AddingUnderstanding

An Apple store is so very desperately needed in Boise. Please Apple if you're listening don't leave us stuck between long drives and our unsatisfactory local choices. Sure we have Boise Mac Life which looks like a great store. When you look a little deeper, though, the advice has been suspect (should one really wait six months to start using Leopard?), the prices are inflated (the "cash discount" price is the list price and the list price shown is higher) and the service leaves us wanting.

Earlier this week we returned home and the MacBook hard drive promptly died. When it came back today it had the wrong OS on it -- a problem I've never encountered with Apple's service directly. Sure it had a nice embroidered Marware keyboard cover, but the time I'm left looking at that waiting to reinstall the operating system on a blank disk just so I can then do the file recovery is making me not like it so much. (Though I sense there are some Drupal keyboard covers in the offing).

Reading through my RSS queue this morning this set of photos sent me back to days of yore. Instantly I was transported from the modern hotel lobby to the Laser 128 sitting in my childhood home and all of the amazing things we managed to do with AppleSoft.

Certainly software mashups are more prevalent but it seems like cool hardware mashups get less coverage than they should.

Recently getting into job looking mode has led me to brush off the Automator routines for combining PDF documents into one document. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be working in OS X 10.5 (or 10.5.1). A Apple Discussion Forum post suggests I'm not the only one encountering the problem.

When you run the action in Automator it works like a charm. When running the action as a plug-in in the Finder the action swirls for a moment and then nothing happens. From my testing it does not seem to matter what is done with the output of "Combine PDF Pages" nothing happens from there on.

It is a day early for Friday funnies but this email from Examsoft today was too good to pass up:

Dear Administrator,

SofTest was certified to run on Mac OS X running Windows XP with the beta version of Boot Camp in the spring of 2006. August 31, 2007 marked completion of our first complete academic year (9/1/06 - 8/31/07) supporting this platform. Over this past academic year no issues have been reported to us running SofTest on this platform with either XP or Vista. We purchased the new Leopard OS (with the now supported version of Boot Camp) and have tested SofTest running XP and Vista on this platform without incident. SofTest is now certified to run on Leopard through Boot Camp. We will continue to support SofTest's use on this platform moving forward.

Apple's release of Leopard (http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/bootcamp.html) confirms that not only is Apple moving forward with Boot Camp, it is now an integral part of their operating system and contains its own "Boot Camp Setup Assistant" to simplify Windows installation. It appears that their marketing strategy is to make every Mac computer Windows-compliant as they now even install all necessary drivers. Based upon Apple's aggressive marketing, it seems inevitable that Mac's will be shipping with Windows pre-installed in the very near future. Some vendors are already offering pre-installation of Windows on Mac's as an option.

Sincerely,

Maribel Olvera ES Client Support Manager ExamSoft Worldwide, Inc. 350 Jim Moran Blvd., Suite 120 Deerfield Beach , FL 33442 [O] 866.429.8889 ext. 116 [C] 561.573.1090 [F] 954.429.0733

So the much awaited gPhone, nee the Android OS for the open handset alliance, debuted this week. Yawn. So Google's going to hock an OS that while it has the trendy underpinnings of Linux and the Open Source code-word attached won't at the end of the day (or year rather) give us much more than we already have on our Blackberries, Treos and iPhones. (Not to even mention the plethora of Windows Mobile cell phones with these capabilities).

The story of the Leopard Install. Install Leopard... oooh ahh wonderful. Open mail... wait for database conversion. See that Mail Act On is disabled. Sob. Cry. AHHHHHH. Find this post about Mail Act On and start breathing again.