Mac

Since I got my iPad six weeks ago, I have only used my MacBook Air once.

I am not going to repeat the extensive reviews posted elsewhere, but after over a month of extensive use, give some perspective for those who don’t get the point of the iPad, or other similar devices.

First of all, commentators have focused on entirely the wrong thing: feeds and speeds, missing features like multitasking or Flash, Apple’s iron fist over app developers. The iPad begins and ends with the user experience, and that means multi-touch and the incredibly long battery life. That’s why comparisons to stylus-driven devices like the unsuccessful Microsoft Tablet PC miss the point. The amazing battery life, specially on standby (I have never managed to go under 60%, even after three days without charging), means you can use it as a real mobile device and not subconsciously watch the battery meter.

Is it a perfect device? Of course not. Mobile Safari has a hard time with complex and heavy pages like those from my Temboz RSS/Atom feed reader, the screen is too prone to reflections and fingerprints, and Apple’s use of high-quality materials like aluminium and glass instead of plastic and acrylic makes it heavier to hold than necessary.

As to whether it is a replacement for a laptop, the answer is yes and no. The iPad is the first in an entirely new class of devices, and I think it has the potential to replace desktop and laptop computers as the dominant form of consumer computing. The touch user interface makes for a very engaging user experience, far more than using a mouse and keyboard ever did. To be sure, the input limitations do not make it a very efficient content creation device, but that’s where opinions diverge.

I use desktop computers for real work (an eight-core Mac Pro with 12G of RAM and a 30″ display at home, a quad-core iMac with a 27″ display at work). A laptop just feels too constricting for extended use. I have the luxury of using proper desktops because I do not travel much for work, and the extent of my mobile use is reading books or browsing the web while commuting by bus. The improvements that most benefit me are in synchronizing my iPad with multiple computers, and offline capability (I got the WiFi model since there is no way I will pay AT&T for their garbage excuse of a network).

Road warriors need a more featured device, even if cramped, and will not be so impressed. I think genuine mobile users are a minority, however. Surveys in the past showed that most laptops are tethered, i.e. users would unplug them from home, take them to work and plug them there, and back. That is why Windows laptop makers introduced monstrosities like Pentium 4 powered laptops with battery lives that barely exceeded the hour. Laptop sales exceeded those of desktops because many people wanted the option of mobility, even if they seldom, if ever, availed themselves of it, and a less obtrusive presence in their homes than the typical beige box with its rat’s warren of cables. Those people would be better served by a well-designed desktop like the iMac and an iPad for the occasional mobile use.

After updating OS X on my work iMac, I noticed XEmacs and DDD take about 30 seconds to launch, behavior I did not see before the upgrade, and do not see at home either. The 30 seconds are suspiciously similar to a name lookup timeout—I am dependent on whatever lame excuse for a DNS caching server is used in my landlord’s 2WIRE router, whereas I run unbound at home.

Sure enough, running a packet trace shows strange DNS lookups:

tellann:src root# tcpdump udp port 53
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on en0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 65535 bytes
13:18:51.819226 IP tellann.58811 > home.domain: 5470+ A? tellann.gateway.2wire.net. (43)
13:18:51.840258 IP home.domain > tellann.58811: 5470* 1/1/1 A 192.168.1.81 (150)
13:18:51.841196 IP tellann.58057 > home.domain: 18746+ A? /tmp/launch-4UITkL/org.x.gateway.2wire.net. (60)
13:18:51.870233 IP home.domain > tellann.58057: 18746 Refused*- 0/0/0 (512)
13:18:52.842654 IP tellann.58057 > home.domain: 18746+ A? /tmp/launch-4UITkL/org.x.gateway.2wire.net. (60)
13:18:52.865696 IP home.domain > tellann.58057: 18746 Refused*- 0/0/0 (512)

The code>DISPLAY environment variable has changed to:

tellann ~>echo $DISPLAY
/tmp/launch-4UITkL/org.x:0

Before 10.6.3, it did not have the org.x bit. This whole approach of using a DISPLAY set to point to a UNIX domain socket was set up by Apple to allow launching X11.app on demand when a X client is run, but obviously many clients make the incorrect assumption that the part before the :0 display number is a hostname if it has a dot in it, and this is biting us.

The solution is simple: just set DISPLAY to :0 prior to launching XEmacs or DDD, and presto—no more delays, e.g:

env DISPLAY=:0 xemacs&

The decline in computer prices in the last 10 years is not an unqualified blessing. Something had to give, and component quality is one of the areas where manufacturers skimp. There is no room in a $500 computer for a $100 CD-ROM drive, even a quiet yet ultra-fast one like the Kenwood 72X drives.

Another area where components have been cheapened is keyboards and mice. The impact on mice is lessened by the simultaneous transition from gunk-prone mechanical ball mice to more precise optical ones. The latter are cheaper to manufacture because they use solid state circuitry and far fewer mechanical components, but they are still pitched as a premium product.

