Adapting to a new MAC

Recently I got an email at work saying that my laptop was due for replacement. The email asked me to choose whether to get a Lenovo laptop or an Apple MAC,. I am not really a fan of Apple products due to their habit of ignoring standard interface conventions. Nevertheless I was persuaded by some co-workers that clicking the apple button was the right choice. The new laptop was delivered very promptly after I clicked on the button and suddenly I had a shiny new MacBook Pro sitting on my desk and I had no choice but to become friends with it.

• On the positive side
• The hardware is impressive  The laptop is slim and light and the screen is crystal clear with a very high resolution. It can even be read outdoors on a sunny day.
• It comes with a solid state disk drive which means that it is lightning fast.
• The CIO office in IBM has set up a process http://setupmymac.ibm.com which  makes it trivially easy to setup all of the essential applications most people need in IBM in one go. This meant I was productive very quickly.
• On the negative side:
• As many of you know, MAC uses the command key for most  situations where most normal computers expect  you to press the control key. This is quite annoying at first, but I am surprised how quickly I managed to learn the new key sequences. This inventing of their own UI conventions is not ideal, especially for people like me who have to regularly use a variety of different operating systems. However, I think I will learn to live with it.
• What is really annoying is that Apple is into minimal design and hence they decided to remove any keyboard keys that they think are rarely used. One of these is the break key. Many users rarely if ever use this key, but in Lotus Notes there is a convention that you can use ctrl-break to abort any operation which is taking too long. Unfortunately this is a key combination that I find myself wanting to use frequently. A Google search threw up a few suggestions for MAC compatible alternatives, but none of them seem to work.
• Another missing key is the escape key, but this is compensated by the Touch Bar.  This is a cool strip which contains virtual keys that change depending upon what app is running. For example, whenever an application is running that can accept the escape key, a small esc appears in the touch bar. Likewise whenever Spotify is playing the touch bar has virtual keys for play, skip etc.  (even if it is running in the background).  This is a nifty idea, but most applications don't take advantage of it yet (probably because it is only available on newer MACs). You can also customise the touch bar so it works the way you like.
• I am a big fan of Bluetooth and I (wrongly) assumed that a modern laptop like a MacBook Pro would have excellent Bluetooth support. To be honest I find the poor Bluetooth performance to be the most frustrating thing about the new laptop. Initially, I connected a Bluetooth mouse and it worked except that I need to turn the mouse on and off every few hours to make my laptop realise that it was still there. Then I connected a Bluetooth keyboard and things got even worse, the laptop looses connection to either the mouse or the keyboard about once per hour (it can be even more often). Finally I added a Bluetooth headset and this seemed to overload the laptop's Bluetooth sub-system completely. The different devices seem to conflict with each other. For example, if I turn off the Bluetooth keyboard (which I often have to do),  the sound on my headset is likely to go up or down. Overall it makes me want to go back to wired devices (if the laptop had proper sockets to plug them into).

Overall I have to say I am still undecided about my decision to go down the Apple route. I am not (yet) looking to take my old Lenovo Linux laptop out of retirement, but I am a still a long way from being converted into an Apple fanboy.

My Love/Hate relationship with my new Mac

Slightly over 10 years ago I bought an Advent home computer in PCworld. It really served us well and never gave any real problems especially once I upgraded it from Windows XP to Ubuntu. However, I recently decided that I should upgrade to something more modern and I decided that I needed to splash out an buy reasonably good hardware if I expected this new PC to last as long as its predecessor.

I was advised by friends to consider buying Apple. I don't have very happy experiences with Mac-OS, but my Mac loving friends tell me that I just needed to be more patient and once I learn the oddities of Mac-OS I would eventually fall in love with it.

I briefly considered buying an iMac 27", but I balked at paying almost €2k for a PC. Eventually I settled on buying a Mac mini and a separate ASUS 27" screen which reduced the price down to slightly over €900. Having the screen and PC in one unit is handy, but didn't justify doubling the price. Overall I am quite happy with my purchase, but my opinion of Mac-OS has not really been a love affair.

I really only have two problems with the new system

1. I have an old HP OfficeJet 4500 which  should be capable of printring, scanning and faxing. However, due to a long standing fault in the paper feed mechanism it only works as a scanner. Linux just calls this a generic scanner and it works fine. Mac-OS recognizes it asa HP Officejet 4500, but even when I download a special driver from the HP web site it refuses to work (a helpful error message "internal error"). 
2. The computer refuses to suspend when I select sleep from the system menu, but at least it does suspend OK based on an inactivity time.

However, there are also some features of Mac-OS that continue to annoy me e.g.:

• There are a well documented set of control key combinations which are almost universally implemented in every computer system (e.g. crtl-C to cut, ctrl-V to paste etc.) It seems that Apple hate following any standard that they didn't invent themselves, but these key combinations are too well known to be ignored so they compromised by implementing them, but not with the control key. Instead they implement these with another key whose name that I don't know (it is in between the control and alt keys). This is OK once you practice using a Mac for long enough, but I still make the mistake of expecting the control key to work the same that it does in every other operating system.
• Likewise the middle scroll wheel on the mouse works the wrong way on the Mac. I know that Apple probably claim that there is some reason why the way they implemented the mouse scroll button is better than everyone else, but anyone (like me) who uses more than one type of computer will hate when they don't go with the consensus,

On the plus side I find that there are normally more help documents online for Mac than there are for Linux.

I am a pretty persistent guy so I will stick it out a while longer before I take the nuclear option and install Ubuntu on my new system.

My first Hardware hack - a stand for an iPOD touch

Stand for ipod touch
Originally uploaded by Brian O'Donovan

One of the problems with my daughter's new iPOD touch is that when she places it flat on the table, she is unable to easily view it while lying in bed. This was causing her to have to hold the device in her hands which was not ideal.

I tried several physical and on-line stores to see if I could buy a stand for holding it propped up. Unfortunately I had no luck so I was forced to build my own from a wire clothes hangar. It might not be as elegant as Steve Jobs would design, but it works and hence I am happy with my handiwork.

Which mobile phone provider is nicest to the Apple fanboys

I think that the iPhone looks like a nice phone, but I am not personally tempted to shell out serious money for a phone which is entirely locked down (and I am very happy with my current Android phone). However, many of my friends are serious apple fanboys and since today is the first day that the new iPhone 4 is being officially sold in Ireland, many have been twittering all day about the relative length of the queues in different shops.

In the USA, many iPhone fans are less than thrilled with the fact that they can only be bought with an expensive AT&T service contract (apparently the service is also not very reliable). In Ireland it is possible to buy iPhones either free of contract or with a contract from any of the service providers. According to Electric News, the different mobile phone service providers had a radically different attitude towards facilitating the Apple fanboys who can't wait to get their hands on the new device:

• Three Ireland opened its stores in Dublin, Waterford, Limerick, Cork, Galway and Killarney from a minute past midnight.
• Rival network O2 opened the doors of some stores in Dublin, Drogheda, Tralee, Galway, Cork andLimerick at 8am. However, the mobile operator said it was restricting iPhone 4 sales to existing customers for the initial launch period.
• Vodafone stores opened at the normal time, but the online store began selling the handset at 7.30am.

There seems to be a serious shortage of stock with all of the outlets reporting that they were sold out by the evening time when I got a chance to check. This is probably a reflection of the huge rise in popularity in all smartphone types. All of the outlets were also reporting that the Android based HTC Desire is also sold out eventhough that has been on the market for a while.