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Ensure your Mac’s top performance with MacKeeper – an award-winning system utility for Mac that offers a completely new approach to system care.

Judging by their advertising, which if you haven’t seen it, is just overly invasive, and presented in such a way that a certain type of tinned meat¹ comes to mind as soon as you see it, you’d think they’re not legit. Then perhaps you might Google them, as I did, to see if there’s anything interesting about them; any fishy reviews, any haters etc. Then you’ll find about a million results advertising MacKeeper as spam/fake/not legit etc, and when you click on them, you find out that they are in fact all affiliate links, saying how great MacKeeper is, and how much of a scam it is not.

Can I please be the first to call bullshit here? If they’re paying people to advertise (with their 50% affiliate fee!) the fact that it is not spam, then there’s something wrong, and using javascript popups to stop you closing their ad window is just so… low. Stop being so ghetto. I bet a large percentage of their reviews aren’t unbiased either. It’s terrible, alienating Mac users and using scaremongering tactics. Get a better marketing strategy.

In fact I propose that they change their little spiel about their company to:

Be unsure of your Mac’s top performance with MacKeeper – a no award-winning system utility for Mac that offers a completely new approach to spamming the hell out of Mac users on the internet.

Disclaimer: I would normally link to the various sites in question, but in this case they don’t need any more traffic, nor do they deserve any, hence why the links are missing.

1. spam

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I think a lot of the new Skype criticism, especially that from Lukas Mathis, centres around the fact that the UI has changed, both making it difficult for regular and professional users of the program (who before used to tile the windows to support multiple conversations etc.) and for casual users (who just got used to the last interface and are now faced with a whole new kettle of fish). The change in Awaken is similar in some respects, the interface has changed from a ‘conforming explicitly with the HIG’ kind of style (see this excellent talk by Gruber for more info) to essentially an iOS app ported to Mac, using the iOS standard icons, switches and colour schemes. Frankly it’s not the fact that the UI has changed so boldly that annoys me, that on its own would be interesting (the new UI is rather striking), it’s the fact that the program has changed so much, breaking some of the little intricacies that made it better than similar apps. Let’s look at this in more detail.

On the previous style of Awaken (looking at version 4.0.20 here, which was generally very similar to the preceding versions), the standard interface looked a lot like this:

Notice the use of the ‘standard’ 10.5/10.6 title bar and generally consistent (with the OS UI) buttons, checkboxes and text (even the ‘cog’ icon symbolising the traditional one button mouse’s right click features, taken straight (and rightfully so according to the HIG) from OS X). Furthermore when editing a given alarm, the action can be completed in a number of ways, double clicking, hitting return, going to Alarms > Edit Alarm, or through the ‘cog’ icon. As before, very traditional and conforming. Doing so, brings up this screen to change or add an alarm.

As before, all elements of this are uniform and consistent with the OS UI. There’s a touch of confusion with the setting of the volumes of the alarm, as they’re not present, but then again they’re all in the preferences. I think the best bit here however is the play button. It may not work as expected to some people, and frankly it shouldn’t necessarily have a play symbol on it, but rather preview or something similar (at the end of the day the meaning is essentially implicit), but it previews exactly what happens when the alarm goes off. Click it and get transported to iTunes where your playlist of choice will start playing. Simple. Even when the alarm is playing, the interface is alarmingly (no pun intended) consistent and understandable.

There’s perhaps a little inconsistency with the interesting blue button ‘Stop Alarm’, and the previous and next track buttons, but all in all, it’s pretty simple and standard. Notice the album art and track info graciously taken from your iTunes, and displayed simply in the Awaken interface whilst all the music playing is handled by iTunes.

Furthermore, little things in this version of the program that were worth noting are the fact that by just having the program open, and the little box in the preferences that says ‘Wake Mac from sleep’ ticked, your Mac will successfully wake up when required, nothing else needed. Additionally one could install Awaken Helper, an additional app to wake up and open Awaken at alarm time, if you had perhaps forgotten to keep it open. However this was one of those little menubar cluttering apps, that you had to keep open all the time for it to work, when you could just make Awaken was open when you were going to need it. I always felt that it was a little pointless….

Now with the new design, it’s all rather different. Admittedly I was a little excited when I realised that there was an update, and that there may be some cool new features, and I was initially pleased, though slightly surprised when I saw it. This is from Awaken 5.0.1.

