In My Experience: Apple and Mac OSX

Having some copyright fun with GarageBand.

2004-01-29T10:47:20-05:00

Many of us older nerds have played with MIDI files before and played them on our old crappy computers and enjoyed popular songs played out in the style of childish muzak. On the Mac, Quicktime Instruments (a plugin) did a better job than that old Amiga at playing these files, but GarageBand improves on that be several orders of magnitude. Here's how to have some MIDI fun in GarageBand...

Use a Mac that is pretty fast (because GarageBand is kind of a pig)
Go download Dent du Midi
Find a MIDI file of a song you like, in my case, I used Google to find a MIDI file of the old "Popcorn" song by Hot Butter. There's plenty of files out there.
Install Dent du Midi, open it and drag and drop the MIDI file you downloaded onto the Dent du Midi window. Look on the desktop for a folder with the name of the MIDI file with "-GB" attached to the end.
Start a new song in GarageBand and drag the .aif files onto the GarageBand window (dragging the hole folder won't work).
Start applying instruments to the various tracks and have butchering your old favorites into bloody mess.

Hey Kids! Now you can violate copyrights in a new way! Releasing your own remix of old one hit wonders (or even new classics like the Simpsons theme) may be annoying to the original copyright holder due to the quality of the output you can achieve with GarageBand. So, get that Eurythmics groove going again and record you own voice over your own mix, edit the ID3 tags to look like the real thing, and upload it to Usenet (using Unison of course) and make it available on Kazaa (with your PC)!

Better yet, why not just steal the baseline from one song, the drums from another, and the keyboards from another and just sequence them together with zero effort in GarageBand. No one will be able to tell when you distort the hell out of everything so you can call it your own and sell it on your very own website!

Spin faster Mr Bono.

Are five minute compositions worth anything?

2004-01-26T11:54:26-05:00

I was at the Apple Store (in meatspace, not online) and was tooling around with GarageBand on a dual proc 1.8gz G5. Loading loops was taking longer on that machine than my G4, so I thought that was weird, but even more weird, and kind of amusing was that Terminal was, in a way, disabled on the machine. They had stuffed the file into a password protected archive which made it hard for me to scp my GarageBand file to my host (instead of being evil and rf -rm'ing the filesystem in Terminal).

I had been noodling around in GarageBand for about 5 minutes and came up with a set of loops and arrangement I liked and wanted to keep the file, so I just downloaded Transmit, connected to the host, uploaded the .band file, disconnected, cleared my connection from the 'recent connections' list, trashed the app and the .band file and walked away (after setting the music to play in a loop on the machine). It's WAY too easy.

Yeah, GarageBand is cool.

2004-01-23T14:22:22-05:00

Being the Mac dweeb that I am, I of course am playing with GarageBand and have a few opinions to share ("opinions are like assholes..."). Primarily, it's an interesting application for non-musicians like myself who want to fool themselves into thinking they created some music. Without ever playing an instrument, you can fake it enough where your wife will believe that you created the music coming out of the speakers, and that can be pretty satisfying in itself.

Really though, GarageBand is a grokkable composition and arrangement application offering you some flexibility in modifying, tweaking and embellishing the (MANY) loops provided for you. And you can add in your own noodling with a keyboard and microphone, but I'm inept and will mercifully keep my talent out of the ears of others. And again, in spite of that, I was able to fool my wife into believing that I created the music and she was actually interested in knowing how I did it. I don't think i want to show her because the bloom will be off the rose at that point, and I think that might be the Achilles heel of this application for the masses out there (ie, I don't see any Billboard hits coming out of this app, but who knows...)

What I'll really be looking at when I use the app and when I hear the songs created by GarageBand users is the compositional quality and arrangement skills of the song and author. Lots of electronic music out there is anchored in composition with a veneer of beeps, twitters and synth chords (a delicious collection to be sure) so, I figure that I'll be able to use GarageBand for a long while without missing out on the creative process that is solely based on loops arrangement (in my musically untalented case, maybe not yours). There's enough value in that for me to justify the price of iLife 04 (of which GarageBand is a part).

In terms of user interface, I utterly loathe the wooden UI elements surrounding the main application. It's cheesy, ugly and matches nothing else in the Mac OSX software pantheon, and the brushed metal theme on other iLife apps don't fill me with dreams of derivative experimentation (like Kaleidoscope did for some reason). Luckily though, the app is simple enough to allow for this multiple document interface paradigm (I loathe that word more than any other). Adding in tracks and fiddling with output levels and timing is pretty straightforward, but the process of importing loops or other sounds is completely undocumented (afaict).

