’t want Beta3 janking up my MacbookPro). I WONT be buying a first revision iPhone. Do I want to play with one? Of course. It’s crazy cool. But first revision hardware can be saved for the fanboys. I’ll hang around and wait until he kinks are worked out.

[tags]iPhone, software development, browser, SDK, safari[/tags]

Philly’s very own Scott McNulty (known for his work as a blogger on TUAW) was featured on CNBC’s Fast Money Face2Face as a corespondent regarding the upheaval over the announcements (or lack thereof) at WWDC. Nice work Scott!

[tags]apple, wwdc, fast money, face2face, scott mcnulty, philadelphia, san francisco[/tags]

Microsoft, take a note. While your updates make my computer slower, Apple’s latest EFI updates have restored my boot time to that of a brand new, clean install…and all apps are running noticeably snappier.

After the fiasco 2 weeks ago with having to reload my OS on my work computer (guess which one it is) due to the worst case of 8 month Windows-rot (ok, ok, i gave the answer away).

Windows, I hate you. Mac OS X, thank you for reaffirming your place in my heart.

Signed, Your biggest fanboy not so secret admirer.

[tags]os x, windows, EFI update[/tags]

my windows PC, NONE of my windows PCs, have ever gone 19 days, 13 hours, and 13 minutes without a reboot. And still been snappy, or even useful..

Things ive done in the last 19 days and change include:

• dvd ripping with handbrake
• photoshop/imageready work
• textmate development
• parallels use for IE browser testing
• firefox open ALL the damn time (memory leaks, huh?)

i know ive got a pretty max’d out configuration, but really…i need to reboot my windows PC at work TWICE a day because windows rot is so bad it becomes unusable…and the only programs i use are firefox, IE, visual studio 2003, and imageready.

so, for the record, 6 month windows rot requires 2 reboots a day, 7 months of OSX and i can still go 2/3rds of a month without a reboot. my name is alex, and im a happy mac user.

i just made a mess in my pants.

Thanks to Chris Messina, I just became aware of Swift, a project that ports the webkit framework to PC. A quick install gave me the above message on quirksmode’s javascript browser detect page.

Friggin weird, if you ask me.

More to come as to why we were even talking about cross-platform browsers….Just had to get this screen up here!

I’ll admit it…as entertaining as the new Apple commercials are, i don’t think they’re that creative. They go after the same points that Apple and PC have contended against for ages.

Sure, I use an Apple, and I’m really happy about using my Apple, but, i find these commercials by HP WAY more interesting than “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC”.

The only question, is, are these videos produced on a PC, or a Mac?

Mark Cuban

Pharrell

Shaun White

Ok, so it wasnt intentional, but at least I felt like i was getting a new toy on WWDC day 1. Do I want a Quad Xeon 64 bit mac pro? Not really. But i want a developer copy of Leopard SO bad. Time machine, now that’s the shit.

I now have 2x 512mb OEM apple memory chips for any new intel-driven mac(mini, imac, macbook, macbook pro) for sale.

So my recent switch to mac has left me happy with a number of new applications…be they applications that replaced old “wanna-be” text editors (i can’t live without textmate) or a launcher extraordinare that brings my productivity levels to a new high that i never imagined possible. On the other hand, things like microsoft office for mac leaves me mostly annoyed, but luckily my need for applications within it are minimal. One thing that stayed pretty much identical across the platforms was firefox. My extentions carried over, and development procedures were pretty much the same…. safari sat in my dock for browser testing, but thats about it…all of my development powertools were firefox only. Until today.

First came the new javascript debugger. Drosera looks a whole lot like firebug to me, and is built into the nightly build of webkit. What does that mean? It not only works for Safari, but ALL webkit based applications like Xylescope…which has already proven useful for CSS inheritance debugging. Thats a pretty powerful tool right there. Could things get any better? I thought no…but then, i found Safari WebDevAddtions v1.0b19.

What is this, you ask? Well…take all of the most useful tools of the web dev toolbar for firefox…and bring em over to safari. Check this out:

This first shot looks like i should be able to edit things inline on the page. I’m not sure if this is a PPC only thing, because this feature crashes my browser. No big deal, because while thats cool i dont see it being very useful.

This shot lets you pull up some cool stuff, most notably, the headers. This can be useful when strange bugs are occuring on a page due to data being served incorrectly.

This lets you turn off pretty much anything by element…with a few items that are selectable.

And my personal favorite, outline. I can’t live without this feature in firefox for XHTML/CSS debugging…and now that it’s in safari…well, i dont think safari will become my default browser but wow, it REALLY earned it’s spot in the dock today.