First off, there are a number of differences. The whole UI has been uphauled and simplified. Half the buttons have disappeared, the light grey titlebar has gone, and all in all it looks a lot more like an iOS app. It’s also a fair amount simpler to look at, but at the same time harder to use. To access the alarms you’ve set, you have to go to the alarm section (in many ways the buttons along the bottom are just like those from an iOS device), where it will display all your alarms, a lot like this.

Now it becomes even more apparent how iOS like this is. Never before iPhones and iPod touches would you see the faux sliding on/off switches and the ‘>’ arrows (of which the functionality is lost on the Mac (what happened to double clicking)). I almost feel like I could swipe sideways across it to delete alarms (sadly I can’t). It also shows less information than before, now you have no idea when the next alarm is (you can click the date to give you a countdown however), or what playlists/actions alarms will trigger. Slightly annoying. However this isn’t the main issue with me. When I updated the software, I assumed (boldly) that it would function similarly to the previous one. Much to my dismay the next morning when my MacBook did not wake at alarm time to sound the alarm. What a shame. Apparently (after just a little delving in the preferences) that feature had been removed from Awaken and given to Awaken Helper (talk about modularity). So now I needed to have Awaken Helper run all the time for alarms to go off. Great. Just what I didn’t like about the previous version. Next big niggle coming up here, but first off, have a look at the great (no sarcasm here) alarm screen.

Personally I think it looks better than the last one. It’s more clear what is going on. You can see the album art nice and big, the track info, and even the buttons (now that they don’t even have to remote resemble OS X UI buttons) are clearer. Good effort.

But wait! Try pressing pause on iTunes to stop the music temporarily, or even change the music and you might realise that iTunes isn’t even playing music. In face Awaken has taken over all control of the music playback. Interesting. So now you can have two applications playing from the same library, at different times, all just because you pressed ‘play/pause’ on your keyboard to stop your alarm. I think this is really a step backwards. Admittedly it stops any issue from occurring where an update to iTunes will break the compatibility with Awaken, which has happened in the past I seem to remember, (but then again controlling iTunes from a separate app is fairly straightforward if it’s anything like Applescript), and all the new music playback code must have taken a while to write, test and implement. It also makes the whole thing a little less modular, much unlike the Helper app idea. Personally I think it’s a bit of a weird decision. However there’s probably a few reasons why:

• Mac App store submissions may not like you using certain libraries (which I believe is what they used before) to control iTunes.
• It may have been similar code to the iOS version of the software, and as such may have been easy to port.

However still, it seems silly to implement a whole new way of playing alarms when the last one worked perfectly.

So anyway, I feel like I should wind up this whole mini discussion of the changing UI and workings of Awaken with a little bit of a summary, and my suggestions on how possibly to improve the new interface.

The advantages of the new Awaken interface I see as being:

• Looks sharper – More shiny, and eminently more lickable.
• More iOS like – This might not be an advantage, but it makes it simple for iOS migrators to easily use the app.
• Version 5 is smaller (somehow!).

And the disadvantages:

• Awaken Helper – Why oh why do I have to use this stupid little app in addition to Awaken to make it function!
• iTunes non-integration – It worked so much better before, why change it.
• More iOS like – This isn’t an iPhone, this is for a Mac, people can double click, and mouse cursors aren’t stubby like fingers. Let the UI reflect that.
• Any reference to Awaken Helper is fairly well hidden – It mentions it once in the preferences (you do have to look though).
• Why the unnecessary animation with the window fade in? – Try using exposé (all windows) with Awaken 5 open. It doesn’t even show up, just a black space where it should be. Probably worth fixing, and not worth it just for the animation.

And my thoughts on potential improvements:

• Bring back the actual iTunes integration – It seems so much more obvious to users if the music comes from iTunes
• Do away with Awaken Helper – Allow Awaken to (do as it says on the tin and) wake up your Mac, suggest users set it to auto open at login. Keep it small and light so it can always be running.
• Find a compromise between the iOS UI and the old style UI – The iOS UI is great, but only on iOS devices. It has it’s limitations, and some tasks can be accomplished better with a mouse.

I’m interested to hear other opinions on the subject. Leave a comment, let me know…

Update: I’ve gone back to using version 4. So much better and a joy to use.

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“Interesting business model: there’s just one app, no separate “lite” version. It’s free to download, but not all levels are included — the upgrade to the full game is a $1.99 in-app purchase.”

I think it’s fantastic that someone’s gone ahead and actually used the in app purchases in a novel way. They’re surely not the first company to do this, but the strategy of creating one version of your game has so many advantages over the classic (and overused) ying/yang full version/light version concept.