After using offline help (and failing) and online help I was able to figure out how to import loops into GarageBand thru drag and drop. Just drag a folder of loops onto the loops area of the window and it will import them. However, it won't highlight that area when you are dragging the folder over it, so you have no indication that you are doing the right thing. There is widespread absence of contextual hinting in the app's UI...

There are zero contextual menus in the app
Tooltips are non-existent, and there are several buttons in the app that are completely new to me and new to Apple iApps
Selecting a track will subtly highlight the instrument in the track and un-grey out the loops that may be in the track. This needs to be made more obvious.
Like I said before, droppable region hinting isn't there and the Help application shows no info when you search for 'import'.

The only hinting that I can see is a line appearing in the main composition window when you drag a loop into the area (the line shows where, in time, that loop will start). So called "Real Instruments" and "Software Instruments" can only be dragged onto certain types of effects filters so the line will only show up if you are making a new track by the drag and drop action, of if the loops is compatible with the effect defined in a track you have already created. It's annoying (to me, the neophyte) that there is this compatibility issue in there when it comes to loops and effects.

Still though, it's a fun application to use and it passes the 'wake up' test for me, which works like the following...

When I wake up in the morning, do I think about the application and feel motivated to get out of bed and use it?
When I use the app, does it make me think differently about things?

When the answer is "yes" to both questions, I get excited.

$50 extra.

2004-01-06T16:16:36-05:00

Apple says that for fifty extra dollars, you can get a way better portable music player than you typical flash memory based unit. Well, for fifty extra dollars over this new iPod mini, you can almost quadruple the amount of storage (from 4 gigs to 15 gigs) with a less-than-modest increase in size. Essentially, the difference is $50, 2 ounces and 11 gigabytes. Somehow Apple has managed to make something less expensive and make it more of a luxury item.

MSFT employee fired for posting pic of G5's.

2003-10-29T09:28:43-05:00

Firing him will generate more bad press than his blog posting would have. I would never of heard of this unless the news of his release from MSFT was put on the various Mac news sites. Everyone is going to see this story today, but I'm going to post about it here anyway.

Now really, it seems to me that MSFT must need to buy some Macs so they can be sure their Mac software actually runs, right? What's the harm in showing a pallette of G5's (some of them knocked over) on a truck? If they poster didn't say it was at Microsoft building, you would be able to tell.

Where I work, we have a Standards of Business Conduct thing that you agree to work there, which I read carefully, and it suggests that giving away corporate secrets will get you into trouble. That's why I didn't post pics of AOL's blogging system while it was in beta, and why I don't make all of the corporate logos available for download in vector format. Those would be obvious violations of trust between me and the company that feeds my family.

IMHO, a picture of a pallette of G5's being delivered to a company that writes Mac software is not grounds for removal. But who knows, this guy could be a major asshole who was on a 'work performance plan' and the company was looking for an excuse. Who knows. I don't, but the whole thing is pretty crazy.

MSFT iTunes FUD (or 'How I Didn't Learn to Stop Worrying and Love iTunes')

2003-10-21T09:12:50-05:00

Dave Fester, General Manager of the Windows Digital Media Division has a few things to say about the iPod and iTunes on the PC (and what a coincidence, the article was posted the day before Apple announced iTunes for PC). Even though he looks sprightly and offers you a high rez portrait of himself (oh joy!), he is less than enthusiastic about one more digital media application being written for his platform. Here's a quick look at the FUD...

iTunes will still remain a closed system, where iPod owners cannot access content from other services.

Nice FUD buddy. The last time I checked (which is every day for the last several months) I was able to put music on my iPod from non-iTunes based music services (eg, eMusic, MP3.com). Don't take my word for it though, just look at Apple's tech specs page for the device...

Audio formats supported:

Mac: AAC (up to 320 Kbps), MP3 (up to 320 Kbps), MP3 Variable Bit Rate (VBR), WAV, AIFF, Audible

Windows: MP3 (up to 320 Kbps), MP3 Variable Bit Rate (VBR), WAV, Audible

WMA is of course missing. WMA, that really open file format that lets you do whatever you want with the music you bought. What he really meant was that iTunes and the iPod do not work with BuyMusic.com, Napster or the other WMA specific music services currently being offered in the marketplace. IMHO, that's a good thing.

Additionally, users of iTunes are limited to music from Apple's Music Store.

