So we all updated Mac OS X 10.5.1 to 10.5.2 the other day.

Updated both my iMac and iBook, both weighed in at 180MB. Among the fixes are a couple of UI tweaks, one of these is the ability to return the menu bar to the good ‘ol opaque days. But can you see little snag in the screenshot above? The left and behind is the iMac’s desktop property dialog and to the right is the iBooks. Both are 10.5.2. Hmm, I guess iBooks have no business having opaque menu bars.

Hope that screenshot fits in my blog theme OK, it’s a bit large.

I’m terrible at organizing myself, and I constantly get stressed out when I remember shit that has to be done.

I may have found the answer however, Omnifocus is a new app, so new it hasn’t even been written yet! It’s a complete life organizer, it looks just like a task list type affair but it’s much more thorough.

Omni were inspired to create the app by David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” self-improvement book (and boy do I need some improving). I’m not even half way through the book yet but I already know it’s going to be incredibly helpful. It’s all about getting every single god damn nagging thing, big or small off your mind and organized, and it’s promised that you’ll feel a huge relief.

Also, you don’t just list things skirting on them like you’d usually do, not just “Complete financial document”, but all the steps involved that you can think of and categorize them. You also specify what conditions must be met before you do it, whether you can do it straight away, how long you will need, if you need to be in a specific place…

Omni seem to have big ideas for omnifocus, there’s going to be a web server/interface, even with an iPhone optimised version. And it will add time based tasks to calendar and the like.

Oooh, I feel optimistic.

UPDATE:

Crazy, just days after I wrote this Omni have announced 1.0.  So if you haven’t already bought it you’ve missed out on the half price beta offer.  oops.

My iMac Core Duo 20″’s screen hasn’t aged gracefully. Either that or it’s always been this way and I haven’t noticed until recently.

I quit smoking way before getting it, mind you, the cealing it pretty damn nicotine stained, but I don’t think that will damage an LCD being long since ex-smoke. Also, only the rear of the mac is facing a window, so there can’t be sun damage either. And yet, the default profile now looks like hideous brown poo.

I’ve profiled it using both superCAL and the built in apple affair, they help tons but I don’t necessarily trust my own eyes to do it correctly.

So I’ve bought a Colorvision Spyder Express. It’s a piece of plastic goodness that contains some kind of sensor. Plugs into the comp via USB and you dangle it infront of the screen and the software flashes different shades of colours and measures what the sensor is seeing to create a nice accurate profile.

Well, it worked great on my iMac. I thought it looked a little blue at first but that’s probably because i’m used to the poo. Now, after starring at it more it looks great, if maybe a little dark, I’m used to gamma 2.2 so it isn’t that, but I think maybe all the fudging the poo causes less light to get through.

Next I tried the Sammy TV I have the mac connected to via DVI-HDMI. With the express this shouldn’t be possible because you are supposed to go pro for multi-display set ups. But if you rename the profile file and also change the “desc” property in the profile you can trick it into letting you have more profiles on the same machine. I set the TV to “Movie” which is the only screen mode that disables the dynamic contrast, sure to confuse the spyder. Then let it roll. But hmm, it made a right mess. Gray’s were all over the show. I didn’t mind too much though because being a TV I’m sure its made for overly vivid video rather than accurate stuff.

The arrgh I’m having is to do with my iBook G4’s Display. I kind of expected a little trouble because this iBook screen has a very very bad viewing angle. But I’ve done it several times, I’ve even wrapped plaster tape around it to keep it nice and flush with the display but it always makes me a profile with tons of pink. Especially the OSX brushed metal windows show up the pinkness.

What am I doing wrong? Grr. I know for a fact that the one person who reads this is a graphic designer by trade, and so I presume he has done many a monitor calibration in his time. So… help!

The other day my iBook endored yet another gravity based accident.  It was on top of my un-made bed, hidden by the folds of the duvet.  I looked upon the mess and figured that won’t do, so I flung the duvet into the air like you do and watched helplessly as the iBook screamed through the air.  When I picked it up one of the seems had separated but it clipped back together.  Also, it seemed to have that cheap plasticy creaking sound when fingering the unit.  Thankfully it seems to be OK now.  This things been through such hard times I’m surprised it even boots.

