A couple of weeks ago I bought a very nice new monitor for my Mac Pro which has displayport connection on the back along with DVI.

In the Mac world we have become used to the mini-displayport. We haven’t really thought too much about the fact that this is a smaller version of a pre-existing connector called the displayport. Odd, given that the name “mini-displayport” is a bit of a clue to the existence of something bigger.

I was quite interested to connect my new monitor to my Mac Pro with a displayport <-> mini-displayport cable. So I phoned up an Apple retailer quite close to where I live and asked them if they had one. In fact they’d never heard of it. I phoned another retailer in Brighton, they had never heard of it either.

I tried Maplin’s website but I could see no sign of it there. I did some searching of the Internet and could not find it in the UK. The only place I could find it was in a US store called Circuit Assembly. So, I bought it from there and after only a few days I had the cable. Mine is two metres and white. Pictures below:

Curled up like a snake.

Displayport connector is a fair bit bigger than Apple’s mini-displayport. Also displayport has a button which releases a pair of locking teeth on the top of the connector.

The teeth of the displayport.

Mini-displayport plug is, well, mini.

The teeth of the mini-displayport

I’ve been reading some complaints that Apple are sneakily installing software into the Windows OS. The way it works is that you install, say QuickTime, and then the software upgrading software for that installs Safari when you only intended to upgrade QuickTime. A quick search of the web took me to this report on the issue.

I use a Mac, but I do have Windows XP which I run with Parallels Virtual Desktop. Yesterday I installed QuickTime in it, the QuickTime installer gave me this dialogue:

It looks like there is an option to Automatically update QuickTime and other Apple Software. However it doesn’t say install other Apple Software. Anyway I’m going to let nature take its course. When I am told I need a QuickTime update I will see what happens and report back.

About two weeks ago I purchased a new Logitech MX Performance Mouse. To be absolutely honest I’m not entirely sure why. I put it down to the cumulative effects of marketing to which I and most other people on the planet are subject:

• We will be happier if we buy stuff.
• The stuff we have is not as good as the new stuff.

I had a major problem with the Logitech MX Performance Mouse but even aside from that I decided it wasn’t as good as the mouse I am already using.

The MX Performance Mouse is at the top of the Logitech range and scores highly in many areas. It is very solidly built and looks like a lot of care and attention has gone into its design.

Design features:

1. Scroll wheel can be set to spin freely
2. Four thumb buttons
3. Accurate, precise cursor control on virtually any surface
4. Sculpted shape for the (right) hand
5. Wireless operation
6. Can be used while recharging the battery

Before I address items in that list I want to just describe the major problem I had with it.

On my Mac with OS 10.6.1 the mouse would freeze the screen while in “Open…” or “Save As…” dialogues. This freeze would last for about five or six seconds. Obviously it was quite a nuisance. I did a lot to check if it really was the mouse. I also checked out the Logitech forums where there was much discussion about problems with the Logitech Control Centre 3.1 software. So, after two weeks I had to stop using the Logitech mouse.

I’ve never used a wireless mouse before at home though I have used them in other places. I’ve often wondered why people do use them. I don’t see any problem with the wire and it means that the mouse doesn’t need a battery. The Logitech is, of course wireless and a big appeal was that it can used while the battery is being charged. The cable for charging attaches at the very bottom of the front of the mouse, so it does make the mouse feel slightly strange while it is charging. However it is better than having to use a different mouse while it charges.

I just left the mouse switched on all the time and the battery seemed to run dry once every 24 hour period. I’m not sure if that is how it is supposed to be. Maybe I should have switched it off when I wasn’t using it, but it is the kind of thing I would forget all the time anyway.

Behind the scroll wheel is a button that will remove all resistance to the wheel spinning. It does this by mechanically freeing the wheel from resistance. This is a great idea, for long documents, or long webpages, like blog pages you can just scroll through them very fast, you can even take your hand off the mouse, they keep scrolling. You have to be aware of it because you can forget that the wheel is scrolling. If you are at one window which is at the end of its scrolling then you move the mouse to another which can scroll, then that window will start to scroll if the wheel is spinning. It can take you by surprise. This can be a problem when using FileMaker Pro. If the wheel is spinning unnoticed and you put the cursor over the status area then you can accidentally scroll through loads of records. However I think the advantages of the free spinning scroll wheel outweigh the disadvantages. If you push the scroll wheel to the left or to the right it will scroll in that direction. It takes a while to get the hang of this left/right movement but when you do get the hang of it, it is easy.

There are four thumb buttons. The least good thing about the Logitech MX Performance Mouse imho is that the Zoom button is in the way of where I would normally put my thumb.