Now, that's true, but only if you limit the scope of that statement to "in terms of buying music and putting it on your iPod without leaving one application" then it is indeed true that users of "iTunes are limited to music from Apple's Music Store." But, again, the last time I checked, music that I bought at eMusic.com, and downloaded off of MP3.com can be placed on my iPod using iTunes.

As I mentioned earlier, this is a drawback for Windows users, who expect choice in music services, choice in devices, and choice in music from a wide-variety of music services to burn to a CD or put on a portable device.

The last time I checked the flexibility offered by paid music download services that use WMA for the format, none of them match the iTunes service (10 burns per playlist, files can be on multiple machines, etc). Some only let you stream the music. And others only allow one CD to be burned. If you take a look at BuyMusic.com which uses WMA you'll notice that "BuyMusic's terms of sale also shut out several major digital music players from receiving downloads." More precisely...

The company specifies that devices are allowed to store digital music files and play them back in analog form but must not be able to transfer them on to other electronic devices. For example, consumers with an Archos device, an iPod competitor, would not be able download music, because that system allows them to transfer music to other devices. -C|net

Why isn't Mr. Fester complaining about BuyMusic.com's obvious lack of 'wide-variety' of support for portable devices? Oh yeah, they are WMA based. Ok, more on iTunes and music devices...

Lastly, if you use Apple's music store along with iTunes, you don't have the ability of using the over 40 different Windows Media-compatible portable music devices.

Is he trying to say that the iTunes application breaks all other music players? I'm guessing he meant to say something like 'syncing to a Rio doesn't work in iTunes' but the actual statement is kind of odd and FUD-like. I'll assume he's not being smarmy and meant the more benign interpretation, and I'll simply say, 'so what?' I own an iPod for a few good reasons, and one of them is the integration with iTunes and my Mac. 750,000 PC users have bought iPods for their own reasons. iTunes integration can now be added to that list.

The bottom line is that Apple brought iTunes to the PC to sell more iPods. God forbid they make iTunes work with the iPod and any MP3, ACC, VBR MP3, WAV or Audible file that you might have, regardless of where you got it (and if you are like me, you don't care that WMA and other DRM based music file formats aren't supported).

[I've been on a real tear with the Apple/Mac postings recently, and MacSurfer has been linking to those posts. Thanks for the links and thanks for visiting.]

The battle for default browser status.

2003-10-16T08:58:52-05:00

Being a web developer, I download all of the browsers I can get and use them and come to various opinions about their utility, speed, compatibility and that intangible 'like it or hate it' quality. For the last month or two, Safari and Mozilla have been taking turns as my 'love it' browser, and I now keep them both running at all times.

Safari is my most often used browser for a few simple reasons...

It's pretty fast.
It has tabbed brosing.
I want to support the mothership.
The bookmarks handling is great.
The Google search is small and always there for me.

But there is one huge disadvantage in Safari that I'm not sure affects many other people. The JavaScript engine is very slow. Simple JavaScript is nicely handled and the engine is pretty good in terms of standards compatibilitiy, but when the going gets tough and there's lots of heavy JavaScript to deal with, Safari bogs down. I have one page in particular that I use daily that is a great example. but that's on an intranet site and you can get there from the Internet. Mozilla handles that same page perfectly, and extremely quickly.

Mozilla's advanages are...

Fast parsing/rendering.
Fast JavaScript handling.
Standards compliancy.
JavaScript Debugger, JavaScript Console and the Dom Inspector

Unfortunately, it's not an Apple browser (which is not a good reason to say it's disadvantaged, but for some reason I put it in there), has an unnessesarily chunky UI (why are the tabs so huge?) and has an email client embedded (I would migrate to Firebird but there's no DOM Inspector or JavaScript debugger, and it's still pretty buggy).

I think Safari is better for casual browsing and Mozilla is better for working. (Dis)Agree?

Why did I buy an iPod?

2003-10-11T20:59:45-05:00

With so many portable digital music players out there, why did I pick the iPod? Let me count the ways...

It's pretty small.
It's a firewire hard drive.
You can install OSX on it and boot from it, so I can bring your environment with you anywhere.
I'm a Mac zealot, I admit it.
It's a light weight PDA, and all I really need is a lightweight PDA instead of a PocketPC (shudder) or even a Zire.

I can export from my corporate calendar system over to iCal and pump that on the iPod
I use Apple's Mail application, and add people to the Address Book a lot, and having all of those contacts in my pocket helps when I'm on call.