OK, Now i’m confused, I just this second received a mail-shot from Apple informing me about the battery recall, hmm, a week late but nay mind.  It appears they’ve amended the list of affected batteries yet again and now the iBook G4 range that mine fell into reads like this…

6C519–6C552 ending with S9WA, S9WC or S9WD

Well this means mine is no longer an at risk battery as it ends in S9ZD.  It also means the guy at their tech support line was wrong in issuing me with a replacement.  So I wonder what will happen now, if I do still receive a new one, do I get to keep both?  Woohoo!

I’m convinced that since getting my iMac back that the fans are running more loudly than before. It may of cause be my imagination, so anyway, i’ll probably be obsessing over the constant slight hum I’m hearing right now for the rest of the week, driving myself slowly insane. The polystyrene blocks than you sit the iMac between when you box it up don’t seem to be quite as snug as they should be, maybe the box has bulged a little, but it means that whilst you carry it… by the handle the insides rock back and forth a little as you walk. So now i’m thinking all the walking with it has made the fans inside a little loose or something.

Yeah, i’m obsessing. I bet you it isn’t even any louder. It certainly doesn’t compare with the turbines you hear from the average PC. Also, a slight problem with the iMac is that its at the same height as your head, so any noise it emits is right in front of your ears.

I still can’t get my iBook battery serial to validate on the battery recall page. I would take a photo of it so that you can all have a go yourself in case I’m miss-reading one of the letters in a foolish manor. But i’m not sure if there are any implications to telling the world the serial. I can’t think of any reason not to, its not like someone can go on a spending spree with a battery serial number. But somehow it doesn’t feel right to.

I created a diagram to accompany todays post, I hope you find it useful and it should also serve to summarise the post’s information in a quick manor.

For the long trip down here and any other passages of isolated boredom that may strike I figured some movies may come in handy. Playing DVD’s is quite a battery drain, partly because of the power being used by the optical drive, and I think also because the low compression of a dvd’s video is a fair amount of data that has to be wizzed around the machine’s guts. So I downloaded Handbrake which is a really easy to use dvd compression/converter app, its easier and more straight forward than I think any of the free ones on the pc were, that i had used before.

I first tried converting the dvd’s to 1000kbit H.264, but unexpectedly when I tried it later on the iBook, even with the standard definition of a DVD movie it struggled to play it back, pausing here and there to take a breath. Which is a shame because they really did look almost identical to the original. So I did them in xvid instead, which isn’t too shabby anyway, except in the odd fast moving scene where xvids tend to look grubby.

I encoded them on the iMac and it really is silly fast, came as quite a shock actually. Handbrake does the whole thing in one pass, it doesn’t even have to dump the dvd’s contents on the HD first, does it all in one go. And managed to encode xvids at an average of 34 FPS, with PAL films being 25FPS thats much higher than real time! Probably even more incredible it encoded h.264 at about 24FPS. Crikey.

I’ve run xbench on my iBook, and this page compares my results with those of a core duo mac mini. I figure that the new mini’s will be more or less similar to the upcoming “macbook” (if that is what they will be called) performance wise, so might make an interesting comparison.

A lot of the tests are crazily faster on the core duo and some scores look impressive, but I doubt would offer anything noticeable to the user. Things like the thread test. Oh and memory speeds, i’ve seen this a lot on the pc world, changing motherboards that use much much faster memory but end up not actually offering any noticeable improvement when doing things. I.E. Going from DDR to DDR2 dual channel, you just don’t feel it.

Of things that do matter, the floating point test is almost twice the speed! I Wonder what “computation” actually measures ‘cos it whips my g4’s ass.

Unfortunately, it looks like i’m right to be pissed that they’re still using wanky HD’s in the mini though. The overall HD performance is basically the same as my iBook, which is so so not good enough. In fact my iBook gets 1 point higher. Thats silly.

UPDATE:
I’ve had a further play with the xbench results site and have come to the conclusion that their HD tests are flawed and completely inaccurate. According to them my ibook’s HD even beats some iMac Core Duo’s, hmm I don’t think so somehow.

lol, here’s an interesting one.

I really have had a boring couple of days, and the world seems to agree with me. Or at least the blogosphere does, I haven’t felt inclined to bookmark anything in ages. Sure there have been one or 2 major things happening in the news over the last week but they’ve all been so obscenely *aliens hovering in a small spacecraft laughing and pointing at earth* stupid that i’ve pretty much felt bemused by it all.

