Magic Mouse Woes...

Well it looks like the honeymoon is well and truly over!

Had a couple of issues with the magic mouse over the last couple of days:

Tracking - The mouse seemed to lose it's accuracy tracking across the screen. The Twittersphere suggested I install a third part Pref Pane utility - MouseZoom - to fix this. I did as was suggested and whilst it improved the speed of tracking, it did nothing for the lack of accuracy. Another issue may have been the surface, I was using the MM on a wooden desk so I started using a laminated mouse mat.

Still no joy.

An examination of the underside of the mouse gave no clues until, I popped off my glasses and held the mouse lens about two centimetres from my eye. I suffer with extreme shortsightedness but my eyesight is fantastic from this distance! 

Ah ha!

Tiny, tiny particles seemed to be stuck to the lens. A careful wipe with the corner of a damp tissue seemed to clean it up and tracking accuracy was restored.

Dropped Connections - Happy that tracking had been fixed, I continued using the MM for a day or so. Then came the 10.6.2 update. I installed successfully onto the Mac Pro during the evening of its release and all was good. The next day however, the mouse dropped its bluetooth connection, not once, but four times! I can't remember it dropping the connection a single time prior to the 10.6.2 release.

Luckily, it's possible to reconnect the mouse using the keyboard, but it's a pain I could do without. 

The battery is still over 60% so surely it can't be that causing the dropouts?

I'll give it a few more days to see if it settles down, but despite the lovely scrolling of the new Magic Mouse, I fear its days may be numbered.

As an aside, Ross Judice (@odisphincter) over on twitter gave me some food for thought. He suggested:

Try a Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch tablet as your sole input device. Love mine. Gestures, buttons, pen, programmable

Hmm!

Ground Control to Major Don...

Did another MacBreak Weekly a few nights ago with Leo Laporte, Andy Ihnatko and Wil Harris

It's been a long time since I was on so I was delighted to be invited, it's a huge honour and obviously, the exposure is a great help in spreading the word about ScreenCastsOnline. 

I've done many Skype interviews and podcasts all over the world and I'm glad to say that in almost all instances, I've never had an issue with the Skype connection. Until this weeks MacBreak Weekly that is :-(

Turns out, the audio and video for both myself and Wil was pretty poor resulting in breakups and distortion. 

What a shame!

The upshot was that we both found it fairly difficult to join in the conversation with the obvious problems a bad audio signal brings. It sure as hell stops you from wanting to jump in as much as you'd like, as you never know if the others can hear the start of your spiel. I'm sure it makes it difficult for Leo to pass over the conversation to you too, not knowing if the signal is going to break up or not.

The surprising thing is my setup should be rock solid. I use my maxed out Mac Pro with and external DV camcorder for the video and a USB connected audio rig for great audio. The Mac Pro is connected via gigabit ethernet to a router one hop away from the Airport Extreme connected to the cable modem. My internet connection is a 50MB cable connection to Virgin Media which flies most of the time. I think next time (if there is a next time!), I'll setup a dedicated user on the Mac Pro just for Skype with none of the 3rd party plugins and menu bar items loaded, see if that makes a difference.

Od course the likelihood is that the network problems for that night were not local, but further downstream (actually with Wil being affected too, it's probable rather than likely), so in hindsight, there's probably not much I could have done, but still, it's so frustration.

So a bit disappointed I wasn't able to contribute as much to the show as I'd have liked. 

The upside is that immediately following the show, Leo thinks of a suitable name for the episode and records the intro for attaching to the beginning of the show. I'd gone offline by then, so imagine my delight to find out later that he'd called the episode

"Ground Control to Major Don" :-)

As my good buddy Joseph Nilo tweeted: 

"What's cooler, being on MBW or having an episode named after you? And lampooning a Bowie song at that."

Absolutely Joseph, both are very cool, but the episode naming is a hoot!

Just as an aside, if you do take a listen to the show (MBW 166), the story that Leo relayed about the MacMania trip actually took place in Nagasaki, Japan. To flesh out the story...

Myself, Andy and Leo were all presenters on MacMania 9 this summer, an amazing trip around the Far East covering China, Japan and South Korea.

Leo had suffered a major crisis with his presentations as rather than use Keynote, he'd created his presentations using an online service but one that you could download to your Mac. For whatever reason, the downloaded versions (or the application) had become corrupted and he couldn't open his presentations.

Disaster!