I have a Mac at work and Mac at home, and only one bookmarks file.
Oh yeah, I listen to music, a lot. (Several hours a day).
My car has an auxillary input in it, and I can plug my iPod into it.
The user interface and HCI elements of the iPod work well for me, and this post at Daring Fireball made me realize that...

You can scroll through long lists with an iPod using one continuous circular motion with your thumb; with a DJ-like scroll wheel (on the recently announced Dell Digital Jukebox), you're forced to scroll in short strokes, picking up your thumb each time, repeatedly, which wastes half your effort.

I had $250 in gift certificates to the Apple store, so a mere $50 out of my pocket put 10 gigs into my pocket.

OS X for system administration.

2003-10-09T09:22:24-05:00

The rumor around my office is that we're going to buy a site license (for our department anyway) of Mac OS X 10.3 (aka, Panther) due to the large amount of system administrators doing their SA work on OSX machines. In case that rumor doesn't pan out, and we don't get a site license, I plan on buying Panther myself.

The important thing is this, Panther is going to be expensive ($130), but everyone around here wants it (except for the Linux guys) and no one wants to pirate it. That's pretty good news for Apple I think, and I can't wait for the 24th to roll around. I'm most lookng forward to Exposé.

[I've been pretty busy recently with real life stuff. I hope to return to regular blogging volume soon.]

A good MacOSX RSS feed.

2003-09-29T09:53:17-05:00

Over the weekend, Apple improved their RSS feed for the OSX downloads page (and perhaps improved other feeds?). The feed now contains a full description of the application download instead of a simple subject line. You can subscribe to that feed here. There's also a "Hot Downloads" RSS feed here.

iPod Notes are the coolest extra.

2003-09-17T09:35:46-05:00

There are several 'extras' on the iPod including a Calendar thingy, some contacts handling and other junk like Solitaire (which I won while on my beach vacation a few weeks back). The notes functionality is cool too, but what makes it VERY cool, or more to the point, usable and helpful, is the 'clipboard to iPod note' AppleScript.

The script does what it claims to do. It takes whatever text is in the clipboard, and smashes it into a text note, and dumps that onto your iPod. If the text is more than 4k in size (the max size of an iPod note is 4k for some reason) it will automagically split it up into the number of files it needs to cover the data, and links them together, and copies them all to the iPod.

It does a pretty good job at getting the text parsed and written out in a useful way. Tables of data lose their formatting of course, but not in a horribly unuseable way, and the auto linking of long text blobs is extremely helpful.

Application Switching can be a Killer App.

2003-06-25T09:19:01-05:00

I will be waiting for Panther like small furry animal, and will no doubt give Apple another $129 the night the OS comes out (only dorks buy software midnight). Mostly because I want to use Exposé. Application switching has always been a problem in Windowed GUI's, and maybe Apple has a solution.

for the past couple of years, I have been using various system utilities to deal with application switching. I like command-tabbing over to other apps, but I don't like the clutter. I typically run with 6 to 10 applications open at any time, and those windows add up. ASM offered a pretty flexible solution for hiding applications on switch. So, when I go to BBEdit from Safari, the browser will get hidden, and BBEdit will be un-hidden, which keeps the screen clean. ASM let(s) you choose applications that will be hidden in various ways...

Hide this app when switching away from it.
Never hide this app when switching away from it.
Don't hide the other app when switching to this app.
Always hide the other app when switching to this one.
etc.

This allows us to keep a few apps visible at all times, while forcing other apps to hide as you move from one to the next. I assign the Finder to never be hidden, and to never make the previous app hide. the same goes with my instant messenger and other system monitor tools. I push all of these over to the second monitor.

Now, some of you Windows users may be thinking "that sounds sort of like SDI." And you are right, in a twisted way, I am emulating a Windows GUI paradigm; Single Document Interface. This is used in the current AOL clients for windows, and used to be used in Photoshop, but I don't know if that's the case anymore. Anyway, the idea is that ne master window contains all of the other windows for the given app, so when I click on the task bar for another SDI app, it fills the screen.

The vital difference between my SDI and MSFT's si that there is no containing window. the windows float over the Desktop and Finder windows. This makes drag and drop possible from the Finder to the currently selected app, and makes entering IMG tags in BBEdit SO MUCH EASIER.

Now, go have a look at Exposé and see how it might be useful way of dealing with window clutter and application switching. And think about how many shareware application switchers (here, here and here) may be rendered useless, or at least, less attractive.

WWDC post mortem.

