Long time TUAW commenter Arkowi, tracked down my personal blog, shot me an email and said: "I see you are picking up a Macbook for your wife. I am ordering a 15" MBP either today or tomorrow. Still not sure about which way to lean on the glossy screen. At first it seemed like a no brainer...but some of these reviews seem pretty high on the gloss. . . . It seems the glossy screen might give more a TV appearance which I find appealing (I will be using my MBP as a portable HDTV). However, I will be primarily using it for design work (mostly web based, a few print situations). Just wondered what your take on the gloss was?? Feel free to answer on TUAW if you so desire."

Well, Arkowi (and all the others amongst you wrestling with this decision), having both a matte-finish MacBook Pro and a glossy-screened MacBook in the house, I can sum up my observations of the glossy screen in one short sentence: It ain't too shabby.

The glossy finish is not that horrible super-shine that I've seen on oh so many HP laptops in the local Comp USA or Best Buy. My good friend Randall has a glossy-screened HP laptop that I've been forced to use from time to time, and although he loves it, I've gotten a nasty headache any time I've sat down and used it for any length of time. I've used my wife's MacBook quite a bit so far, especially when I was setting it up, and I've enjoyed it. the screen is slightly brighter than the matte screen on my MacBook Pro and bright enough that the reflections are not distracting in consistent lighting.

However, I'd still pick matte for myself. It's all a matter of taste. Try both out in an Apple Store before you buy, if you can, and make sure you read through Scott's take on this topic.

Someone in the comments to my morning post about the Apple Store being down noted this, and I agree: What's with the shiny screens on the new MacBooks? My friend Randall has a really shiny-screened HP laptop that he loves, but every time I use it I get a headache. I mean, they sell antiglare filters for desktops. Why do we want this on our laptops? Granted it makes the screen more visible outdoors with sunlight blaring on your screen, but ... I'm not sold on it. I guess I'll have to see one in person to make the call on whether to get my wife one of these or to go for an iBook.

What do you think? Should there be an option for glossy or not on the MacBook (like there is on the Pro model)?

First the UK Apple Store and now the U.S. Apple Store is down.

Place your bets: MacBooks or just another promotional advert in the side column?

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

File this under: cool application you'll only use once every blue moon.

Yesterday, after rooting around the web for a solution and then chatting with Fabienne a bit about porting a version of the app to OS X, I tripped across FlickrBackup. Sure, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles that Fabienne wanted, like preserving tags, groups, comments, notes, etc. from Flickr, but it does one thing and does it well: it downloads all the pics you've previously uploaded to Flickr to a central location on your computer, to a zipped archive, or to a CD or DVD backup. Of the over 1600 pictures I just downloaded from Flickr, only about 12 of them didn't come down the pipeline properly, instead resulting in a blank image with a Flickr logo and a note reading "This image temporarily unavailable." This would seem to be a Flickr issue, rather than a problem with FlickrBackup.

All in all, not too shabby. It's especially good if you've just got a new MacBook Pro and you wanted to grab just your favorite pictures for carrying around rather than sifting through all the pictures archived in iPhoto and other photo-management applications on all your other Macs. ;-)

For other cool things Flickr related, make sure you check out this page.

Update: Use this tool at your own risk! So it did a great job of downloading all those pictures, but it also somehow managed to delete several of my recent pictures. Not cool.

Victor has a post over at DownloadSquad with some handy tips for those of you running Windows on your Mac via Boot Camp. I like the idea of using the Windows .Mac tool to actually get some value out of my .Mac account for a change. One observation that I'd like to make: whoever spends money on Microsoft Office for Windows is a fool. Open Office on XP runs like a charm; it's much better than the OS X version.

The seasoned Windows users amongst you will most likely find Victor's introductory post on this topic a bit too basic, but he's sure to crank out more in the future, and as always feel free to weigh in with your own ideas in the comments to either this post or Victor's.

This weekend, I conducted a little experiment. I used Boot Camp to boot my 17-inch 1.83GHz iMac Core Duo with 2GBs of RAM and an external 24-inch monitor in Windows XP and then I forced myself to remain in XP. I didn't reboot into OS X. Instead, I explored the Windows performance on the machine. Overall, I have to admit, it was a positive experience. I still prefer OS X, but I can now see the advantages to booting into XP from time to time.

One odd thing that I wasn't expecting was that I didn't find myself loathing Windows quite as much. Something about running it quickly on my nice iMac made it more pleasant than all of my previous experiences running XP on various PC boxes. It's still the fastest I've ever seen Windows perform. Half of this is probably that I didn't load it down with lots of crap programs, and I had it properly protected immediately after install with virus, firewall, and spyware protection.

There were negative aspects to the experience. It hard crashed at least 5 times on me this weekend. This mostly happened when I was installing something...
More after the jump...