The only option for him was to re-create some of the major points in Keynote. Well I say disaster, it would have been for me, but Leo can just talk for 90 minutes straight, unprompted. So the fact he didn't have the slides was more of an inconvenience, but he still wanted to put up some slides for the audience. One of his talks was on Social Media and he really wanted some shots of some of the websites he was due to discuss. Of course,  Internet access on the ship was a non go.

Before his Social Media talk, one of the port stops was Nagasaki, so he hoped to get some screenshots there.

Once we'd docked in Nagasaki, I went on one of the arranged tours whilst Leo and Andy decided to make their own way around.

As I walked the tour, I had the surreal experience of stumbling across Leo, sat on the pavement on a busy shopping street in Nagasaki, laptop open and furiously accessing websites using some free internet access spilling out from a local hotel. After a quick chat, he asked if I knew of any good software packages that would capture full web pages, so he could use them in his presentation.

I immediately thought of LittleSnapper from RealMac software. This beautiful app not only downloads full webpages in a snap, but stores them in a local database so you can sort and tag them for organisation and later retrieval.

Within 5 minutes, Leo had downloaded and installed LittleSnapper and was away!

As it transpires, when Leo did his presentation, he didn't use Keynote at all, he used LittleSnapper to manage and display the different websites during the live presentation. It worked a treat, with him able to display and scroll down a full web page as if he was actually logged on.

LittleSnapper saved the day!

The talk was pretty good by the way and although only scheduled for 60 minutes, I think it actually lasted a good 2 hours! 

I wonder what's cooking...

I only realised this morning that other than the fabled Apple iPad/Tablet/Notebook thingy (© Mac OS Ken) that we really don't have a clue as to what Apple are cooking up for us next year. In fact, as the Apple iPad/Tablet/Notebook thingy is just a figment of our imagination and/or wishful thinking, there's absolutely nothing in the pipeline.

OK, so there are plenty of things in the pipeline, it's just Apple won't tell us!

For the past three years, we've always known something was being worked on, and had things to look forward to.

Ever since the iPhone launch, we had to wait for the release of the iPhone itself but then each successive upgrade to the iPhone OS was pre-announced and we had a waiting period before its release. However, since iPhone OS 3.1 was released, no word as yet about any new features of OS 3.2.

Show Leopard was previewed to Developers as long ago as June 2008 when the feature set was pretty much established and made public. A whole 12 months later it was publicly demonstrated and then released a few months later. As of today, Apple have not made any statements on the feature set or direction of the next release of the operating system.

As far as hardware is concerned, Apple don't provide a roadmap for any of the product lines so we're in the dark there too, although there are rumours of new Quad processor laptops in the near future.

So all is quiet whilst Cupertino prepares for the next big thing...

Is it co-incidence that all three streams of activity at Apple are all quiet at the same time?

Or should we expect some major synchronicity of all three streams as we move into 2010?

If there's one thing I've learnt after tracking Apples progress over the past few years, co-incidence is not the norm.

It's probably a good job they pulled out of Macworld 2010 when they did. Imagine the fever pitch of anticipation leading up to the traditional Macworld keynote announcement in this void, especially if Macworld was still in it's usual January slot.  What if the task they've taken on is so huge that it was impossible to co-ordinate and deliver or even announce in January.

Now they can focus on getting things right and then announce any new products or initiatives on their own terms and at a time of their choosing.

It's amazing to me that the Apple stock price is going through the roof and we have no idea what is in store, just the confidence that Apple can and will design further world class products and execute with laser focussed precision.

2010 should be very interesting.

Things vs OmniFocus...

As you're probably aware, I've done screencasts on both OmniFocus and Things, the two "front runners" for task management on the Mac.

I started using OmniFocus initially, following on from using the GTD scripts developed for use with OmniOutliner, the original inspiration for OmniFocus. I was aware of Things when it was launched after OmniFocus, but I held off until certain features were made available. Once those features were there, I started using Things and have been more than happy to use it ever since.

So now the two questions I get asked more than anything are, which do I recommend and which do I use.

The answer, I recommend both but I currently use Things!

Each has it's own advantages and disadvantages, but for me, Things has the right combination of power and flexibility and allows me to task manage without getting in the way.

OmniFocus is a GTD powerhouse and in the right hands, with some investment of time and effort, it can become an incredibly powerful  tool.