2003-06-25T08:43:31-05:00

I was, of course, disappointed by Steve's keynote at Apple's world wide Developers conference. Why? Because I read the rumors sites often and had built up insane expectations based on scraps of half truths that were floating out there. Here's my grandest delusion...

A while back there were rumors that 1.4, 1.6 and 1.8 ghz G5 processors were sent by IBM thru a purchase order from Apple to a Taiwanese manufacturer called Foxconn. They actually make Apple's stuff. Now, flash forward a week or two and consider Apple's leaked G5 tower details. they mentioned 1.6, 1.8 and 2.0 ghz processors. Where did the 1.4's go?

Another rumor was floating around that Apple's retail outlets had been receiving pallettes of the new product, and there were two box sizes. One big, one less big, which meant to me, tower and Powerbooks. G5s are not better than G4s at wattage dissipation (42 watts in the 1.8 ghz G5 vs. 30 watts in the 1 ghz G4), so only the 1.4s can be in those supposed "Powerbook boxes." But that was bunk.

There was no Powerbook announcement, but I still assume one is coming soon. The current crop of Powerbooks are getting old (8 months old in some cases, and Apple's typical Powerbook refresh cycle is 6 months). So, perhaps G5 Powerbooks will eventually show up, and if they do, they will be just as hot as the G4 tiBooks, and I'll buy one anyway.

Worst Kept Secret Ever.

2003-06-20T11:54:55-05:00

The rampant speculation that Apple is about to release new hardware based on the IBM PowerPC 970 (aka the G5) processor has been confirmed, sort of. Yesterday, one of the graphic images that Apple uses in the product pages got mixed up, and the file that shows the specs for the G5 was put out on Apple.com.

Stevie Boy Blue has been a pretty notorious secret keeper, and lawsuits have been the result of leaked secrets before. This time though, pretty much everyone knew the G5's were coming. IBM said they were, and rumors leaked Apple's manufacturer that large quantities of processors were in hand and machines were being made. Others have seen the pallette coming into various apple store with notes not to open them until the announcements happens.

It's pretty hysterical that the actual details were leaked by Apple. Who ever made the mistake is going to get ripped a new asshole. My thanks got out to him/her though, because it makes the buying decision easier to make (ie, don't buy a G4 and wait a week and buy a G5). Here's what was leaked...

1.6GHz, 1.8GHz, or Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5 Processors
Up to 1 GHz processor bus
Up to 8GB of DDR SDRAM
Fast Serial ATA hard drives
AGP 8x Pro3 PCI or PCI-X expansion slots
One FW800, two FW400 ports
Bluetooth & Airport Extreme ready
Optical and analog audio in and out

The max amount of RAM seems pretty huge to me, but the real story is that the 1.6's and 1.8's are single processor units. My guess is that the dual proc 2.0 ghz's are going to be in the $3k range, and the low end will be around $1800, but that's just a guess. At any rate, I think it's a mistake to buy a single processor unit these days. Because...

The PowerPC 970, on the other hand, is designed from the ground up with multi processing in mind--IBM intends to see the 970 used in 4-way or higher desktop SMP systems.

I'm dreaming of ultra fast DV to MPEG conversions, and iMovie transitions previews and rendering. /drool

Pent up demand.

2003-06-10T09:29:42-05:00

It seems to me that Apple always has "pent up demand" when it comes to new hardware (except for the Performa Christmas disaster). This update cycle will be a classic pent up demand bonanza if the rumors are true...

Apple Computer Inc. is nearing the release of desktop systems featuring IBM's 64-bit PowerPC 970 chip, sources report?but a 64-bit version of Mac OS X may lag behind by a month or two.

Looprumors had this to say back in May...

We received word that two large shipments of Power PC 970 processors went to Foxconn in Taiwan, under a purchase order from Apple computer. Twenty thousand 1.4Ghz PPC 970's and forty thousand 1.6Ghz PPC 970's have already arrived in their hands. IBM's inventory contains fifty thousand 1.8 Ghz PPC 970's, of which forty thousand are destined for Foxconn tomorrow (Wednesday).

So, it certainly seems as though there are rumors covering the supply chain, which has always been Apple's problem, along with slow ass Motorola G4 processors. I kind of think it's cute how Moto is attempting to make a better G4 and sell that to Apple. My guess is that Apple actually uses it in future iBooks (if it's a low enough wattage). But really, who cares. All that matters is that the G5's do come out, are available in volume, and that Panther is a true 64 bit operating system. Assuming all of that falls into place, I expect G5's to be a hot commodity.