1. Firstly, just one app to submit to the store, admittedly it’s not a huge deal to submit two, especially if one of them is just a limited version of the other, but think of the hassle involved in updating two separate apps, maintaining them, bug squishing, all of the above. Wouldn’t it be so much easier with just one to deal with?
2. People are lazy. Bear in mind that people won’t even want to go to all the hassle of firing up the whole app store just to get the full version of an app (and then have 2 of the same apps on their iPhone). If the extra levels or extra content could be attained as an in game purchase, it would be so much easier for them just to click accept and BOOM, get them, making you more money in the process.
3. Thirdly, piracy. If apps could be downloaded freely without the app store, bypassing all protection and copyright, then a full version could be had easily. Not so true with in-app purchases. If the extra features and levels can only be bought through the app itself, then it’s surely going to be much harder to access them illegally.

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But anyway, as it was a PowerPC machine (G4 1GHz – retro times indeed!) the furthest I could upgrade it was Leopard, which was pretty good. And going back to using it temporarily doesn’t seem that bad at all, in fact it’s pretty similar to Snow Leopard (obviously), except a little slower. Not bad for an old Powerbook! I thought it was best to do a massive erase (sadly not a 35 pass erase – however fun it looked) and install of the system, which meant that all the applications went walkies. But one thing that I figured out, that might be of use to some people (and this is actually the crux of this post) is that when installing iLife, I could do it (via Pacifist of course) with a new Intel MacBook Pro DVD. Crazy huh? For all the hype of not having Snow Leopard run on PPC machines, the included versions of iLife on the DVD are Universal Binary. That’s gonna change soon I guess. But anyway, that’s what I found out, and I was pretty happy that it worked. Would have been pretty irritating if it didn’t work as I don’t have a clue where to get a PPC iLife ’09 other than the actual standalone product…

But all is good, and all works well so far. Mission accomplished.

À bientôt

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I got one of those new MacBooks too recently. The top spec 13″ one thru Apple Refurb online. I was so contemplating getting a Pro, but just the general increase in weight and size wasn’t really worth it for me. However that may sound a little hypocritical as I was the one carrying a 20″ iMac back and forth from Cambridge at the end of each term. Hmmm. Anyway, the 13″ ones are cheaper and basically as fast. The only difference being the graphics card and maybe a little processor GHz… and it’s nowhere like the huge difference between the last (plastic) MacBooks and the Pros. At least they pretty much have a graphics card now…

Anyway as I said around this time last year, I intended on pimping/maxing the MacBook out just to make it that little bit faster and more usable (I’m not saying they aren’t in any way!), so I went ahead and got a 500GB hard disk (the 9.5mm 2.5″ form factor ones are clearly in production these days as opposed to last year) and 4GB of RAM. However buying the RAM kinda seemed a little pointless when I received the machine as Apple had made a little mistake and given me 4GB of Hynix RAM with the MacBook instead of the prescribed 2GB. So back to Crucial the extra RAM went, and more money for me (so I shouldn’t complain!). Anyhoo, for an overall cost of about £1000, I managed to get a maxed (sic?) out MacBook. Good times…

I just need to get a nice case now, so my volume of crumpler searches on eBay have risen rather spectacularly. Hopefully I’ll pick up something pretty soon. Oh, and they’re really pretty cheap on there too. Maybe not the skins (I believe the Crumpler name is “The Gimp”) – they’re a little pricier for what they are (or at least what I think they are) and there’s an under-abundance of 13″ ones (15″ owners rejoice however). Though you could read into this in a different way with the whole supply and demand concept such that 15″ computers are clearly not the thing, but then again, who am I to judge. However I will keep you informed. Totally…

Other interesting things that I think that I should mention include:
- I’m currently reading (or was, as the hardback is a little big to move) The Bonfire of the Vanities. Excellent book.
- I’m still fascinated by Cradle To Cradle (McDonough and Braungart). It’s an excellent book (and concept too) – and while a little conceptual and seemingly far out in parts, it should be put in practice and widely understood.
- Though it has been mentioned a little recently in press and relevant magazines, “Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air” (MacKay, www.withouthotair.com) still seems like a very interesting book to read (I alas haven’t yet – but I have the pdf of it ready to go). Seems like ages since I first heard about it (from the legend Gabor), but I suppose it is a little Cambridge based…
– New Math is worth checking out. Occupies the same kind of realm as the always fantastic xkcd, but wittier in a different and potentially more accessible way.

Anyway, that’s all I can think of for now. Enjoy.