Default thumb button assignments:

I found the position of that Zoom button to get irritating after a while. I hardly ever wanted to actually use the Zoom button during my two weeks with the mouse. Cheaper models in the Logitech range don’t have that Zoom button and I think they are worth looking at. I do think that it would be ideal to try these Logitech mice, or indeed any mice, before purchase. The other buttons were fine in their position. During my time of using it I never tried re-programming the buttons but this was possible with the software. In fact it looks like the software offered great flexibility in configuring the mouse. However I never checked any of that out because my time was spent trying to sort out the problem created by the software.

The thumb button I found I used most was the one for “going back” in a browser window. However I didn’t get into the habit of using it a lot. This “go back” button didn’t seem to work in Apple’s Finder windows. I never used the “go forward” button but that is because I hardly ever use that in browser windows anyway.

I use my mouse on a black mat with a gel rest for the wrist. This meant that I didn’t get any idea of the ability of the mouse to work on optically difficult surfaces. If I took the mat away and put it on the wooden desk surface then it was absolutely fine.

That it has a sculpted shape for the right hand didn’t really impress me. I don’t think it was any more comfortable than a normally shaped ambidextrous mouse.

So, even if it had worked properly on the Mac I don’t think I would have ever liked it very much. Even if there hadn’t been a problem with the Zoom button I don’t think I would have found the four thumb buttons to be any advantage. There isn’t any advantage that I can see to a mouse being wireless.

Now I’ve returned to using my Contour UniMouse I’m not missing the Logitech one at all. I think the Contour UniMouse is far more comfortable and more controllable. It doesn’t have any software so that can’t go wrong. The only worthwhile advantage I think the Logitech has over the Contour is the free spinning scroll wheel, but I find the scroll wheel on the Contour to be such a pleasure to use, with resistance just right, that I think I prefer it anyway.

Living as I do in Hove I became interested in the Sussex Mac Users’ Group email discussion list and susbscribed on 17 February thinking that it might be enjoyable to chat to other Mac users in the sussex area. The info at the  Sussex Mac Users’ Group website certainly suggests that this is what it is for.

Unfortunately what is not explained at the group’s website is that  the email discussion list receives and distributes promotional emails from retailers such as Cancom UK.

Two days after I joined an email was sent to the list from a Cancom UK representative with the subject title: On the subject of Quark….

But if you go to the Quark 8 page at the Quark website you will see that in fact a 60 day test drive is available from there. So, there really is no need to go to Cancom UK to get a 60 day test drive.

On the same day, 19 February, an email is sent to Sussex Mac Users’ Group asking:

Six minutes later Cancom UK responds:

What is not mentioned is that you can buy it from Amazon UK for £59.80 at this time. You will not have to pay any delivery charge with Amazon’s Super Saver Delivery option.

On 25 February an email is sent to the discussion list with the subject title: “expanding hard drive”:

All the following emails I quote take place in the thread “expanding hard drive” on 25 February.            

Within thirty three minutes of the “expanding hard drive” enquiry an email arrives from Cancom UK:

By now I’ve had enough of this, so I send an email myself:

This is followed by a contribution from another list subscriber addressing the Cancom UK representative:

The Cancom UK representative responds to my email:

And the Cancom UK representative responds to the other subscriber’s email:

He refers to the special offers he is going to continue to send, such as the Quark one. That’s the 60 days free of charge trial which you can get from Quark by simply going to their website. 

A different retailer, someone with a very large graphic “signature” in their email advertising services for Macs and PCs sends an email to the list:

One retailer defends another. The retailer refers to the iWork suite “offer” but of course iWork is available at Amazon for less than that offer as I’ve pointed out. It is revealed that the person enquiring about whether it is simple or not to upgrade the hard-drive in her Mac got an email giving a quote for her to do this job off-list as well as the quote to do the job on-list.

To this email I respond:

There then follows a series of emails which are in favour of being offered these “discounts”:

First:

Second:

Third:

Fourth:

Fifth:

I now send the following email:

Having unsubscribed I don’t have any knowledge about the discussion which followed however I felt that my expectations of the Sussex Mac Users’ Group were very different from those of the other participants.

I do feel that the description of the group at their website should be changed. That retailers use it for promotion should be explicit. It is not possible to view the messages in the list before subscribing because the archive can only be read by members.

There are two things I really like about iWork ‘09. The outliner in Pages and iWork.com. The later suits me very well indeed. I find myself doing quite a lot of collaborative projects. The last one I did I used Google Docs. While Google Docs gives 100% editability to all participants the actual Google Doc that is produced is not very pretty. I would then have to create something nice from this.

With iWork.com the uploaded document is not editable like a Google Doc, but rather participants can leave comments on it. This is fine by me because that is all that is required. However the actual document is a very nice looking thing. It is much easier for me to update the nice looking iWork document with the contents of the comments by the others, rather than convert a Google Doc into something presentable.

