Macworld and the lack of Steve

Wow. Just got through possibly the worst coverage of Macworld I have ever seen. One can see that Steve Jobs is truly the dynamic force behind the scenes in Cupertino. To wit: No Steve = No live video feed No Steve = No Snow Leopard update No Steve = No Blu-ray support announcement No Steve = No Mac Mini refresh No Steve = No netbook sized MacBook (MacBook Mini? MacNote?) No Steve = No vid card refresh for Mac Pro No Steve = No Cinema Display refresh Top that all off with MacRumors' live coverage getting hacked ("STEVE JOBS JUST DIED" was inserted into their comment stream by person(s) unknown) and then their site went down. Now, don't get me wrong, I know better than most people how dangerous anything happening to the pancreas is (I am a survivor of necrotizing pancreatitis - which has a 2% survival rate in 1 month vs, pancreatic cancer's 20% the first year), and I do not begrudge Mr. Jobs looking after his health. It just without Steve, Apple loses quite a bit of its zing. On a positive note, two new MacBook Pro models were introduced and the 17-inch unit looks amazing. I am going to have to head over to my favorite Apple store to get a gander at one. The thinness and high-gamut display bode well for photographers in the field, especially with photographer-centric Windows laptops already on the market (expect my review of the Lenovo W700 this week). The new iLife and iWork are worthy upgrades considering the amount of utility people get for the price and I am glad to see that Apple finally realizes that there is more to the net than MobileMe.

Interarchy and Iris: Two from Nolobe Software

Nolobe Software makes two applications for the Mac: Interarchy - a high performance file transfer program that supports mirroring, a boatload of protocols (12 in total including iDisk and Amazon S3), and can take advantage of everything that Mac OS X has to offer: Automator, Dashboard, Bonjour, iDisk, Spotlight, Address Book, AppleScript and a whole bunch more. The other application they make is Iris - an “easy to use” image editor built from the ground up to take advantage of the Mac environment. Interarchy is one of the slickest file transfer programs I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Unlike most other file transfer application which use local and remote file viewing panes, Interarchy shows only the remote content, the local content is displayed in the Finder as usual. That’s right, the Interarchy window behaves as any other window on the Mac desktop. This ease of use can be an issue for veterans of classic file transfer applications (like me - something so obvious, isn’t). While it gets top marks in protocol support, features and interface design, actual file transfers do not live up to the hype. File transfer speeds on this app are good, but not impressive. Nolobe claims that the only limit to this application’s transfer speed is the underlying speed of the hard drive and networking subsystems. I transferred a 700 MB AVI file from my desktop to a local FTP server over gigabit ethernet and it took 3:32s. The same file transferred using CuteFTP Mac Pro took only 2:24s.

Iris is Nolobe’s entry into the graphics market. Looking a bit like Photoshop Elements 3, the software promises to be light and fast with all the tools graphics artists need to get the job done. To bad it doesn’t. Iris looks good, but beyond that it is quite buggy and has several annoying habits. For example: all images are displayed full sized when opened. This is not an issue with most web images, but regularly deal with 10-12 Mpix files that are larger than my 30“ display. Other functions do not work as advertised and the software has a rather odd tendency to not follow established interface and ”do things it’s own way“. The complete absence of help files does not make things better. In conclusion, Interarchy has a rather good interface but its performance was not up to claims and Iris needs to be avoided at all costs.

Dropbox: Practical Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is the buzzword for the next generation of web applications that interact directly with users at the system level. The term has been bandied about for the last couple of years but no one has really developed anything that crystallizes the idea. Until now. The folks at Dropbox have come up with a novel way to solve an age-old Internet problem: secure file sharing with yourself, your friends and family. By combining web services, Amazon's S3 storage clusters and some clever programming, Dropbox plugs into Windows Explorer and Mac Finder to create a drag-and-drop interface for easy file sharing. Create shared folders between yourself and your friends/family, drop files in and a Mac-like sync occurs between all parties involved. Have to collaborate with a group of people? Add names to the share folder and when you drop the file in there, all participants get a copy.

Best of all, Dropbox is free. Currently in beta, you can surf over to the Dropbox website and apply. If you know someone already on it, they get 10 beta invitations. The free accounts are limited to 2GB of data so don't get any wild ideas about using it to create the next Napster. Also there are plans for a Linux client as well. The current client does not support proxies, but that is in the cards before the final release. There is a forum where you can find a list of upcoming features.

