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.

I was freezing cold a few minutes ago and now i’m boiling hot, freaky. I think i might have avian flu, I’d love a bit of avian flu, be lovely with blob of chutney. This is my first post typed out in ecto, wonder if it will work? I tried the windows version of ecto with LJ some months back and hated it, this mac version seems to be completely different, i don’t know why they even share the same name.

Eddie is lying next to me flat out, aww he looks so peaceful. Uh oh, well he did, now he’s having a scratch.

I fancy talking about my early iBook experiences. Actually i’m going to go through some negatives, moaning is always much more fun than praising.

VGA Ghastliness

Hmm, how do you do a heading in ecto, i’ve tried adding <h2> to the custom tags but it replaces it with strong when i switch between modes. Weird. Anyway, using the iBook on my monitor has been nothing but painful. Firstly, Apple in all their wisdom decided we have no need to turn off the built-in LCD display, ever! It can’t be done! Which means even when you connect to an external monitor you still have to have the notebooks display on, and because of this you can’t increase the res beyond the capabilities of the display (which is 1024×768). My monitor is 21″, so a res of 1024×768 is hideous.

Well, the above would be the end of it, but after a huge amount of unnecessary research I discovered that you can increase the VGA out’s res beyond the limitation by using screen spanning. BUT Apple ship iBook’s with screen spanning disabled despite the fact that the iBook is perfect capable of doing it. Now this is funny, the PowerBooks ship with it enable, I wonder why that is, well OK i don’t, I know why, to artificially add value. I discovered a cunning script called Screen Spanning Doctor which enables screen-spanning in the open-firmware (there is a caveat, don’t run the script if you have an ATI-Rage based iBook because the Rage GPU can’t do it and you won’t be able to boot anymore). With screen-spanning the second display becomes an extension of the primary display, you can even drag windows between the 2 screens, what’s even stranger is that they can be different resolutions, so now i can have my 21″ set to 1600×1200 as it should be. This is a far from perfect solution because it means extra work for the iBook, in particular the GPU, 1024×768 is 768432 pixels and 1600×1200 is 1920000 pixels, add them together and you are using A LOT of GPU memory, and the iBook only has 32MB of graphic memory. This means that some of OSX graphical tricks suffer from some slowdown because the 32MB is maxing out and spilling into the main memory. (expose is noticably jerky), fortunately general speediness of the desktop and apps themselves don’t seem to suffer, i guess that’s because the CPU is freed from graphic duties on OSX. This extra load is totally unnecessary if only Apple would let us turn the display off completely, or if they really do need to the keep the display on, why not let us have over-scan on the built-in display, for instance just show the middle 1024×768 pixels of a 1600×1200 desktop. Please Apple will you??

My woes don’t stop there, it turns out to my amazement that the iBook’s VGA out is under-powered, just like the mac mini. I’m surprised no one has mentioned this before??? It’s made all the more apparently because i can switch between the mac and the PC. The mac looks weak, black is black, thats fine, but white looks dim, almost gray. Colors also don’t look as vivid as they do on the PC, I get used to the mac after a while, but when i switch to the PC its like WOW, colours look soooo good compared. Just as mac mini owners have found, you can improve matters slighty by going into universal access and increasing the contrast, white then looks half decent but it washes colours out at first, but if you carefully go through the display calibration wizards in expert mode with the contrast upped slightly you can get things looking whist not great, adequate. Apparently, you can fix all this by getting hold of a VGA voltage amplifier. But i can’t find one online anywhere
Eddie is wandering around as if he’s lost something.

iPhoto i do i do i swear i do

iPhoto is a tremendous disappointment on so many levels. Firstly, i had presumed that it catalogued photo’s similarly to Adobe Album and picasa, that is, that it searched folders for photo’s to add to its database. Turns out iPhoto does nothing of the sort, it manages its own photo’s and stores them in a fixed location, if you import photo’s from a folder it physically copies them all to its own folder. Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb. I’ve set my iBook up so other family members have their own login, but they can’t share each others photo’s because iPhoto can only deal with one datastore at a time, and the share your photo’s facility depends on each others instance of iPhoto running simultaneously!!!! I have got around this problem to some extent by a massive amount of fiddling. I’ve created a shared account, and for each person removed their own “iPhoto Library” and recreated it as a symbolic link to a shared directory. This means that everyone uses the same iPhoto library. I have an extra complication in that i want to store some photo’s remotely on my networked PC, it has a much large HD (250GB compated to just 60GB on the iBook) and as seen as photo’s are rather large files these days I don’t want all of them on the iBook. Not only can iPhoto not store files in 2 places, it isn’t exactly network aware either! My solution is to write 2 scripts, one to create a symbolic link to the shared directory on the iBook, and another to change the symbolic link to a network location. I simply close iPhoto and run a script to switch datastores. It’s a faff but i’m getting used to it.

I’m not too keen on iPhoto’s interface either, it takes up too much space, especially on a relatively small screen, too much of the time the photo you’re looking at is cramped into the middle of the screen, there’s no easy/quick way to switch to more of a full-screen view. Why is that the only app not to have a hide toolbar button is the one that would benefit from it the most? The only way to get a bigger canvas is to do a slideshow, which is way to many clicks to get a closer look.

Why is that “open in external editor” is only available on a context menu?

Ooops, i won’t do that again.

Why didn’t the mac community warn me about the macs folder copying behavior? I moved all my textural documents from the PC to the mac, occasionally it would come up against a file that it didn’t have permissions to copy or move. So i went on the PC and granted them, then moved the folder again, in the blissful belief that it would merge the contents. I left them for a few weeks under the impression that everyone went fine. I then had the strange feeling that some documents were missing. And then shock horror, my skin crawled and i panicked when i read on someones blog that the mac doesn’t merge folders when you copy/move them onto each other, when it warns that it’s going to replace the directory, it really does do just that, it removes the contents before it copies the new stuff, to put it another way, if there is a file in the destination folder that doesn’t exist in the source folder, it removes it anyway!!! Whaaaaaa????

Thankfully, i do a backup every month, and there wasn’t many files that were not in the previous months backup. phew.

Right then, i’m bored now, if there’s something i haven’t covered, i’ll do a part 2.

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