For those that are creating newsletters and that kind of thing with Pages iWork.com would be really a fabulous thing to have.

I have one concern about the iWork.com which is the email that is automatically sent out to the invited participants. This is an HTML email with a link embedded in a graphic to open the iWork.com document in their browser. The problem is that if they are using a plain text only email client then I suspect they are going to be receiving an incomprehensible mess. The actual link is shown at the bottom of the email that is sent but it is approximately one mile long. There doesn’t seem to be any Plain Text Alternative included with the outgoing email. What I’d like to see is a plain text alternative with a short link that would not be in risk of having line breaks inserted by the email system.

I don’t think I currently use any third party desktop utilities on my Mac. I have to give it some thought because what actually constitutes a desktop utility is not very clear. I don’t even know if the term desktop utility is used these days.

To me it means something that is designed to assist with using the GUI of the Mac. It might be some system of toolbars, or maybe some form of contextual menu enhancement. Generally the destop utility will assist with locating files and folders, look after text clippings, run scripts, that kind of thing.

The Finder in Mac OS X is, imho, so well worked out that it just doesn’t need these little programs. Instead of improving the Finder they just add unnecessary complications.

I used to feel the same way with the classic Mac OS. I did use one desktop utility for that and it was the Behierachic Apple Menu extension. I remember that with the classic OS I tried out many of these desktop utilities and even bought a couple. All over the web there are people praising them for this and that. The price of these desktop utilities is usually fairly low and so there is a tendency to download them, try them out and be quite taken with their ingenuity and novelty and then buy them. Usually it’s a mistake. After a while they turn out to be more trouble than just using the Finder and so they stop being used. At least that is my experience. With Mac OS X I do try out these utilities from time to time but I now have the rule not to buy until the trial period has come to an end, and this rule has saved me some money.

OS X comes with a desktop utility called the Dock. It is the best I’ve ever used and I am a big fan of it. The Dock does deal with the big problem of the classic Mac OS which was that icons on the desktop would be covered by open windows and become inaccessible. For an OS which makes such use of icons, dragging things onto them, or launching/opening things by double clicking them, this was a problem. As well as solving this problem the Dock is a very powerful thing in itself allowing a lot of functionality with apparent simplicity.

So, I say all hail the Dock!

You can’t keep an icon for all of your progams in the Dock. Well, for those you don’t use so often, the icon is available in the Applications folder. This you can access very quickly and easily as you know. It is in the “Places” part of the Finder sidebar unless you removed it. You can use the shift-command-A short cut or use the “Go” menu to take you there.

Text clippings can be dragged to the desktop or any open folder. As can so many things.

So, for me the Finder is great and imho a far better environment than those funny third party desktop utilities.

I was muttering about the wasteful nature of our throwaway society as I dumped my “old” printer. “Old” it wasn’t, in fact I’d bought it only a couple of years ago. However it had started failing to lift the paper from the tray. I phoned the manufacturer but it was out of warranty and it would cost more to fix it than replace it.

It was an extremely cheap printer. It’s pretty rare for me to buy something very cheap, I tend to buy infrequently but carefully. When I do buy I get something more expensive which will last longer.

This printer was my first mono laser printer after having used an inkjet for some years. I wasn’t sure if I was ready for mono. I knew I hardly ever used the colour of the inkjet. However I did find that mono laser is the way to go for me now with this cheap printer so it had some value.

I don’t print anything like as much as I used to. The vast majority of creation on the computer goes into PDF files which get emailed.

I remember when the computer was all about creation for paper, but that is long ago now. I remember when getting a colour printer for the first time was so cool. It didn’t make sense to have a black and white printer when I had a computer capable of creating such superb colour.

Now the Internet in all its forms has come and so “output” means uploading something not printing it.

I took the mono Samsung printer to the Hove district depot on my bicycle. It has been replaced by a more expensive mono laser printer the price of which confirms that I will never print in colour again.

Writing with lightly coloured on a black screen seems to be all the rage. Various Mac applications offer this possibility now, Scrivener and MacJournal are the ones I use most which will do it. There’s an application called WriteRoom which seems to exist primarily to facilitate the writing of lightly coloured text on a black screen. Ulysses also does this and I’m sure there are more.

Full screen has been around for ages, but in the same way that an open document looked like a sheet of paper with the type on it, so did full screen. These apps I’ve mentioned are abandoning the idea of looking at a page on screen when in full screen mode, instead having lightly coloured text on black screen.

This return of lightly coloured text on black screen is at the same time retro and a look at the future. It is retro because it takes us back to pre-Mac days and it is looking to the future because it represents a movement away from using computers to create something that will be on a piece of paper.