Mac Pro SATA Blu-Ray HOWTO

Apple's decision to not offer a Blu-Ray drive as an option on the Mac Pro has been frustrating many users for quite some time. PC users have long enjoyed the expanded storage and high-definition content available on the new format.

This has not stopped enterprising third parties from adding Blu-Ray drives to their systems. The good news is that Apple decided to make the Mac Pro easy to upgrade in the field. The bad news is that Apple chose to use the more traditional (and less expensive) IDE (PATA) interface for it's optical drives. PC motherboard OEMs are cramming more and more SATA ports on their boards, so optical drive makers are switching to SATA as well. This makes it hard to find IDE based Blu-Ray drives.

Enter the gang at Cooldrives.com with their SATA-PATA adaptor board. This little gem plugs into the back of the SATA Blu-Ray drive and allows you to easily install it in the Mac Pro. Apple provides a complete and thorough set of instructions on how to swap out optical drives on the Mac Pro, so I won't cover those here.

SATA and PATA sides of the Cooldrives adaptor board

Here are the steps to prepare any SATA optical drive for installation in the Mac Pro using Apple's instructions.

Tools needed:

• Large paperclip
• Small Phillips screwdriver (or large jeweler's screwdriver)
• Tweezers (optional)

Instructions

1. Take the large paperclip and unfold one side of it.
2. Insert the unfolded end of the paperclip in the front of the optical drive to manually pop out the drive tray. (Please refer to the drive manual to see the exact location of the ejection port.)
3. Turn the drive over and (using your fingers only) pry the front plate off of the drive tray. The plate is usually snapped on the front of the tray, so carefully pry the tabs away from the tray and push down. The front plate should slide off intact.
4. Take the Cooldrives adaptor and peel the cover off of the double-sided tape.
5. Line up the SATA connector with the SATA port on the optical drive.
6. Press the Cooldrives adaptor gently but firmly onto the optical drive.
7. If you are installing the drive as the Mac Pro's primary optical drive (as I did), you have to pull the jumper off of the back of the adaptor board. Use your fingers or the tweezers to pull the jumper. If the drive is going into the secondary slot, you won't have to mess with the jumper. (Apple usually expects optical drives to be set to "Cable Select" but that is not an option on the Cooldrives adaptor.)

Your drive should now look like this:

Front and back views of prepared optical drive

Follow the Apple installation guide and you will be able to mount the drive easily in your Mac Pro. I used an LG GGW-H20L which supports BD writing, HD-DVD reading, multi-layer discs, DVD's, CD's and includes BURN-Proof and Lightscribe. You can purchase this drive from Performance PC's. Tell Hank that I sent you.

Please keep in mind that Blu-Ray/HD-DVD playback is not supported in any Mac OS yet (the jury is still out on Snow Leopard) so you won't be able to play commercial discs. You will be able to burn BD discs for playback on set top players and for data storage. Roxio Toast Titanium 9 offers BD support via an optional plugin.

Moving back to Mac: Fun with networked printers

As my little journey continued, I began connecting my Mac to the Windows network that already exists in my home. I was already connected to the IP network, so I tested the waters hooking up networked printers and connecting to shared drives.

I have three shared printers in my home network: two HP LaserJets (one color, one B&W) and an Epson Stylus Photo R800 USB inkjet printer I use for printing photos. 

The LaserJets (a color 2605dn and a 5) both have built-in JetDirect interface cards allowing them to be plugged directly into an Ethernet switch. The Color LaserJet 2605dn even has a built-in Bonjour print server. Bonjour is Apple's Zero-configuration technology that can be applied to a wide variety of hardware devices. They even have a version for Windows. (There is a 64-bit version here.)

Suffice it to say, the HP 2605dn was as close to a brainless install as one could dare hope for. The LaserJet 5 was a tiny bit trickier as I needed the IP address of the printer in order to point to it. Since I am the network admin, I had that information. You can also get it from the printer by printing it's Configuration Page.

The Epson Stylus Photo R800 was another story. If the above two were stories, they were written by Dr. Seuss. Setting them up was that easy, I kid you not. The Epson's story, however, was written by Clive Barker (I still see Cenobites creeping out of the corners of my home office).

I originally had the Epson connected via USB to my Windows 2003 Server (R2, Service Pack 2, 64-bit) and shared. For 64-bit Windows clients this is great as the workstation uses the server's printer driver. Everyone else is forced to install a local copy of the driver for their platform. Leopard provides a mechanism to connect to Windows based printers and I was able to connect easily enough to the shared device. The bundled print driver is from the GutenPrint project (formerly GIMP-Print) an Open Source printer driver. Lo and behold, the GutenPrint driver included support for the Epson R800!

