The best Mac I’ve ever owned

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I’ve owned a lot of Macs. Two iBooks, one PowerMac, two titanium PowerBooks, two aluminum PowerBooks, one iMac, and now my first MacBook. Even adjusting for processor enhancements and other hardware advances, I think I’m ready to declare the MacBook the best Mac I’ve ever owned.

I agonized for days over whether to go with the MacBook Pro or the standard MacBook, and in the end, I opted for the more modest standard MacBook for the following reasons:

  • Apple finally positioned the ports on the MacBook on the left where they belong (unless you’re left-handed, of course). Not ramming my mouse into a thick black DVI cable approximately 3,000 times per day was probably worth the price of the MacBook in an of itself.
  • At 5.2 pounds, the MacBooks are the most portable of Apple’s Intel notebooks. Unless you plan on hiking the Appalachian Trail with your MacBook, though, you probably wouldn’t notice much of a difference between the 5.2 pound MacBook and the 5.6 pound 15″ MacBook Pro.
  • The battery life on the MacBooks is about as good as it gets. Up to 6 hours compared to 4.5 for the 15″ MacBook Pro, and 5.5 for the 17″. There’s an ancient Chinese proverb which states what one gives up in screen size, one gains in battery life (except in the case of the 17″ MacBook where Apple simply shoved a big enough battery into the case to compensate).
  • The new MacBooks use a magnetic latch as opposed to two tiny metal hooks to keep the machine cinched tightly closed. I don’t know about the MacPook Pros, but the PowerBooks had problems with their latches. I have a friend who has replaced his PowerBook latch with a piece of masking tape until he can get his hands on a new MacBook. As Apple has clearly learned with the iPod, the fewer moving parts, the fewer warranty repairs.
  • The MacBooks have new keyboards which initially come across more like rows of buttons than keys. Presumably Apple made improvements over the old keyboards (still in use on the MacBook Pros), however I’d be perfectly happy with either. I have noticed that the keys don’t come into contact with the screen when the machine is closed which used to do terrible things to the old PowerBook screens, however I believe that issues has been fixed since the aluminum models.
  • The standard MacBooks have plastic cases rather than the aluminum cases of the MacBook Pros. I learned from the iBooks that the plastic is either more scratch-resistant, or does a better job of concealing scratches. It’s also less prone to the warping that has been known to occur due to the excessive heat of some models.

Even though I love the standard MacBooks, there are several features that the MacBook Pros have that a lot of professional won’t be able to live without:

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How mobile phone ringers should work

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While sitting in front of my computer at 9:00 PM in my completely silent office, I was scared half out of my wits by my Sidekick’s email alert. It’s even worse when I have it sitting out and it not only chimes, but also vibrates against my desktop like some old door buzzer. Of course there are other times — in loud, crowded restaurants, or outside among the din of the city — when I can’t hear my phone ring at all, and since I keep it in a dorky leather holster attached to my belt instead of in my pocket (who wants to risk cancer down there?), I often can’t feel it vibrate, either.

So I started wondering why mobile phone ringers aren’t smarter. Just like my PowerBook will dim my screen based on a sampling of ambient light, why can’t a phone sample ambient noise in order to decide how it should alert you? If you’re sitting in your office and it’s dead quite, a soft, pleasant chime should do the trick, but if you’re having a drink in a loud bar or walking down a busy street, it should blare and vibrate.

I know some phones have the ability to gradually increase the volume of the ringer the longer a call goes unanswered which is a nice low-tech solution, however I’ve found that if you’re in a noisy environment, by the time you realize your phone is ringing, you’re not likely to be able to recover it from wherever you have it stashed before the caller is forward to voicemail (and you already know how I feel about voicemail).

Another low-tech solution I’ve noticed is keeping your phone out in front of you on the bar. Of course, problems with that approach include: spilling beer on it, other people spilling beer on it, and getting drunk and leaving it behind. Besides, why throw a low-tech solution at a problem when it’s so much fun to over-engineer one.

eBay: the Internet’s most successful bad idea

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The first time I came across eBay, I was convinced it would never work. The idea of conducting anonymous financial transactions online seemed, on the best of days, insane. It’ll be fraught with scams and spam, I told my friends. No matter how many guarantees they offer their customers, they won’t be able to keep up with claims and disputes, both legitimate and fraudulent. Internet savvy con artists will find they can swindle dozens of victims simultaneously from the comfort of their own homes.

Now that billions of dollars find their way through eBay every year (yes, that’s billions), I’ll admit that I was wrong. I have a pretty good track record when in comes to predicting the success of new Internet technologies and businesses, but eBay was one that I missed. As it turns out, the good has outpaced the bad, and 11 years later, eBay continues to not only grow, but completely dominate the online auction space.

Only I wasn’t completely wrong. If you use eBay long enough, it’s pretty much a statistical certainty that you’ll eventually have a bad experience. I’ve been using ebay for over seven years now, and last weekend, my luck finally ran out.