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As for the logic part, while looking around Waterstones (that would be a bookstore) in Edinburgh early last week, I found a very interesting book among the ‘… for Dummies’ and computing books – ‘The Fundamentals of Logic Design’ by Charles H Roth Jr. When leafing through it then, I realised that though a lot of the information contained in it may be really quite obsolete, and not necessarily relevant in these days of computers and so on, it is very fundamental to the understanding to all of the current technologies. To be honest, ever since reading iWoz (Steve Wozniak’s autobiography) and reading about how he managed to redesign computers with fewer (and a more optimal number of) chips, I’ve wanted to be able to learn how this was done, and essentially work out how to do this myself – as it would undoubtedly lead to better understanding of logic systems (which are just slightly fundamental to lots and lots of things!). Anyhow though, this book didn’t even have a price tag in Waterstones, it was obviously too deserved to have one or maybe it just fell off, but later checking of it on Amazon revealed it to be a University level text costing between £45 and £80 – pretty damn expensive. I also found that there was a newer edition that then the one that I had briefly read. Luckily though (and Amazon marketplace comes to the rescue here) I managed to get it for £5 or so! There was a slight delivery charge on it too, but that really was pale in comparison to the £5.75 had to pay to ship it to me (I only had to pay the Amazon flat charge of £2.19 or something like that). So ultimately though I didn’t get the newest edition (I got the 4th) I got it such a reasonable price that no-one can complain! Haven’t started reading it yet, but I’ll definitely mention something once I have!

The other thing I feel compelled to mention is this glaring error in Leopard:

It should obviously be ‘None of your preferred wireless networks IS available’ but obviously there are still some bugs present in Leopard.

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If you’re very new to the internet, or never really look at newspapers or take part in any other forms of communication between people, then you might not be aware that firstly, Apple has launched a new laptop (or notebook (which I believe is the more generally accepted term (at least in the US) these days)) and secondly, it has received lots of criticism.

Fair enough some of this criticism is probably due, for it has one USB port and no media drive. You can make up your own opinions about what you think of this, personally though, I don’t really mind these things. The one USB port seems limiting in most ways, is it really though? How often do you have more than one peripheral connected (AND IN USE) when you’re out and about. Most likely you’ll have a USB key, a printer, an external mouse, or an iPod connected. These wouldn’t all be at the same time though. You might want to use a USB key and a mouse at the same time, which is understandable given the frustation of most trackpads… (AAAGH eeePC!) As we are told though, the MacBook Air’s trackpad is a) multitouch and b) larger. This should hopefully make it more tempting to stick with the trackpad instead of changing to an external mouse. I say ‘might be’ in this case because to be honest I haven’t a clue what the trackpad is like on these things, but if the iPhone is anything to go by, then I’ll probably be impressed. With printers, enough of them are WiFi enabled, or connected to a WiFi network so that the need for a USB cable with a printer these days (unless it’s some huge image files…) is waning. That said, you would only use a printer to print off a document and then most likely unplug the cable and walk away, so having one usb port would not be too annoying. Same goes for an iPod, you’d only sync it on there (that would take a comparitively small amount of time), the charging could be done at the wall. The only usb object left would be the usb drive, something that might be useful, but not always used. So I come to the conclusion that only one USB port might just be bearable and usable!

The DVD drive (or lack thereof) is a different case altogether… But it does resolve itself in a similar way to the USB issue. Apple probably have thought (and fought) long and hard about this and have come to the conclusion that it is not necessary to have one. That is, assuming you follow their way or living (in reference to digital media that is). As explained in the keynote, there are a few things that you would commonly use CDs and DVDs for. In my case these would be…
-Installing BIG new programs (like Leopard, and someone raised the case of Windows w/ Boot Camp)
-Adding CDs to iTunes (I despise the iTMS in terms of listening to music and the culture surronding it as it kills the album, which is an entity in my opinion)
-Watching DVDs
-Converting DVDs to iPhone format.
If this MacBook is not your primary computer, then there’s no real need to do most of these things on it except the installations. You might want to watch DVDs, but you may have a DVD player and a widescreen TV for that, or there’s the iTunes Movie Store, or even you could convert it to a suitable format before you leave home and stick it on your HD. In any case, you could probably manage without it.

Though the MacBook Air has been receiving lots of criticism about it’s revolutionary new features/things that it doesn’t have, most of them are not particularly well deserved. The obvious drawbacks all have reasons behind them, most of these are pretty legit given a fairly normal scenario. So in essence, I think it’s a great little product, with some excellent engineering behind it all, even if I wouldn’t buy myself one in the near future…

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The article states that this company’s new iPod dock is, and I quote,

Designed in part by Robert Brunner who led Apple’s design team from 1989-1996, an era which birthed the Newton and the first Powerbooks.