Unfortunately, the support is only minimal so that made the GutenPrint driver a Doesn'tPrint

 driver. Not to worry, Epson has drivers for Mac OS X Leopard on their site. So I happily downloaded those and set about installing them and using them on the shared printer. Here's where Clive comes into the story.

The Epson driver for Mac OS X hasn't really been updated for a little over a year. Epson has no plans on updating it either. The drivers are for USB connection only. So I went and unplugged the R800 from my server and plugged it directly into my Mac. The mojo happened again and a print queue, complete with the factory drivers I just installed, miraculously appeared in my system. Shot off a jpg to the R800 and it printed normally.

So far so good, I went and unplugged the printer, deleted the local queue and reattached it to my server. I then added the shared printer and when I went to select the Epson driver, the only one I could find was the GutenPrint one. O_o?!? I searched high and low on that hard drive, in every frickin' folder I could think of, but I could not locate the Epson driver that was installed when the printer was attached locally. Frustrated, I turned to the Internet.

I Googled around ALOT. I checked in all manner of support forums, PC, Mac, and even photographic ones. Nothing panned out. As an Official Minion of Steve Jobs (Mac owner), I tried the support forums at Apple. Lots of complaints, but no answers. Most of the folks gave up and got a better printer. Lord knows, I would like an Epson Stylus Pro 3800 (if anyone from Epson is reading this, I will gladly review it for you or the new model that will replace it), but I just dropped a bit of scratch for the Mac Pro and my wife would have me strung up if I came to her with this. 

I called Epson Technical Support and they basically gave me a  "doe in the headlights" look regarding this problem. "We are going to escalate it to a higher level of tech support" they told me. I suggested they escalate it to a driver developer to get it fixed.

I then reattached the printer to my Mac and tried sharing it with my wife's XP machine. Seemed straightforward enough. I installed Bonjour for Windows and her box spotted my shared queue easy as pie. I loaded her up with the latest Epson drivers for Windows and all seemed cool. When I fired off a test print from her box, everything seemed to be going smoothly, but nothing happened in the printer. WTF? I checked the queue in my machine and it was empty. Leaving the queue monitor up, I resubmitted the test. The job appeared in the queue and then vanished. Flitted off to bit-bucket heaven.

So, flexing my powers as a Minion of Steve, I went to the Apple Store where I bought the unit and signed up to chat with a Genius at the Genius Bar. There was a two-day wait. Wishing to make the most of the time before the meeting, I set about learning to look at the logs for the printing system (Mac OS X is Unix based and there is no escaping the amount of logging that goes on in the background. The trick is learning to "open the Mac's kimono" and get to the underlying Unix.) There I discovered that the print jobs I was sending from my wife's machine were failing silently with some sort of authentication error. I printed the log file (just the relevant part, not the whole thing) and waited patiently for my appointment with the Genius.

You know, it has always bothered me when marketing types get too involved with things like tech support. Sure giving them cool names like "Genius Bar" or "GeekSquad" or even "Firedog" (I would really like to know what they were smoking when they came up with that one.) makes them more appealing to the population in general, but it puts undue stress on the poor guys and gals who are only trying to be helpful. 

Client - "You're supposed to be a [Pick one: Genius, Geek, Firedog] why can't you fix my iPod?"

Hapless Tech - "Sir, you're trying to load 328GB of music and videos and it's an 8GB Nano."

Client - "Don't give me that double-talk! I waited three days for you to fix this so I can load Heroes Season One into it! Some [Pick One: Genius, Geek, Firedog] you are! Ha!"

Saturday rolled around (I had made the appointment the previous Thursday) and I gathered all of my notes, screenshots, log printouts, and Tums for the trip to see the Genius. On the way, I took my kids to see "Horton Hears a Who" at the local theater and I have to admit it put me in the right frame of mind for what was coming.

I will admit the whole experience there at the Apple Store was very pleasant. Buying a Mac is like buying a Mercedes Benz or a BMW: you get a lot of TLC along with a really cool product. I was greeted by the Concierge who checked my appointment and I pulled up a stool to wait my turn. I was second in line. The guy ahead of me failed to show up, but the staff had to wait to see if he was going to show up so I ended up waiting 15-20 min. I walked to the Genius Bar and proceeded to tell this story.