After my initial tinkering with Windows XP on my 17" iMac Core Duo, I reinstalled XP on my Mac, using Boot Camp to eliminate the original partition and build a new one, this time 20GBs in size, so I'd have plenty of room for games. I then installed  World of Warcraft, since I already had a copy installed on my OS X partition that I was very familiar with and which would serve as a nice comparison. The results: WoW on Windows XP on my iMac, running fullscreen on my external 24-inch Dell monitor with all the graphics settings ramped up clocks in at about 6fps faster than my OS X installation of WoW, running fullscreen on the same display with the graphic settings pulled back to their default settings. Nice!

Let the PC gaming on sleek Mac hardware begin!

ps--sorry the picture above taken with my cameraphone isn't better.

Subtitle: First Impressions of XP on a Mac.
BAM! How's that circularity for you? Yes, folks. Last night, I bravely installed Windows XP Home on my iMac Core Duo and here's a Flickr set of my installation pictures (taken with my camera phone).

What are my first impressions? It's pretty darn fast. Easily the fastest "Windows machine" I've ever worked on (and keep in mind, I used to run labs full of them). The installation was relatively painless, although I did have a few errors on my internal hard drive and had to boot off of the installation disk and run Disk Utility to repair the disk before Boot Camp would let me create the Windows partition. Unfortunately, you cannot resize this partition on the fly, so make sure you give yourself enough room. I thought I had done so, but once World of Warcraft started updating, it quickly ate up all the free space on that drive with its temporary files. So, I have to uninstall and then reinstall. I already activated this copy of XP though... how does that whole business work?

Also, I chatted with Jason Clarke over at our sibling blog, The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog, via email last night, and I think they may be posting some helpful tips for any Windows virgins who use Boot Camp to install XP on their Macs. In the past, TUMW has been the sibling weblog that we've been in a fight with, but since yesterday's release of Boot Camp means that all things Apple will eventually overtake all thinks Microsoft (as if Apple were the Borg), I don't have any problem linking to any such posts which they will produce. *grin*

My two cents: Run all the Windows Updates immediately upon installation and Download Google Pack so you have some spyware and virus protection. Keep in mind: some of those nasty Windows' viruses and worms are geared toward attacking Intel chipsets, and without OS X running interference, there's definite risk to your Intel-based Mac.

Update: Title corrected. I took another pic of TUAW in IE too, but posted the wrong one. *sorry*

Several readers in the comments to my earlier post are already proclaiming that the sky is indeed falling, predicting that Boot Camp means that Adobe and every other Software manufacturer out there will stop "porting" their products to OS X. This will not happen for two very easy to see reasons:

1. Not everyone will install XP on their Macs, and therefore there is still money to be made selling software for OS X.
2. Software companies like making money.

Also, a dual-booting environment is not the ideal work place. There's a lot of lost productivity in shutting down OS X to switch over to Windows XP to run Photoshop. As is, software manufacturers have the chance to make *more* money selling to both platforms. I mean, there is an entire Macintosh division at Microsoft creating Office for the Mac (which is not a port but a fully native OS X build of their software). Why? Because they make money off of it.

People made these same dire predictions when RealPC and VirtualPC and all those other emulators came out. They made the same predictions during that odd time in the 90s when you could purchase a PC computer on a card that you shoved into your Mac to dual boot. It hasn't happened yet (in fact there is more Mac software than ever before today because of Apple's growing marketshare) and it isn't about to happen. As long as Apple is in a state of growth, there is more money to be made selling to Apple and software companies will continue to do so.

OMG I cannot stop giggling with glee over Scott's Boot Camp post. Apple has just thrown down a pretty major gauntlet to all the current PC manufacturers. I mean, now, thousands of cubicle workers around the globe can say, "Yes, I can run Windows on my MacBook Pro. I won't be needing that Dell machine you ordered for me to run the one bit of proprietary Windows-based software that has shackled our company to an expensive spyware and virus-riddled platform for far too long."

If it works nicely, that means in the short term that Dell is in big trouble, as are all other PC manufacturers. It also means that Windows may be making some more money starting out, as a decent number of Apple users *may* go out and buy a copy to install on their Macs. However, over time, if Apple plays its cards right and doesn't screw things up, people will see that booting into OS X runs more smoothly and is nicer than booting into Windows, and we may see more switchers than ever before.

Of course, the real key to this would be if Apple would just go ahead and release a version of OS X for PCs. I think with Boot Camp, Apple just threw down the gauntlet and within a year, they'll take the fight to the desktop PC. I cannot wait.

If you launch Software Update, you should see iPod Updater 2006-03-23 pop up. Weighing in at 27.6MBs this update contains both New iPod Software 1.1.1 for iPod and New iPod Software 1.1.1 for iPod nano. Besides the normal group of bug fixes, the main feature being added is Volume Limit, which Apple claims will be mentioned here, although the link currently doesn't work.

Cool. I wonder if it will limit the volume from blaring every time my cellphone rings, or if that bug still works around this fix.