If your serious about task management and want to get a good feel of the differences between OmniFocus and Things from a users point of view, I'd recommend having a listen to two of my podcasting buddies from the MacRoundtable (David Sparks and Katie Floyd) on the most recent edition of their podcast - Mac Power Users.  

In Episode MPU 013 - Task Management Smackdown - they compare notes on both applications. 

Just one caveat though, David is a GTD ninja and has lovingly melded OmniFocus to integrate fully with business and personal needs. He's obviously an OmniFocus power user and you really need to listen to the podcast in the context of his vast experience of OmniFocus, it will certainly give you some things to think about but don't expect to reach Davids level of expertise overnght. Katie is probably more like the rest of us (no offence David!) and uses Things on a daily basis to manage tasks. 

The level to which David has been able to use OmniFocus probably says a lot about its depth and power, but you do need to put the effort and discipline in to get the most out of it. Things is much simpler and easier to get a rapid return on your efforts. That's not to say Things is not powerful. I use it for organising my daily tasks, my scheduled tasks and my projects. I also use it to capture tasks directly from my email system. 

One correction in the podcast is that there is a way of grouping tasks and projects together in Things to give you the 10,000 foot view, and thats "Areas of Responsibility". Check out my screencasts for more information.

I should say though that you need to read the comments on the show notes too, there is some useful info contained within the notes too.

Time for a rethink...

After struggling last week with the encoding process on my Mac Pro,  I think I will take the plunge and look at "ring fencing" my Mac Pro as just a video editing and encoding machine and do most of my general computing on the MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro is just fine for virtually all computing tasks, especially with the SSD drive installed. 

The Mac Pro would benefit tremendously from a lean and mean build with the minimum of additional third party apps installed. I'll be adding the Mac mini server into the mix soon and I'm hoping that will take a lot of the tasks away from both the MacPro and MacBook Pro.  It seems criminal to use the Mac Pro just for video editing and encoding, but it really is a critical production machine and should be left as stable as possible.

So I've no issues with doing a rebuild on the Mac Pro I'm going to have to re-consider my monitor arrangement on my desktop.

Currently, I have three monitors on my desk. 

On the left, I have a 20" Dell in landscape mode. This is connected to the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Pro runs this as its primary monitor when on the desk.

In the center is a 30" Dell connected to the Mac Pro along with a second 20" Dell on the right hand side in Portrait mode, also connected to the Mac Pro as a secondary monitor. 

The issue is that I feel more comfortable with having my primary machine on the central monitor. The problem is the primary machine will change dependent on the task at hand.

I could just connected the MacBook Pro to the 30" Dell, but when editing, I like to have Final Cut Pro on the big display. I've tried a monitor switcher before but that didn't work for me - too distracting having to switch between both machines.

One option might be to revert to a two monitor setup of equal size, and dispense with the central monitor. But then I'm not sure how ergonomicaly distruptive it would be to have no central monitor? The mouse and keyboard isn't a problem as Teleport handles having a single mouse and keyboard. 

So the options would be:

• I could sell the two 20" dells and get another 30" Dell. The current 30" Dell is a couple of years old now so they wouldn't match as far as brilliance and contrast, etc. I'm also wondering if the 30" is just a bit too big, never mind two if them. You can get a refurbished Dell 30" for £900 plus VAT.
• Or I could sell all three of my existing monitors and look at getting two newer 27" Dells. The 27" Dells work out at about £465 each plus VAT.
• Or I could sell all three and look at getting two new Apple 24" Cinema displays. The Apple tax means these work out at £552 each plus VAT, although they are stunning monitors. I'd also need to buy an displayport adapter for the Mac Pro. 

And before anyone suggests it, I'm not going to sell all three and get two 27" iMacs just to use as monitors, that would be just silly! At £1200 each plus VAT this isn't an option.

Now if Apple did Apple Cinema Displays based on the new 27" monitors as used on the iMac, I might consider paying the Apple tax as they are truly magnificent monitors. The 2560x1440 resolution would be perfect as well as the true 16:9 aspect ratio. One has to wonder why they haven't launched this configuration as a separate Apple Cinema Display?

Could it be they have stock of the older 30" ACD they have to move before bringing this to market?

Surely they can't be selling many of these older model? They are only £200 cheaper than the 27" iMac for goodness sake?

I really can't understand Apples policy on external displays.

Of course, the problem is (as always) do you act now or wait to see if Apple release the iMac 27" display as a separate monitor.

Talk about first world problems!