The tech (Chris) tried very hard to find an answer, I will give him that. He more than likely hit all of the same things I did when I searched for myself (I pride myself on having mad google-fu skills), but he gave me a response that usually takes care of most printer problems in Leopard. And the number to a consultant in case that didn't work.

It didn't work.

As I was wondering which car I was going to have to sell to pay for the consultant, The Answer showed up from the question I had posted in the Apple Support Forum. I was advised to update the GutenPrint drivers to the latest versions. Those were the drivers that had to be used for networked Epson printers. The factory drivers were USB only.

I did this and tremulously fired a test print to the R800. Hokey Smokes it worked! So there is the answer kids: download the latest drivers from GutenPrint. I highly recommend reading all of the docs that come with it so you understand how to configure them.

The End.

PS: I visited the Apple Store today (Monday) at the request of the Store Manager to discuss my experience with the Genius Bar and to see what else they could do to help me out. I happily reported the solution I had found and asked the Manager to let Chris know so he (and the rest of the support team) will be able to help others with this problem in the future. Got to hand it to Apple: no one does "warm and fuzzy" customer support like they do.

PPS: My Epson R800, ungrateful bastard that it is, up and died on me after all of the trouble I went through to get it working on my heterogeneous network. Paper feed mechanism broke down. Ordered an HP B9180 from Buydig which has a built-in network adapter and Bonjour server.

HD Format Wars are over, but who won?

The war over which high-definition disc format to choose is now over. Toshiba yesterday announced that it would be withdrawing it's HD-DVD players from the market and retiring the format. With Warner Brothers deciding to release it's content on Blu-Ray Toshiba seems to have gotten the message. So, Sony is the winner, right? Maybe.

Certainly it will be simpler in the future to select HD content discs: all of them will be Blu-Ray. However, unless Sony cuts the prices of BD discs right now, the consumer community may simply bypass BD and opt for downloaded HD content from sources like Netflix and AppleTV. 

It's not only the price of the discs, but the licensing fees, royalty payments, and the cost of the actual blue lasers themselves that have to be reduced. This may not happen quickly enough for the consumer and if Sony wants to really cash in on this format war victory, it may have to take a bath in the short term, selling the pricier components below cost in order to have market penetration. Technological development is always moving forward and the cost of those components will inevitably drop providing Sony with profitability but what they need now is to restore consumer confidence.

What about those of us who bought HD-DVD movies? Are we "screwed, blu-rayed, and tattooed"? Not really. HD-DVD players will be going for dirt-cheap and you may want to invest in a multi-format player like the one from LG so you can play your "legacy" HD-DVD discs.

Also, since no new content will be produced, there won't be any need for the software updates to make the players compatible. Software updates? Yep, both of the HD formats use an interactive layer that is essentially computer software. In the case of BD, it's a version of Java called BDJava. As content providers upgrade the Java versions used in the creation of the BD discs, players need to be updated to support these features. Internet aware BD players like the Playstation3 can update themselves automatically as do PC based BD drives.

Speaking computers, maybe this is the sign that Steve Jobs was waiting for to announce formal Blu-Ray support on the Mac? Considering that he has a seat on the Blu-Ray Committee one wonders why he hasn't jumped up and supported the format since day one.

Apple Blu-Ray Support: What's taking so long?

I have been thinking about this topic for quite some time now. What is preventing Apple from officially supporting BD drives and HD content from them? Steve Jobs is on the Blu-Ray Steering Committee for Pete's sake!

Not technology. With the latest refresh of the Mac Pro, even the base model has hardware support for decoding the HD content with ease. MacBooks and iMacs have been that way for a while as well.

Not encryption. The HDCP stack is now supported fully by all of the components.

Not licensing. iTunes/AppleTV already has access to a ton of HD content.

The only answer (that I can think of) is money. Playing HD content over DVI or HDMI requires royalty payments to the patent owners. My guess is that Steve is waiting for DisplayPort (the royalty-free VESA standard for HD connectivity) to become prevalent. He will then announce new video card options for the upgradeable Macs and new version of the MacBook to support this technology. At this point the drives will become suddenly available and viewing BD content on the Mac will only require a quick software update (which removes the blocks in place).

Oddly enough the catalyst for this will be Windows Vista. With the release of Service Pack 1, Microsoft will add support for UEFI (making more video cards compatible with Mac) and DisplayPort as well. This will drive changes in the video industry with new graphics cards and displays coming out in force later this year. Add HP throwing their weight in the UEFI arena and we can see a lot more options for the Mac in the near future.