Mylos

The MacBook Air was what I was waiting for (I pre-ordered the SSD version just before the online Apple Store buckled under the load). I have a MacBook Pro 15″, and because of its weight I end up leaving it at work and not carry it with me at all times (the MacBook is hardly any lighter). Sure, the Air has drastically limited connectivity (the lack of Gigabit Ethernet is probably what I will regret most, even though I clocked my Airport Extreme at 90 true Mbps throughput). Other minuses include the glossy screen (instead of an anti-reflective one), the MacBook-like chiclet keyboard rather than the much nicer MacBook Pro keyboard), or the sealed non user-replaceable battery.

I suspect people deriding it are people whose main machine is a laptop. My main machine is a tower desktop, and no laptop is ever going to compete in terms of capacity and expandability. The drive on the laptop is merely a cache for the desktop where the real data lives. The compromises the Air makes are acceptable ones in exchange for a machine that is light enough for me to carry all the time. I was considering getting an Asus Eee PC prior to the show, and the MacBook Air is a vastly more capable and polyvalent machine.

Apart from that, the show was a relatively quiet one with few truly noteworthy new products. Here are the main highlights:

• Matias did not have the Tactilepro 2.0 keyboard on display. I love mine (a version 1 with the ALPS keyswitch) and would like to get a spare, but apparently they have parted ways with the manufacturer of the new Matias-designed keyswitches and are working on a 3.0 version for later this year.

• Fujitsu were demonstrating an ultra-small, bus-powered document scanner, the S300M. Unfortunately, once again for reasons due to licensing of the bundled software, they could not release a single SKU that would work with both PCs and Macs.

• The German company Project Wizards was demonstrating Merlin, a project management program similar to Microsoft Project. The scheduling and load-leveling algorithms look at least as capable as Project 2000, and they told me the next version will allow team members to report on task advancement by simply contacting a built-in web server. Looks like a promising product.

• Samsung showed the CLP-300 which they bill the world’s smallest color laser printer. Indeed it looks roughly the same size as my monochrome HP LaserJet 1320, and much smaller than my bulky HP 2605dn, that’s quite an achievement. I am wary of Samsung lasers since buying the CLP-500 for Kefta a few years back. The print quality was fine, but it was ludicrously slow, taking something like 5 minutes per color page to print. The CLP-300 seems reasonably fast, faster than the 2605dn at any rate.

• Samsung was also showing off the gorgeous XL30 30″ LED-backlit LCD monitor. LED backlight is more environmentally friendly, does not shift colors as it ages unlike a TFT backlight, and gives a wider color gamut. Unfortunately, its price is a princely “between $6000 and $7000”.

• Microsoft was showing off Office 2008, emphasizing ease of use and productivity rather than features for features’ sake for a change.

  They even set up a bloggers-only salon to curry favor, complete with Internet cafe and snacks.

• I tried Nikon’s humongous AF-S VR Nikkor 200mm f/2G IF-ED lens. Very heavy but impressive piece of gear.
• Canon was showing off the new Flash-based HD camcorders they introduced at CES. They are not that much smaller than the HDV ones. The HV30 replaces the excellent HV20, but the only real improvements are 1080p30 mode and an articulating LCD.

I have been living and working in downtown San Francisco for almost eight years now. Until a month ago, my office window (right) used to overlook Third Street and the Moscone center. San Francisco is a popular convention destination (one wonders why proctologists seem to prefer it to, say, Detroit) but Macworld Expo is definitely the biggest show in town. Restaurants and hotels are taken by storm, taxis become scarce, traffic gets even snarlier and the lines at Metron eateries cross the threshold of ludicrousness. So here are a few tips for Macworld attendees to have a better time and not caught in tourist traps.

Transportation

Driving in San Francisco is a non-starter. Traffic is horrendous, parking is scarce and you would lose far too much time just getting around. SF Muni is a pretty good public transport system (at least by admittedly paltry US standards) and their 1, 3 or 7 day Passport passes are good value.

Cars are mostly useless inside the city, but nice if you want to drive to make a Fry’s run or a day trip to Marin across the Golden Gate. If you must drive, the friendly folks at Reliable Rent-a-Car will give you decent rates on Toyotas. Until I bought a car last month, they were my go-to place for when I needed a car.

