ctrl.altered.mind

I just received a comment on my previous post about Apple’s unfair attitude - disallowing running OS X as a virtual machine, while happily supporting and encouraging the use of Windows on Macs through Parallels and Bootcamp (which might be a bundled feature for the next big OS X release, Leopard).

The prevention of virtualization of OS X has different reasons, in my opinion. The OS has been optimized to run on Apple hardware, which is a tiny subset of computer hardware that Windows has to be able to recognize. If OS X is opened for virtual machines, Apple will have to inadvertently provide support for hardware that they do not make. This is extra effort with no real benefit for them. In fact, it quite possibly would adversely effect Macintosh sales - this is not something Apple would appreciate, especially when they are trying to increase market share with their switcher campaign.

Supporting Windows on the Mac, on the other hand, is a big plus because a significant section of people cite one or more Windows-only applications as their reason to not consider a Mac. Providing this support takes away from that argument and makes the Mac an attractive option.

Apple is careful to project themselves as an experience provider (as opposed to a software vendor) while making the claim that OS X is the world’s most advanced operating system. The concept here is that with Apple, everything ‘just works’. That may not necessarily be true once you have a virtual system with a whole new hardware ecosystem. Microsoft has been battling that for years - hardware vendors’ lack of updated driver support for example, can fuel the angst toward Windows even when Microsoft is not the real culprit. By locking in to a known hardware configuration, Apple can manage to sell a premium computational device that concentrates on usability like no one else does.

Dasher is a free universal binary app for OS X Tiger that lets you run Dashboard as a screensaver. It adds a preference pane that pulls up your widgets after a certain amount of system idle time. If you’d rather have your screensaver display something useful, instead of some really slick OpenGL mathemagical beauties like these.
Dasher by Splasm Software

When I last wrote about Google’s new Notifier application for the Mac, I didn’t mention a shortcoming of the calendar notifier, which failed to notify me of upcoming events in shared calendars that I have subscribed to. This seems to have been fixed in the latest update for the notifier.

For those who may not know, the Google Notifier is an application that shows you alerts in your menu bar (on the Mac), so you can see when you have new Gmail messages or upcoming Google Calendar events without having to open a web browser. I believe the Windows version of this program is still called Gmail Notifier, and is yet to see the integration of calendar events notification.

Event notification of subscribed calendars is a big plus for me, since my primary use of Google Calendar is to keep track of public-interest events (and not so much to record my own personal transactions), the Indian Public Holidays calendar (maintained by G R Prakash) being on top of my list.
Download Google Notifier for Mac

Indian Public Holidays Calendar links

Ordinarily, the thought of asking my mother to take a few pictures using the digital camera, zipping them into an archive, firing up a mail client and emailing the file over, would have been followed by the visualization of a long-drawn tutorial phone conversation that perhaps would never see the said task list brought to fruition. Don’t get me wrong, my mom is as enthusiastic as can be when asked to send me some pictures over the internet, but when the process involves anything more than switching three applications and a dozen clicks of the mouse, I know my mom’s no longer part of the audience.

To a geek like me, the process of say, setting up a simple web server is no big deal. I’ve done it many times before, on Windows of course. You begin with installing the latest apache httpd web server… oh wait, did I lose you as well? So you see the point. Every person who owns a computer would like to see it being used for so many applications, that are simply beyond reach - a majority of people end up purchasing computing power that vastly exceeds their needs. If only it were a bit more simple.

I got my mom to set up a web server yesterday. Yes, she is a web administrator now - it just took a couple of clicks, thanks to the Mac. I’ve always admired the power in the simplicity of Mac OS X, but today I’m a much bigger fan - for they’ve bundled an apache web server distribution with the OS.

All you need to do on a Mac, is this:

1. Pull up System Preferences (via the dock or the Apple menu (top left))
2. Click on Sharing, under Internet and Network
3. Check the Personal Web Sharing item under Services
4. Importantly, check the Firewall tab and make sure the built-in firewall is turned on - and that Personal Web Sharing option is checked
5. Close the System Preferences window

Thats it. You’re done. Your Mac is now running a personal web server. To check if its working correctly, fire up a web browser window and point it to the URL mentioned when you select the Personal Web Sharing option under System Preferences, which looks like this (see screenshot below):

View this computer’s website at http://192.168.1.2/ or your personal website at http://192.168.1.2/~aidoor/

You can even type in http://localhost/ at the same machine to check. To access your web server from any other machine on the internet, you will need the ISP-assigned IP address similar to the one in the note above. The easiest way to find your IP address is to visit http://www.whatismyip.com.

If things are set up correctly, your browser should bring up the default Apache index page. You can now build a website by designing and placing html files in a specific folder - under your main drive, select Library > WebServer > Documents

Each user account on your Mac also gets a personal folder for web sharing as well - for this you need to put your html files in the Sites folder located in the user’s Home folder. The URL for each user’s web account looks like http://your.IP.addr.ess/~username

The next step would be to register for a domain name using one of the many registry services on the internet (I use GoDaddy), so you can have a nice name to give out to people, instead of a 12 digit number.

