An Architect's View

Some people were not very excited about Apple's keynote yesterday but the 1.1.3 firmware update for the iPhone is plenty enough for me, along with Google's updated mobile apps. I use Gmail a lot on my iPhone and one of my clients has standardized on Google Mail/Docs for their communications so I'm constantly reading mail and documents on my iPhone. Gmail was OK on the iPhone and Google Docs was bearable but Google Reader was a nightmare. At the weekend, I noticed Gmail suddenly got a lot nicer with a very iPhone-style UI, sliding panels between labels and mail. Great... now what about the other apps? Tuesday night, I got home from said client's site and eagerly updated my iPhone firmware. The new "location" feature in the Maps application is very sweet (and seems sufficiently accurate for my needs). Then I started reorganizing my home screen. Screens. That's when I noticed that Google had updated most of its apps to be iPhone-friendly. Google Docs makes a great reader now, even for fairly large spreadsheets. Google Reader is a huge improvement! So now my iPhone has:

• 43actions - a great little GTD (Getting Things Done) task manager
• Calculator
• Calendar
• Clock - with 10 cities
• Maps
• Notes
• Stocks
• Weather

Followed by:

• Google Docs
• Google Mail
• Google Reader
• Belfry Scientific Calculator
• My client's Google Docs
• My client's Google Mail
• ColdFusion 8 QuickDocs
• IMDB - I'm always looking up movies and actors so I need that accessible!

Then my menu bar is:

• Mail
• Phone
• Safari
• Settings

On screen two, I have a row of games:

• Bejeweled
• Code Breader - a simple take on "Mastermind", a childhood favorite
• InARow touch - aka "Connect 4", another childhood favorite
• Mahjong

Then my multimedia tools:

• Camera
• iTunes
• iPod
• Photos
• Text
• YouTube

And, yes, they are in alphabetical groups. Call me anal retentive and see if I care! Anyway, a big thank you to Apple and Google (and those games companies) for making my iPhone an even more lovable and addictive little toy!

A Leopard is in my future. I've been holding off upgrading to Leopard until Adobe (and others) have updates available to ensure compatibility. My financial controller (Jay) pointed out that it's year end and if I need any "last minute" software or hardware I should buy it a.s.a.p. Smart woman, my wife! So I just ordered Leopard, a car charger for my iPhone and a 750Gb USB 2.0 HD that I can stick on my Apple BaseStation as a network drive. 750Gb for just $230... amazing... and scary how cheap storage has become... The question is: can I resist upgrading until all the software I use has been updated?

You used to be able to go to the online Apple store and buy iTunes gift certificates for people and send them directly via email. In fact, my "wish list" used to contain a link directly to that page on the store in case anyone wanted to buy me a certificate (thank you to those folks who have!). I just clicked the link to check it and found myself on the home page of the Apple store. Huh? So I hunted around and you can only buy gift cards online now, which Apple will dutifully mail out to the lucky recipient. So I clicked the "Chat Now" link and got online with Lori. She informed me that the only way to buy these email gift certificates is to fire up iTunes and purchase them from the iTunes Music Store itself. Lori helpfully pointed out "iTunes is free"... So apparently Apple think that if you're buying music for someone, you'll download and install iTunes in order to do so. I can't say I'm very impressed with this change.

Today Jay & I went to the AT&T store and bought his and hers iPhones. I have to say that I'm even more impressed with the phone than I ever could have imagined. The virtual keyboard is good enough to type blog entries and the overall integration with email, calendar, contacts and browser is stunning!

I know a lot of people rushed to installed Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) last night and my friends found it very odd that I was not one of those early adopters. I've owned and used Macs day-in, day-out for almost two decades, since the early System 6 days. I've been through two changes of hardware (68000 to PPC, PPC to Intel) and several of the "major" O/S upgrades (I skipped System 8 and System 9, for reasons that anyone who actually used them will happily expound upon for hours!). I'm on my sixth or seventh Apple laptop and my fourth Apple desktop. I'm a huge fan boy. So why did I not pre-order Leopard and rush to install it?

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Remember when Adobe gave away trial copies of Flex Builder on a CD with magazines? Several people in the ColdFusion community bemoaned the fact that Adobe wasn't doing this for ColdFusion (and the usual complaints about Adobe not doing its bit to promote ColdFusion blah blah blah)... Cop a load of this cover shot of MacWorld magazine with ColdFusion 8 on the free CD accompanying the magazine!! (via Andy Jarrett)

You've probably read it elsewhere but I ran through the experience myself and wanted to try to save some folks some pain... If you try to install CS3 for OS X when you have Safari 3 Beta installed, you'll hit an annoying problem. Here's what happens. The install seems to go really well until you get to the end of disc one and then you get a blank alert box that you cannot interact with and you cannot quit the installer. You have to force quit the installer to get out of this situation. Here's how to do it the right way. If you still have the Safari 3 Beta .dmg, mount it and run the uninstaller (if you don't have it, download the beta again from Apple's site). The uninstaller will remove Safari 3 Beta and restore your Safari 2 install. Now you can install CS3 without a problem. It takes up to two and a half hours depending on whether you install the entire suite or just select parts. It's huge. Once you have successfully installed CS3, fire up the Safari 3 Beta installer again and you're back to where you started. No mess, no fuss. Remember to run the updater - Help > Updates... from any program in the suite!