I’ve been on sabbatical from my Product Management position at Adobe for about three months now, so I decided to start getting rid of a few disused toys I have lying around in order to keep at least a trickle of cash coming in. Last week, I tried to convert a PSP bundle and an iPod Video into cash, so I listed them on eBay. Both sold on Sunday, and by Monday afternoon, I had learned that both buyers are deadbeats. The PSP auction ended with sniper taking it for $300, then like any good sniper, vanishing into his surroundings to never be seen or heard from again. The other auction ended with "Buy It Now" in about 30 minutes, and has been a much more interesting experience. The buyer had no feedback whatsoever, so I didn’t have very high expectations, but I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, and send an invoice anyway. Later that day, I received the following email:

Hello, how is you family and business? i just want to infrom u that i have made out my payment. once u get the comfirmation email from paypal pls get the iterm shiped.

Moments later, I received the expected forged PayPal email showing that I had been paid in full, and instructing me to send the iPod to, of all places, Nigeria.

Now I’ve been using eBay since 1999, and I’ve generally had pretty good luck, however an experience like this is enough to make you want defect to craigslist. Here’s my current situation:

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Google Firefox Extensions

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Sometime’s Google’s motto of "do no evil" translates into "do really cool stuff". I’m a big fan of several of Google’s non-search realted projects (not all, but several), though I think their Firefox extensions might be my favorite. Here’s what’s on the menu:

Good stuff, Google.

Widget Madness

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Everyone has widgets these days. Or gadgets. Small, lightweight software utilities that do one thing, and one thing only. They try to stay out of your way until you need them, and then they are close at hand and ready to serve. Stock quotes, weather reports, words of the day, dictionaries, notepads. Widgets are the tapas of the software world.

Off the top of my head, I can think of about eight different widget implementations:

In general, I like widgets. At least in theory. They make a lot of sense when you think about them. The problem is actually remembering to use them. As I see it, these are the main problems with widgets:

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If you like flickr, you’ll love fastr

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Via this post on O’Reilly Radar, I came across fastr. If you like flickr, and you like word games and/or puzzles, you’re going to love fastr. In their own words:

Fastr is a game that uses flickr images. It loads ten images that all share a common tag, one by one, and you guess what the tag is. When you guess right, the tag will turn blue, and you’ll get points. The faster you guess, the more points you get. The points are reset every six minutes. You’ll need to choose a player name before you can play. You can play using tags for multiple languages and for specific flickr groups.

Enough said. Try it. I’ll probably see you there.

How voicemail should work

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I hate getting voicemail. The last thing I want to see when I look down at my phone is that stupid little voicemail icon. My messages go unchecked for days if not weeks, and every time I finish going through a backlog, I consider changing my greeting to something like "Please DO NOT leave a message. Send me an email, send me an SMS, or even better, just hang up since my phone will tell me you called anyway." But I don’t because as much as I dislike it, I know voicemail is necessary. And I also realized the other day that it isn’t actually voicemail itself that I dislike so much — it’s the horrible implementation that every mobile phone carrier seems to use.

To get my voicemail, I have to call in, wait, enter a code, wait, listen to the stupid greeting, wait, then navigate through one or more messages using a very clumsy and non-intuitive numeric interface. Even with all the menu options memorized, it still takes far longer than it should.

So how should it be done? Here are two ideas:

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Why all the recent movie news isn’t good news

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Lot’s of interesting movie news lately. First of all, Toshiba has released the first HD DVD players in Japan, and will soon start selling them in the US for $499 and $799, depending on the model. The debut of HD DVD will soon be followed by Blu-ray technology backed by Sony and Samsung (the new Sony PS3s will have Blu-ray built-in), and we’ll all get to relive the Betamax / VHS format wars all over again.

So what’s wrong with first generation DVDs? First and foremost, they aren’t selling like they used to, so it’s time to revitalize the market by updating the format. According to Toshiba, however, people are asking for them since television resolution has surpassed that of DVDs. Personally, I think Sony, Samsung, and Toshiba have a lot of challenges ahead of them.

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Gaming on the cheap

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I’m taking a little break from my Developer Relations position at Adobe Systems to work on some of my own projects, which means no money coming in for a while, which in turn means I won’t be dropping $60 on any new Xbox 360 games any time soon. Although I’d really like to be playing the new Ghost Recon, Advanced Warfighter (which I’ve played at friends’ houses and love), I am instead entertaining myself with Xbox Live Arcade games.

If you have an Xbox 360, you need to spend some time checking out the Xbox Live Arcade. It consists of a couple dozen small, simple, downloadable games across six categories which seem to cost anywhere between $5 and $10, and provide hours of swearing and celebration. To get to the Xbox Live Arcade, go to the Xbox dashboard, navigate to the Games tab (or "blade" as Microsoft calls them), and it’s right there.