Unbelievably simple. My mom loves it.

(Screenshot of System Preferences window)

From The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW):

Her new name is “Mrs. Right Place, Right Time.” When shopper Elizabeth Rodriguez walked into New York’s flagship Apple Store this past Saturday, she was showered with a MacBook, iPod, iPod Hi-Fi, and an Apple ProCare membership, all for being visitor # 1,000,000.

Color me green of course, but my congratulations go out to Liz and Apple. I was at the store last weekend, if only… sigh
Some pictures I took at the store:

If you have been a long time Windows user like me, you mostly probably would have atleast a few music files on your machine in the Windows Media Audio (WMA) format. I’d guess it would be more so if you used the Windows Media Player to keep your music collection organized. While it is a format that offers an advantage by using up lesser disk space over the MP3 format by using a proprietary algorithm, its disadvantage is exactly that - the proprietary algorithm makes it unusable on other operating systems due to licensing issues.

iTunes for Windows, which I have been using all along, automatically converts WMA songs to Apple Lossless (AAC) or mp3 formats when added to the library - although, this does not work with iTunes on the Mac. Its the licensing issue again. Unfortunately, there is no indication that this action is not allowed on the Mac. iTunes just stays put and does nothing when you try dragging a WMA file onto the library. The (easy) answer is to use third-party software that does this conversion for you. A better answer would be to altogether switch to an open source format (OGG Vorbis), however this is not an option for me since I use far too many devices that do not support this.

FreeMacWare introduced me to Switch - a sound file conversion application for the Mac that converts most known audio file formats to mp3 (or wav). While Switch is free and provides basic conversion options that would satisfy most users, NCH Swift Sound does offer the advanced Switch Plus application (for $19.40 - a 50% discount until Sep 15) with many more features.

A feature that stands out amidst the standard list of supported encoding rates and optimized CPU usage, is the ability of the application to process up to 32,000 files in a single batch process.

Switch is also available for Windows and Linux operating systems.

More Screenshots

There has been much talk about how Google Calendar has made a lot of people toss out Apple’s iCal (atleast from their docks). However, with Google’s latest Mac-only upgrade for the Gmail Notifier, now called the Google Notifier for Mac, I can see many more people quit their iCal applications for the last time, myself included. The new notifier adds a Google Calendar icon along with the standard Gmail notifier icon in the menu bar, letting you access your Google Calendar, create a new event, and get reminders of upcoming events with a single click. The mail notifier has also been vastly improved. It now indicates the last time it checked your mailbox, and sports a Growl-like dark glass message preview for new messages (not to mention some new icons and custom notification sounds).

Google has already made much needed performance improvements for Safari users, so this new notifier should bring back some staunch Mac users back to their door. Personally however, I’m content with the new Firefox 2.0 beta for Mac, which is quite responsive and seems to have been rid of the memory leak issues plaguing Firefox 1.5 on the Mac.

Get Google Notifier for Mac.

Its surprising that National Semiconductor, a company that has been doing well recently, atleast apparently so, would even have to lay off 35 workers at its plant in Arlington, TX. National was in the news some time back for announcing its plans to hand every employee a 30GB video iPod, a reward for its best fiscal year ever.

Employees that are on their way out have to turn in the ‘gifts that were’nt’. For the ones who ended up selling or re-gifting their iPods, the company would like the now-ex-employees to pay “fair market value” for the company hardware - which retails around $300 a pop.

Losing their jobs and even their iPods (Star Telegram Article)

Yes, after months of blogging and drooling over Apple products, I’ve finally got a Mac I can call my own. A humble beginning of course, with a Core Duo Mac Mini. My notebook PC’s partition tables got corrupted a couple of weeks ago and I took it as an opportunity to switch. There were a few applications I needed before I could get around to updating my website, especially NVu (I’d really like a Universal Binary, although Portable NVu works just fine - iWeb is nice and all, but its too basic for my needs). Today was also the grand opening of an Apple retail store close to where I live, and I was there at 9am to grab a free shirt and try my luck at the sweepstakes.

Apple’s fourth retail store in Minnesota opened today at the Ridgedale Mall, just west of Minneapolis, in Minnetonka. While I don’t think people camped outside the mall to be first in line (no IM Pei designs here after all), but there were atleast a hundred people in the store during the first hour - significant when you have three Apple stores within minutes of each other. It might have been more grand if this was at the Mall of America.

And now, for the pictures (click thumbnails for larger versions).

My brother Sankalp sent me this video of a home-made Mac Mini Portable, by Peter Green. A really impressive system with an 8″ TFT LCD screen, and a Li-ion battery that powers the setup for over 3 hours. Its also supposed to be lighter than a 15″ iBook. While the touchpad and tiny keyboard may not look too comfortable (I may be wrong), the design could most certainly be improved upon with a custom-built LCD panel.

The MMP: The Mac Mini Portable Project Video

Engadget had a post on the MMP on Feb 9, which I obviously missed.