As I've blogged in the past, I like Parallels Desktop for Mac a lot. I relied very heavily on it for a while. But then I bought Vista and it ran like a dog on Parallels. So I switched to VMware Fusion. Parallels just released build 5160 which they claim is faster, uses fewer resources and adds interleaved Windows / Mac windows and the ability to use Expose etc while Parallels is in the foreground (all minor reasons that contributed to my switch to VMware). Well, their claims are definitely true: Parallels 3.0 5160 is much improved in terms of both performance and usability and it would almost be enough to switch me back from VMware. Almost... because whilst performance has improved, it hasn't improved enough. Parallels still uses about twice as much CPU as VMware when Windows is "idle". That's definitely better than it was and all existing Parallels users should definitely upgrade. The Parallels Transporter is a very impressive way to import an entire PC - or even another virtual machine - into a new Parallels VM. I commented that I'd tweaked Vista pretty heavily to get it to perform well on Parallels so to compare apples to apples, I used the Transporter to import my VMware Vista image into Parallels and it worked flawlessly although Vista then insisted it was on new hardware and now it wants to be activated again (I went through this when I switched from Parallels to VMware - see my previous blog entry!). Overall, Parallels is still the slicker product (now that Expose and interleaved windows are implemented) because the controls and preferences are more sophisticated and, if you need it, it has unlimited snapshot / restore functionality. The downsides are that the performance just isn't as tight and the 3D / graphics support is still lacking (the Vista Windows Experience Index process will not run at all on Parallels - it does run on VMware).

Back in early August, I blogged that I'd tried VMware Fusion for the first time and was very impressed. I figured I'd follow up with a more detailed report of my experiences. My untweaked copy of Vista runs very acceptably on VMware (well, as acceptably as Vista ever runs!). I run BlueDragon.NET, SQL Server Express and ColdFusion 8 all together on the same VM, along with Eclipse, all in 768Kb of PC memory. Sure, it would run better if I allocated more memory to it but then I'd need to shutdown everything on the Mac side that I wasn't using and that would be somewhat counter-productive! BlueDragon.NET happily talks to MySQL on the Mac side and ColdFusion 8 on the Mac side happily talks to SQL Server on the Windows side (yes, I run ColdFusion on both sides of the virtual wall since I am working on some client projects that are resolutely Windows-only even in the CFML code!). So that's two copies of ColdFusion 8, a copy of BlueDragon.NET, SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL all running on one MacBook Pro laptop. My only real complaint is that VMware Fusion has a small bug in the bridged network adapter that can cause Apple's AirPort card (in the laptop) to think it's being hit by a packet replay attack and it shuts the AirPort card down for 60 seconds. Nice bit of security but very frustrating when it's really just a bug in VMware's networking code. The other network adapter modes work fine but bridged seems to be the only way to be able to connect between the two sides and still access the big, bad Internet from both sides as well. I mostly just stay tethered to my ethernet cable when using VMware Fusion and I'm fine. I hope that VMware add better DirectX support at some point so I can experience Vista in all its transparent-ness.

OK, so many of you already think I'm an Apple fanboi but I've resisted Pages and Keynote in the past because they're every bit as proprietary as Microsoft's bloatware Office product. I have diligently stuck with NeoOffice/J - free, open source, open standards. It's a bit clunky but it works. I've used it for years. I helped (a little) with the Mac OS X port of OpenOffice.org back in the 1.0 and 1.1 days. I've always felt it's quirks are worth putting up with for the karma of Free Open Source and Standards. I'm putting together my presentation for MAX and trying to work with Adobe's PowerPoint template. Someone really needs to teach those Adobe folk how to use PowerPoint! The template is horrific to work with and, unfortunately, exceeds the abilities of NeoOffice/J. It's all been very frustrating. So, Apple released iWork 08 and it claims great Microsoft compatibility. Everyone is ooh-ing and aah-ing over the new features and the all-new Numbers spreadsheet. I'm thinking "yeah, whoop-di-do, another proprietary app". Eventually... Well, I decide to at least download it and try it out. I open up Keynote and open up the Adobe PPT file. Perfect rendering. Wow! I create a few new slides and reorder them. Everything. Just. Works. OK, I'm impressed... so I open up Numbers and bring in my invoicing spreadsheet. Ooooh, I think I'm going to faint! A spreadsheet actually looks attractive! And guess what? It. Just. Works. Damn. I guess I'll be buying Apple's proprietary office suite after all. I'm stunned at how good it is. I love Free Open Source software and I'm willing to cut it a lot of slack but Apple has really hit the nail on the head here and the suite is definitely worth the $79 entry fee...