I’ve played Hexic HD (written in Flash, I believe), Mutant Storm Reloaded, Geometry Wars Evolved, and Joust. My favorite is Geometry Wars Evolved so far. The graphics are simple, but extremely sharp and bright (on an HD TV), and the movement is amazingly fluid given everything that’s going on on the screen at once. Hexic HD is available for free, and is created by Alexey Pajitnov, they guy who, by inventing Tetris, is responsible for decades of accumulated lost productivity.

You can download a free trial of each game which is limited in some fashion, but works well enough to give you a sense of whether you want to spend a little money on it or not. While playing the trials, your Xbox will ask you about 800 times if you want to "unlock" the full version which gets annoying, but the trial technique is appreciated, nonetheless. Unlocking (in other words, buying) the full version allows you to record achievements that your Xbox Live friends can see, and lets you play the entire game through.

The only thing that bugs me about the Xbox Live Arcade is that you don’t pay real money for the games. You purchase "Microsoft Points" which you can then redeem for games, sort of like the Chuck E. Cheese token model. I guess I don’t mind the model itself so much, but they conveniently leave out dollar equivalents next to points. In other words, you might see that a game costs 400 points which you can purchase quickly and easily right through Xbox Live, but there’s nothing there to indicate how much money that actually is. Convenient. Anyway, the exchange rate seems to be 80 Microsoft points per $1, so games will cost between $5 and $10. Check out the Microsoft Points article on Wikipedia for more information.

Of course, there are other ways to game on the cheap. You can pick up an original Xbox bundle for $179.99 at Best Buy (that actually seems a little expensive to me), a PlayStation 2 for $149.99, or a good old Nintendo Gamecube for a mere $99.99. If you’re into mobile gaming, I strongly recommend checking out the new Nintendo DS Lite (videos here and here) which will save you money over the PSP. And if you’re a do-it-yourself type with no moral objections to this type of thing, you might be interested in knowing that the Xbox 360 firmware was recently hacked.

Comparing noise-canceling headphones

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I’ve been a big fan of the Bose QuietComfort headphones for years. My first pair was a cheap, beat-up display model from the Apple Store which I later upgraded after the release of the second generation to take advantage of the more compact and travel-friendly form factor. I’ve used my Bose QuietComfort headphones everywhere from my own office to long international flights, and they have always come through.

But that doesn’t mean they’re perfect. The biggest problem I’ve had with them is interference from GSM phones. You know the annoying ticking you get on speaker phones when someone has their Treo or Blackberry sitting on the table? The Bose QuietComfort headphones let you experience that pleasure directly in your ears. Of course, they are primarily intended for flying which presumably means everyone’s phones are turned off, however when you live in the city and work in sea of cubes, you never know when you’re going to need the little extra peace and quiet from noise canceling technology.

Unfortunately, the interference problem recently got worse after upgrading my wireless network. I went from my ancient Lucent ORiNOCO gateway to the much more impressive looking Linksys WRT54GX, which, in addition to producing a stronger signal, also produces a constant buzz through my QuietComfort headphones. I’m a glass-full kind of guy, though, so when I run into incompatibilities like this one, I look at it as an excuse to buy new toys (fortunately, I had an Amazon gift certificate burning a hole in my pocket).

This time, I decided to go with a much more low-tech solution to noise cancellation: the Etymotic ER6i Isolator Earphones. Rather than sampling ambient noise and generating a correction signal to cancel out unwanted sound, the ER6i headphones are basically earplugs with tiny speakers in them. They cancel noise the old-fashioned way: by physically blocking it.

I just got back from a trip to Seattle during which I had a chance to really give the Etymotics a thorough evaluation. Here’s how they measure up to the Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones:

  • Effectiveness: It’s hard to compare the effectiveness of the Bose and the Etymotic headphones because they actually block different kinds of noises. I found the Bose to be more effective at blocking things like the low drone of an airplane engine, and the Etymotics to be more effective at blocking less predictable sounds, like those you experience in your cube when your co-workers are yapping or laughing at the newest YouTube video.
  • Sound quality: I’m going to say that the two are tied here, but only because my ears are not discriminating enough to hear the difference. I’m sure a sound engineer could tell you which delivers better what, but to me, both sound good enough.
  • Portability: The Etymotics win hands down in this category. They fit into a little 2"x2" pouch which adds no bulk or weight to your bag during a trip. To be fair, the QuietComfort 2 headphones are much more compact than the first generation, but they still add the size and weight of a good sized paperback to your travel load.
  • Comfort. I actually find the QuietComfort headphones to be slightly more comfortable than the Etymotics. The only problem with the Bose headphones is that they tend to tickle the inside of your ears for some reason that seems to be related to pressure after extended use, but in general, I prefer headphones that cup over my ears rather than get crammed inside them. I also don’t like how the Etymotics accumulate ear wax, no matter how clean you keep your ears, meaning they really can’t be shared among people who are the least bit concerned with hygiene.
  • Price. The Bose QuietComfort headphones go for $299, and the Etymotics can be had for about $89.99.

So which would I recommend? It depends on what you need them for, and how important portability is to you. As always, the only true answer is to probably just own both.