Keyboards are another story. Anyone who writes or codes for a living (i.e. anyone who uses a computer for anything but games) benefits from a good keyboard. Longtime Byte Magazine columnist Jerry Pournelle used to rave about his Northgate OmniKey with a layout customized specifically for him. There are basically two main technologies: mechanical keyswitches and rubber dome ones. The first give that old-fashioned “clickety-clack” feeling, the second are quieter, but often a bit mushy (although there are some excellent rubber dome keyboards as well).

A few years ago, I bought the excellent Matias Tactilepro 1 keyboard. It uses premium Alps mechanical keyswitches, and has all the Macintosh special characters combinations silk-screened on the keys so you don’t have to remember that the copyright sign © is Option-g. I liked it so much that just to be on the safe side, I bought two.

At Macworld 2007, Matias announced its replacement by the Tactilepro 2, which replaces the Alps keyswitches by ones of Matias’ own design. They claimed the change was due to Alps discontinuing the manufacture of its keyswitches. By Macworld 2008, the 2.0 was itself discontinued, and the promised version 3 replacement kept being postponed until they finally announced a release date of January 2010. Interestingly, they are said to use Alps keyswitches. I guess they were not so discontinued after all…

While my version 1 Tactilepros are still working fine, the silk-screening on some of the keys has faded, and they have accumulated a fair bit of gunk like hairs under the keys. I ordered two version 3 replacements (I passed on the version 2, and read many reports complaining about it) and received them today.

Matias Tactilepro 1 (top) and 3 (bottom)

The differences are subtle:

• The top of the keyboard is now a translucent milky white instead of transparent. That should help reduce the visibility of hairs and other crud that lodges itself under the keys, and is very hard to eradicate afterwards, even with canned air.
• The power key on top is gone, replaced by a dual-use Escape and power key.
• The warranty was dialed all the way down from 5 years to 1 year, hardly consistent with the claims of improved build quality.
• They now claim the keys are laser-etched and thus more resistant to rubbing out the labels. Obviously it is too early to assess the accuracy of that statement.
• The feel of the keys is slightly different in a way that’s hard to describe. They seem a little bit quieter, but just as precise.
• The 2-port built-in USB 1.0 hub was replaced by a 3-port USB 2.0 hub
• There is no tacky tactilepro.com URL on the space bar any more.
• The typeface is no longer italic and somewhat less elegant. I am a fast hunt-and-peck typist, not a touch-typist, and they feel canted backwards, much like early flat-screen monitors seemed concave compared to convex CRTs.

The warranty change is a bummer, but the keyboard is still a huge improvement over standard ones, specially Apple’s nasty laptop-style chiclet keyboards that have been included with all recent desktop models. For people who have to type a lot, it is well worth the expense.

Update (2012-03-05):

Sure enough, the space bar on mine failed after 14 months. I contacted Matias last week for support, with no response so far.

One alternative worth considering is the upcoming Das Keyboard for Mac, which uses Cherry gold keyswitches. It doesn’t have option characters engraved on the key caps, however.

Update (2017-10-05):

I replaced my Tactilepros with the CODE Keyboard. It’s not perfect either, the black coating on the keys wore off on some keys like the corner of the space bar on the one I keep at work, but the backlit keys are a god-send and my colleagues find the quieter yet still very tactile key action much less objectionable.

Interestingly, Cherry, the maker of the key switches in the CODE and many other premium keyboards, is a sister company of ZF, the makers of the automatic transmissions in BMWs.

When I got my first Intel MacBook Pro, I purchased a license of Parallels Desktop, which was then pretty much the only game in town for PC virtualization on Mac OS X. At some point, when I got my Mac Pro, I switched to VMware Fusion because of the initial bugginess of the Parallels 4.0 initial release, and the competitive upgrade was almost free. When I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I switched back to Parallels because Fusion doesn’t work when you boot Snow Leopard in a 64-bit kernel, which I have now made the default on my Mac Pro (Fusion 3.0 was just announced, with 64-bit kernel support).

Pretty much the only apps I run in Parallels are:

• Microsoft Money 2001 (I need to write a webapp to replace this)
• IE8 (for testing purposes only, of course)
• EAC (sometimes gets better secure rips than Max)

When I installed Parallels 4.0, I was shocked by how much integration between the Windows VM and OS X is enabled by default. I don’t trust Windows one whit, and the last thing I want is for a Windows VM to become a vector for Windows malware to infect my Mac. I disabled all the integration features, and only access Windows files via file sharing where OS X gets to read and write Windows files, but the Windows VM stays securely sandboxed in its ghetto. Hideous Windows icons in the dock are also a distraction.

Parallels and VMware have been focusing on adding integration features to their virtualization products. They probably believe there are few performance optimizations left to be achieved, but if they continue with reckless disregard for security and the contamination of the OS X user experience with Windows ugliness, I will have to switch to VirtualBox, as its spareness looks increasingly like a virtue.

The Image Capture utility in Snow Leopard works with my Epson 3170 flatbed scanner, and is far superior to the clunky and bloated Epson Scan software. What’s more, it can automatically deskew documents that are not perfectly level. Just a small touch, but a nice one. Thanks, Apple!

The new Preview PDF editing behavior is a major step back in usability, however.