I wrote about Screen Spanning Doctor some time ago, it’s still the only half decent solution to the problem of the iBook not offering much flexibility with it’s VGA output, without the patch you wouldn’t be able to use an external screen higher than 1024×768. There was still a problem with speed, I use my external monitor at 1600×1200 and you could feel the iBook’s graphic chip suffering under the strain of having 2 screens worth of display to power. Today for the first time, whilst set in screen spanning mode I changed the iBook’s screen to 640×480x256 color thinking “Ack this will never work” but Christ it did, the lcd went to 256 color with the external display staying at 1600×1200xMillion color and it no longer feels sluggish! I both feel happy, and a bit stupid for not trying it before. I just never imagined it working. I still don’t know how a graphics processor can power 2 screens that are in different colour modes. So yeah, because 640×480x256 takes up such little video ram, it barely hits performance. Also whats great is that as soon as you pull the Mini-VGA connector out the iBook reverts to its native res and colours, and again when you plug the VGA back in it remembers how I had it with the 256 colours, so no messing. Neato. The screenshot is of the entire ibook screen when in this mode, haha bit cramped, I turn the brightness to bottom so I can’t see it. There’s no menu and dock because they’re on the big 1600×1200 side.

I hunted through Version Tracker the other day looking for a blogging client that did everything I need, must have tried about 10 and they were all simply dreadful, I ended back at ecto and figured I may as well give it another try. Turns out I hadn’t given it enough of a chance the first time around, most of the things I needed such as keyword support and the like where there all along, they just needed enabling. I put this down to the fact that I hadn’t had the mac for all that long so I was a little bit too eager I guess. Anyway, I had to spend quite a while getting it all to my liking but hell is it powerful. Most of its genius isn’t noticed until you try things out, such as dragging a photo in your entry and double clicking on it to discover a whole dialog of a thousand and one things it will do for you. Only 2 issues I have with it now are, the iTunes button on the toolbar does sod all (I presume a sheet is supposed to appear like with the iPhoto button), and the Categories list shows all sub-categories with the same importance as the primary ones, and because I use the tags MT extension all my main 5 or 6 categories are a bit lost in all the other sub-categories. Bit of a needle-haystack thing going on.

Oh and shape IM+ ppl, this is how a shareware app should be done! When I loaded ecto after not touching it all these months I got the register dialog because the trial had expired. But one of the options was to restart the trial, but lose any custom settings I had made. How perfect is that! Usually, if you come back to a shareware app after months to give it another go you won’t be able to. So, I’ll put that in my book of how things should be done.

It’s never a good sign when you don’t blog for a few day’s. It can only either mean you’re struck down dumb with some nasty illness or you’re too depressed to write. Heck you can even blog on holiday these days, what with wifi in all major towns and gprs for everywhere else so that’s no excuse anymore either. So yeah, as i think I’ve said recently i’ve been on and off “what’s the point”, a phrase which undeniably say’s it all.

But may as well plough on. First up, as there is always plenty to say about Apple related matters I may as well start there. I took my iBook into the Apple store on monday to have the replacement lid+screen fitted, I didn’t fancy hanging around Meadowhall for hours (south yorkshire types will understand why) so I left it with them over-night and got my mum to collect. And don’t look at me like that, she was going anyway. So I received it back yesterday, turns out they didn’t waste an all new screen on it after-all, rather more sensibly they discovered that some steel frame inside the lid had cracked, so they just fixed that up. It went from a 280gbp/500usd repair to just a 40gbp/71usd one, not that that makes much difference to me as I wouldn’t have had to pay either way, but it does make me feel a little less guilty, what with it all being my own accident prone self’s fault anyway (that’s just between me and you OK?). I’m also slightly relieved about it because I’m fortunate in that my ibook screen has no dead pixels of any kind. You never know, if it had been replaced I might have ended up with a dead pixel deluxe. Now for the comedic part of the whole thing, my iBook no-longer knows when i’ve closed the lid, haha the Apple Store peeps have forgotten to wire something up inside… oops. It’s a nuisance but I don’t think I’m bothered enough to take it back again. I mean, it’s not too difficult to choose ‘Sleep’ from the Apple menu is it? I’ll probably wait until the warranty is about to expire and then take it in for an M.O.T.