Well over a month ago, I reported on the color profile problems I was experiencing on my new iMac. Basically, whenever I enabled fast user switching and actually switched between accounts, my color profile would change off of the nicely calibrated settings to some odd profile that wasn't even in the color profile list with no way of switching back short of restarting the machine. Several readers pointed to a makeshift solution posted over at Mac OS X Hints, which involved launching the Terminal and running DMProxy, a file located along this long path:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/\ Versions/A/Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/Resources/DMProxy

This solution works, as I finally bothered to try it today (bonus question: over a month later divided by C.K.'s laziness equals how many days of lost productivity rebooting the machine?), and I even went the extra mile and made it into a nice little AppleScript Application called, simply, fixscreen (ctrl click this link and save to disk). All this script does is launch DMProxy, which fixes the color shift bug that occurs when fast user switching, and then it displays a dialog that reads: "Done!" I have it sitting in my Dock ready to run whenever I need it. I hope you find it useful.

ps—Why hasn't Apple fixed this annoying little bug yet? From all reports it's been lurking around since at least 10.4.1 and anyone who tries to submit a bug report about it receives a "Known Issue" notification.

Despite my previous two posts on the topic, there are things to like about the Mac mini, and so I've decided not to return the machine. I still think it is overpriced and I also maintain that the Front Row performance over Bonjour is shoddy at best. However, if you keep all your media on the Mac mini, it works nicely as a little media server offering the local media up to my TV. My only complaint about that is that Front Row doesn't recognize my iPod and the content on it when it is mounted on the Mac mini, even though I can navigate and play all that content via iTunes itself.

I also discovered that the 512MB chip that I ripped out of my iMac when I upgraded it to 2GBs of RAM fits quite nicely and works well inside my Mac mini, which is now running 768MBs of RAM after an easy bit of tinkering (Photos of said tinkering after the jump). The added RAM has doubled the frame rate at which I can run World of Warcraft on my 32-inch HDTV. It's still a bit sluggish at 16-20fps in crowded areas, but it is playable and overall a cool experience while lounging on my couch with wireless bluetooth keyboard in lap and mouse to my side. Additionally, using this wonderful little program called iRecord, I can hook up my digital cable box to the mini via a FireWire cable and record shows in HDTV. Unfortunately, playing back these HDTV shows with their large 7.35GB size footprint (for an hour of video) via VLC seems a little beyond the capabilities of the mini as the video shows up as an animated series of stills during fast-moving sections. However, I can easily bring these large files over to my iMac where I can watch them and compress them to a smaller, more mini friendly format. Also, as a dev box, I am liking the mini. I can jump into it easily enough using Chicken of the VNC on my iMac and OSXvnc on the mini. I can also ssh in via the command line. Compiling code, while not blazingly fast, isn't snail-crawl slow either. So, I'm enjoying the box for what I bought it for, I just wish it had a Core Duo, came with more RAM, Bonjour video worked better, and it hadn't cost so much.

I'm getting a lot of comments on last night's review of the Mac mini Core Solo, and a lot of Mac faithful are saying that the review is too harsh, that I'm being too negative, and that the majority of the problems would appear to be software glitches, not hardware. They wonder why I am currently panning the device in my review.

Allow me to offer a very simple rebuttal that I think justifies my negative review. The Mac mini, since its introduction, has been the machine most clearly aimed at switchers. It's a small, supposedly inexpensive computer, sans keyboard, mouse, and screen, that any Windows user can buy as their starter Mac. Now, let's overlook for a moment that in Windows land, $600 for a 1.5Ghz processor and a 80GB hard drive is by no means a steal. If you were a first time Mac user, who had long heard the marvels of Mac, the stability of OS X, and had finally gone to purchase one, hearing from all your friends that it would be a paradise of no crashes, no bugs, that it would just work compared to your crashtastic Windows machine, wouldn't you be inclined to return it if you encountered all the little glitches I've encountered over the past 24 hours?

I honestly think that if a substantial number of other Mac mini users are encountering the same problems that I have been encountering, that releasing the machine at this price point and with these problems could in the long run prove to be a huge marketing mistake on Apple's part.

It may surprise you, based on my initial and following response to the news of the new Mac mini, that I acquired one for myself.

My initial reactions were largely in response to the elevated price of the entry level model in comparison to the new features offered. Nevertheless, I like the mini as a development box to run odd experiments on, so I placed my hands on a Mac mini Core Solo this weekend. This initial post will be my first impressions of the device after having toyed with it for the better half of a day. I can sum up the experience in one easy to understand sentence: I'm considering taking it back before the Apple Store's 14 day return period expires.

There are several little oddities and one big problem that are making me think that either I got a dud, or Apple let this little Mac out into the wild a bit too soon. If you look at the picture accompanying this post, you'll see the Mac mini doesn't fully comprehend what it is. It thinks it is an 1.5Ghz Core Duo in the About this Mac panel, but the System Profiler, pictured to with this paragraph, knows the secret truth. This could be a very minimal glitch, and not something over which to return the machine, but if you read on after the break, you'll see more reason, including Front Row performance that is much below what any of us, I think, expected.

More after the break...