There is now a large generation of people for whom lightly coloured text against a dark screen is how they first started typing anything, they did not start typing with a typewriter. For them this lightly coloured text against a dark screen thing might feel very natural.

When the Mac came along it was very much a black text on white screen device. It brought WYSIWYG to us all and for the most part was used for writing things to be printed out on paper. It was a very cool to get away from the light text/dark screen which let you know what you were actually writing but gave no idea as to how it was going to look.

When OS X came along it included Terminal application the icon of which in the dock is of a monitor, what we might have called a “Terminal” years ago, with black screen. The illustration has a cursor waiting for a command to be entered. I think this might have helped along this embracing of light text on dark screen.

I’ve been doing a bit of clearing out the clutter in my house recently. There’s a bunch of old hard drives which have been hanging around although I know I’ll never use them again. They are the full size ones physically but have too little capacity by today’s standards.

I was totally sure that the contents of the hard drives had been transferred to the hard drives I now use years ago. However I couldn’t remember if the old drives had been erased or not and I didn’t want to go putting them into cases and checking.

I did have a bit of a search of the web to see how other people had destroyed them. None of the suggestions I looked at seemed very suitable for me. Advice included driving a car over the hard drives. I don’t have a car and I think it’s quite likely that the discs inside the hard drives would survive that. Another suggestion was to use a sledge hammer on them. That was better but I don’t have a sledge hammer and even if I did I can imagine that with the hammering maybe some of the hard drive would go flying off around the place. I do have a black & decker drill and so I decided that I would use that. I clamped each one in my DIY workbench thing and then got to work with my drill.

More pics in gallery

They put up quite a fight. It wasn’t too bad getting the drill bit to go through each one, but the casing on one side, I think the top as I view them, was always quite tough to get through. I’m sure I didn’t need to put a hole all the way through but I felt that if I could see right through the drive then I was sure that it was totally destroyed!

I’m trying to avoid getting into a “I remember when we were happy with 512KB” type of thing, but it is amazing how things can so quickly become of no value.

The hard drive unit is one of those internal components which has become recognisable to those with no technical experience. It is like the thermionic valve.

I remember being surprised that Apple had used an actual illustration of a hard drive as the icon for the computer screen. Then thinking about it, it wasn’t so suprising. With the very first Macs the icon was of a removable disc, because that’s what they used. Then when they started using built in hard drives the icon became a rather anonymous box with what looked like a light or something on the front. So, they’d never extended that desktop analogy into displaying drives. I’m quite glad because I am not a huge fan of the desktop analogy. If they had extended it maybe they would have used a filing cabinet as the icon.

I went to a seminar last week at the University of Sussex. For the first time in my life I did not take a pen, nor a notebook. I took my iPod Touch. I sat there listening to the seminar and when anything of interest came along I picked up the iPod Touch and thumbed in the notes. I felt a bit self-conscious about it. Everyone was sitting around a large circle of desks, I guess there were about thirty people there. When I picked up the iPod Touch I felt that maybe other people thought I was playing a little game or texting a friend or something.

I had changed the settings on the iPod Touch so that it wouldn’t make any sound whatsoever when, for example, an email arrives or if an alarm goes off from the calendar. Also because the iPod Touch has, well, a touch screen, then it is completely silent, there is no risk of clicking or anything that maybe could be possible with a Blackberry.

For the actual business of note taking I found it to be very good. I used the standard notepad application that comes with the iPod Touch and then just emailed the notes to myself when the seminar was over. I found it rather liberating not having to hang onto a piece of paper or worry about a pen leaking in my jacket pocket. You could say, I guess, that I have the iPod Touch to worry about but I think one reason why mobile devices are so successful is that we rather like worrying about them.

I’m getting into the way of thumbing which, of course, Blackberry users have been doing for ages. Once you get used to it it is pretty fast. I don’t take copious notes (funny how lots of notes is always copious) but rather I just take down a few things that I want to remember.

Oddly enough while I think I’m okay with using the iPod Touch in a seminar I don’t think I could use it in a meeting with, say one or two people. I don’t know and when I next have one I might try this out. I guess it might be okay if I was having a meeting with Steve Jobs. The funny thing is that while I feel that people give you the space to write notes in a notebook, they will sort of slow down speaking for you in a small group, I would wonder if they’d do the same if you were thumbing into an iPod Touch or a Blackberry?

When I arrived at the seminar all prepared to use my iPod Touch for the first time I sat down and the person right beside me got out what was either an iPhone or an iPod Touch. I thought maybe I wasn’t going to be the only one taking notes on my iPod, but in fact my neighbour just put the iPhone or iPod Touch on the desk face down, then got out a sheet of paper and started writing notes on that. Thinking about it all later I wondered if it was an iPhone and she was recording the seminar? I sort of doubt it though.