Monthly Archives: May 2006

Is the MacBook Pro all it is cracked up to be?

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I’ve had my MacBook Pro for a few weeks now and I have mixed feelings about it. I upgraded from a 15″ PowerBook G4 1.5 GHz to a 15″ MacBook Pro 2.16 GHz Dual Core. I was expecting dramatic speed improvements, but in everyday usage (with all the junk I have loaded), it doesn’t seem blazingly fast. I’ve made a point to only run Intel native apps, but I’m suspecting that some apps that were just re-compiled for Intel have issues causing slow downs. However, compiling code is so fast that I can recompile an entire project with tons of subprojects in a minute or two.

One thing that is really bugging me is that, despite me having the energy saving preference set to sleep at 3 minutes, sometimes the machine doesn’t go to sleep at all or sleeps a long time after 3 minutes. So, obviously, some program is causing this problem. I haven’t been able to track it down, but I did write a program that logs all the processes running if the machine has been idle to 3 minutes and also logs processes running right before the machine sleeps. All this data hasn’t told me anything, but maybe someone else can shed light on the problem.

The jury is still out in my opinion on how much of an improvement this machine is over my old one; it definitely is an improvement, but I was hoping for more.

Is it hard to polish software?

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I’ve been using Parallels for a few weeks now running Windows XP and am amazed at how well it works. In the latest release candidate, they’ve cleaned up a bunch of things, but stil seem to be missing some very obvious user interface issues, most likely caused by the cross platform libraries they’re using or something like that. If you look at the screenshot below you can see that the popup button definitely doesn’t look right.

UI.png

Is it so hard to fix this? I hope that it’s cleaned up for the final release. Furthermore, the popup isn’t a true popup button. Popups in OS X show the menu in line with the button. The image below clearly shows that this isn’t a true popup button.

UI2.png

I think that the engineers working on Parallels are stellar at doing the low level stuff, but it looks like they need a bit of help with the user interface. (I’m available for contract work, if they need help :-) ).

Sync Services can make a mess and here’s a way to clean it (maybe)

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I think that Apple’s Sync Services is an excellent technology and has a lot of potential. It is not quite mature, but I have high hopes for it in the future. One of the problems that has been brought up on the Sync Services developer mailing list is that there is no good way for an end user to remove data from Sync Services and unregister it if they remove a program. All developers are in the same boat and Bare Bones, developers of the popular Yojimbo that I’ve blogged about have written a FAQ about it for their product. Unfortunately this really isn’t a solution, especially for people that want to keep clean systems.

This morning, I decided to attempt to write up a solution to this issue. While my attempt doesn’t solve everything (it only unregisters items from Sync Services and doesn’t actually remove the data from Sync Services or .Mac), I’ve decided to put it out there and include the source code. The app has been lightly tested and may cause issues on your system, so only use it if you know what you’re doing. By downloading this, you take full responsibility for using it and if it nukes your data, I’m sorry, but there is nothing I can do. Having said that, make sure you have a backup first and good luck. This app uses undocumented Apple calls and is likely to break sometime in the future.

You can download my creation here. It’s quite small, so don’t be surprised if it downloads almost instantly.

The application and source code are free to use and modify. While I’d appreciate some feedback on if it helps, there is no requirement to do so.

Telemarketers be gone!

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A few years ago, when I became self employed, I was looking to simplify some things about my business and decided to get rid of our second and third phone lines (one was a fax line). I had to find a way to handle the occasional inbound fax and messages for work. All my outgoing calls were made on our home phone as we have unlimited long distance and don’t get that many calls on it. I decided to get a number from JConnect as it handled both voicemail and faxes. It worked out well and I soon realized that I should just give out that number as our home number so that we could cut down on the telemarketers. That started working OK, but its important didn’t solidify until we moved and we chose not to forward our old number and couldn’t keep it. Now we use this number exclusively for all, but family, friends, and a few others. It has been a huge help in eliminating unwanted phone calls. The $165 per year is a small price to pay for this little bit of peace and quiet.