Lunch

San Francisco has the best food in the United States, but you wouldn’t know if from the overpriced eateries in a three block radius. The Firewood Cafe and Buckhorn Grill in the Metron are actually reasonably decent, but the throngs of convention-goers mean long lines. Mo’s Grille has excellent burgers (I recommend the aptly named “Belly Buster”), and since access to it is a little tortuous, you have a fighting chance (it is literally just above the Moscone South).

Ranging a little further, Nova has decent burgers and a lovely lobster quesadilla, and the new Westfield Mall three blocks to the west has a decent food court. Some good local chains are Bistro Burger, S.F. Soup Co. or Café Madeleine (official birthday cake purveyor to Kefta).

That said, the best lunch experience is to take the historic F line streetcar to the Ferry Building Marketplace with its wide variety of gourmet food stores and eateries. I heartily recommend the clam chowder at Ferry Plaza Seafood (it used to be my Friday lunch of choice) or the eclectic fare at Boulette’s Larder. Chocolates from Michael Recchiuti or fresh-pressed olive oil from Stonehouse make for great (and edible) souvenirs.

Staying hydrated is important when you expect to spend an entire day on the show floor. There is a Whole Foods store a mere block away where you can buy any required provisions.

Dining

Dining in San Francisco is an embarrassment of riches, it would be a shame to settle for overpriced hotel food. A word to the wise: most of the better places are hooked into the OpenTable reservation system which makes finding a good place with availability a much less hit-and-miss affair. This year Macworld coincides with the annual Dine About Town event where participating restaurants will offer specially discounted menus.

Equipment

Murphy’s law will strike at the worst possible moment. If you need help with your Mac, the geniuses at the San Francisco Apple Store (or the smaller Chestnut Street and Stonestown locations) can help. It’s also good to keep in mind the Apple stores all offer free WiFi connectivity.

If you need commodity spare parts like a USB hub in a hurry, Central Computers is a mere block away and carries a wide assortment, albeit PC-centric.

If you are an attendee and have questions I have not answered, please feel free to email me, my contact info is at the right.

I flew into London today. I took the adorable Shaheen B. to dinner at The Ledbury.

Between courses, I asked her to marry me. She said Yes. The only plausible explanation for this lapse in judgement is temporary insanity. I couldn’t be happier.

P.S. the ring is guaranteed to be De Beers-free and not a blood diamond, courtesy of the nice folks at Brilliant Earth, who by the greatest of coincidences are just across the street from my office.

I thought I would escape the frenzy of iPhone hype by filtering out any mentions of it from my feed reader. In fact, I was quite resentful of the way the iPhone launch pushed out the release of OS X 10.5 Leopard to October 2007. On my way to my cousin’s wedding on Friday June 29th, I passed by the San Francisco Apple Store and saw the line. It was actually fairly tame, as it only went halfway around the block (when the store originally opened, the line went all the way around and spilled over into Market Street).

Of course, when I came back, I had to see one. One of the petty annoyances with my Nokia E62 was how it would take several seconds for the address book to load. The iPhone, despite having a much more computationally intensive user interface, still manages to have lightning-quick responsiveness to user input. That itself convinced me to buy one.

The iPhone mostly meets or even exceeds the hype. The user interface is exceptionally good, let alone for a version 1.0 product. Some quick notes from a Nokia E62 switcher (my previous phone was also using Cingular/AT&T):