Whilst this is true (I’m not contesting this fact), I don’t see the need to boast that this is by the same Apple alumni from ’89 to ’96 as this wasn’t particularly the best era of Apple products. Think Performas, think Quadras, think unreliability, think no Steve Jobs and most importantly think different from what Apple is now… Why boast this? Seriously, I wouldn’t buy one of these having known it was from the same design team that let the Performas be produced. What a bummer for that company… Then again, maybe they’re proud of the Performas that they made and after all (according to the article) they did make the first Powerbooks, so they can’t be that bad can they?

Other exciting things that I have found all around include a glaring grammar mistake in Leopard! I mean a huge one! I’m not on my iMac at the moment, so I can’t grab a screenshot right now, but it involves this grammatically incorrect sentence:

‘None of your preferred wireless networks are (sic) available.’

Terrible…

In other news, I have some freakin’ sweet concert tickets for next year already lined up (at some cost). These would include The Mars Volta, Radiohead and Neil Young and Crazy Horse!

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I’m not sure why or how I’m finding it so hard to cope with the general shitness of Windows at the moment. It might be because I actually have to do something with it. I was expected to use Paint to create images for documents… What is that about? I had some completely stupid restrictions on my computer so that I couldn’t install any more software, so nothing even like The GIMP to do work with. Then again for the stuff that I’m doing, the program really needed is OmniGraffle Professional.

The GUI is just terrible. There was no effort, absolutely none, put into the creation of Windows XP. I assume that’s generally accepted by everyone because it should be. They don’t even put in any effort to make the ‘taskbar’ look nice. It has the ability to go to one side or the top of the screen, yet, the rendering of it is awful in that position. The icons aren’t even centered, and the buttons (even the start menu) doesn’t even have rounded let alone finished and joined up edges. Why Redmond why?

Then again I suppose its difficult for people without proper Human User Interface Guidelines and such a thing as Aqua. When you’re copying another operating system, everything just happens to be that little bit behind. Shame really… Linux managed to make it all look pretty polished.

But why bother polishing a system that is flawed from its very beginning? I mean why attempt to make GUI look half respectable when the idea of having a window that fills the whole screen as the basis for the OS is around. Firstly, in Windows, Gates wants you to have two window sizes, full window, and not full window, which is usually just too small a size to be of any use! When you’re in full window mode as one could call it, you can’t have any windows on top, or at the side, or available to pull down or quickly glance at… You just can’t!

It makes it so impractical. Well maybe if you’re writing a report, and you want to be so focused and in a ‘I’m so not going to look at any references’ frame of mind, then just one window is great. The other 99.5% of the time, no. ‘It can’t happen here’ as The Mothers Of Invention might say. The impracticalities of it are outstandingly huge. Yes you might need to try something different to realise what you’re missing. But once you’ve seen the light, no going back! Also have a go at hovering your mouse cursor over a window that can scroll, and try scrolling, it’ll only scroll if its active. What an annoyance!

Another nice impracticality and general annoyance is perhaps when you’re thinking ‘hmm, I’d like to open an image in one folder, and compare it with an image in another folder.’ Let’s also assume in this case, you’re one of those many people who doesn’t possess a decent image organiser/editor (even Picasa anyone?). Well in Windows, provided you’ve got over the full screen window problem, you’ve got no hope! If you’d act as a normal person and double click on the file to open it, you get a nice ‘Windows Picture & Fax Viewer’ window popping up with the image in it. By this point you should be thinking two things; wow, it actually works and why call it a fax viewer too? Who ‘views’ faxes on their computer, I thought you read a fax as well (providing it had words on it, but thinking about it, who sent complex images by fax? like no one.), then again that might be me with rational thinking again! You might want to open the next window now, so you can go about the action of comparison between the images. You’d navigate to the other folder, open the file with a (swift) double click and… it would open it in the same ‘Windows Picture & Fax Viewer’ that you already had open. Oops! Now you’d just have to go back to the other file and open that again. But most likely it will open it in the same window. How useful. Isn’t it just great how Windows lets you have lots of Windows (or not) of the same application, sorry I mean program, open.

Yes, at the end of the day the solution is inevitably obvious, but who cares. The point of this is to again reiterate how terrible certain things are about a too popular OS.

Leopard would be worth getting, I might have to get it soon! I just love some of those new features!

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