• Email and web are very snappy. The SSL implementation on the E62 would take forever to negotiate with my home IMAP server (as in several minutes), the iPhone’s is instant. The E62’s web browser, despite being based on the same WebKit code base as Apple’s Safari, could not run two concurrent AJAX XMLHttpRequest concurrently, Safari has no such problems.
• The battery life is very short, well under 2 days, and it takes a long time to fully charge.
• The glass screen does not scratch, but it does show fingerprints and smudges.
• The virtual keyboard is surprisingly effective. This was the single biggest area where I thought it would fall short, but it actually performs far better than the E62’s chiclet keys. Part of the reason is that the E62’s keys actually wobble when you press them, which doesn’t make for precise typing, and they are so tiny anyway that it’s hard to type accurately without pressing other keys in the process. The iPhone’s magnification effect as well as the fact you can slide your finger to correct a misregistered virtual keypress, makes for much faster typing. The predictive text engine is also far superior to schemes like Symbian’s, or T9. T9 is unbearably annoying in the same vein as Microsoft Word’s noxious autocorrect functionality or Clippy, I always disable T9 on any phone that has it, the iPhone’s system is unobtrusive and eminently usable in comparison.
• The sound quality on the iPhone is not at the same level as the E62, specially for the speakerphone.
• No voice recorder. A rather silly omission.
• The calendar does not support To-Do list items from iCal. This is ridiculous.
• You cannot use iTunes music files as either the ring tone or alarm sound. This was probably to appease AT&T and the RIAA, who seem to believe they have a divine right to make you pay over again and again for the same music. Even if I were prepared to accept their racketeering and pay the obscenely expensive charge for a ring tone, I seriously doubt they would have what I used for mine on the E62, the finale theme from Sibelius’ Kullervo op. 9.
• The recessed phone jack is incompatible with most earphones like my ER-4P, but it works just fine with B&O A8, whose jack is actually a fairly thin molded connector wrapped in a rubber jacket that easily slips off to accommodate the iPhone jack.
• Safari has no option to remember passwords for you, unlike the desktop version, and it does not recognize the standard http://login:password@site/ convention either, which makes logging onto Temboz harder than it has to be.
• The Bluetooth functionality in the iPhone is pretty minimal, limited to using Bluetooth wireless headsets and not much more. You cannot beam business cards or photos. Unlike the E62, I cannot use it as a modem for either my MacBook Pro or my Nokia N800. Since there is no SSH client on the iPhone, this could bite me when I need emergency access. Then again, the $20 unlimited data plan for iPhones is half the price of my previous $39.99 unlimited data plan.
• Not supporting Java or Flash is a feature, not a bug.
• The camera, as could be expected, is mediocre. We all know the only purpose is to snap facsimiles of notes, billboards, flyers. whiteboards and the like.
• The calculator is minimal. It does not support RPN and does not have either scientific or financial capabilities.
• You can specify 24-hour time format, but there is no way to specify ISO date format.
• The iPhone seems incompatible with my SendStation PocketDock Line Out USB, and thus I cannot connect it to my Ray Samuels Hornet pocket headphone amplifier and full-size Sennheiser and AKG headphones. It is also incompatible with Apple’s own universal AV dock, and displays a warning message telling you so. Then again, since it is a GSM phone, the annoying pulsating buzz induced by GSM would make such an arrangement impractical.

Update (2007-07-13):

It must be the Friday 13th effect at work… My iPhone seems to have developed a defective proximity sensor. The phone works as a speakerphone, but no longer turns the headset speaker on when I bring it to my ear. Resetting and even restoring the phone does not help, it’s probably a hardware issue.

Fortunately, the SF Apple Store Genius Bar let me in this evening without an appointment, and swapped it for a new one. This was the first time they had seen this particular problem, and they told me Apple’s policy for the first month is to do full replacements and collect field failures for analysis. The repair process afterwards seems to be still up in the air. I would recommend they have swap or loaner units on hand, as people are less likely to tolerate not having a phone than not being able to listen to music for a week.

I upgraded my MacBook Pro to the third-generation model so I can bump up my RAM to 4GB. Aperture and CS3 are very resource-intensive, and the 2GB upper limit of my first-generation MBP was somewhat constraining.

I just transferred my files over using Apple’s migration utility and target firewire mode. The process, while not 100% automated (it did not transfer X11, for instance, or some of the preferences), is far smoother than any Windows equivalent. Here are my first impressions on the new model:

• The new, environmentally friendly mercury-free LED backlight is definitely more blue in tone than the pinkish cold-cathode fluorescent backlight on the old model. The default ColorSync monitor profile does a good job of compensating for this, however. There is some vignetting on the 15″ screen (darkening in the corners). I wonder how the 17″ model fares, and whether they had to add additional LEDs for a more even backlight illumination.
• This machine is fast. It blows my dual-2GHz G5 PowerMac out of the water in all benchmarks other than disk I/O. Unsurprisingly, it is also much faster than the first-generation machine, specially on graphics but also on disk I/O.
• It does not heat up quite as much as the older Core Duo model, the heat level, while high, never reaches a potentially dangerous temperature. This is probably due to improved power management, as running two Parallels virtual machine will bring it up to the same pant-scorching levels as the Core Duo.