Me And My Macbook

“My boss just said we’re moving to Macs. I don’t know if he was serious, but it might really happen — he’s a bona-fide, born-again Mac zealot, after decades of using real computers (he even had his own, successful Windows-centric newsletter).
I joked that I’ll switch to a Mac after they pry the PC from my cold, stiff fingers. In reality, I’ll just go along with the program and lose about 30% in productivity.
I hate Macs.”

Nothing in this post by David Ramel that is new, but always fun to read.

I’m not sure whether it had something to do with the fact that I said a number of things that could be interpreted as negative toward Apple and iLife in todays episode of the EduKast (in Dutch) or that it was just bad luck, but after recording the last piece of audio Garageband decided that it wanted to crash.

I’ve been told that Macs are very stable, but today that wasn’t the case. And because I’ve hadn’t had these kind of problems using Adobe Audition yet (not even when the disc was full) I hadn’t though of saving while recording todays episode of the EduKast podcast.
Result: everything gone, 45 minutes of work lost.

I started over and re-recorded the episode, but it underlines the comment that I make in the podcast: “there is much less difference between a Mac and a PC then people would like you to believe”.

Today I’ve been testing Missing Sync 4.0, a product by Mark/Space that enables you to synchronise a Pocket PC or Windows Mobile device on Mac OS X.
Microsoft provides free synchronisation tools for Windows users, but if you’re using a Mac, you’ll have to pay $39,95 and by this alternative tool.

You can download a 14 day trial version first to test it, but it works just as you would expect it to work if you’re used to using the Windows sync tool.

The tools offers a number of nice extras in particular if your device has enough room to spare. Because you can also synchronise playlists from iTunes to you Pocket PC of Windows Mobile device using Missing Sync.
It also synchronises your text messages, but as you can see in the screenshot above it had some problems with the characters.

All in all it is a must-have tool if you’re using a Mac and a device running Pocket PC or Windows Mobile.

One thing I probably will never understand is why people can get so exited about the whole Mac v.s. PC thing. Just use whatever you like, if you want try to learn to use both (like I did), but don’t try to convince the rest of the World that the system you’re using is better because…

But if you’re the kind of person that wants to read why one person thinks the Mac is the best while his colleague thinks you should throw it out of the window, be my guest.

Yesterday was a big day (again) at Apple. Steve Job hosted yet another Apple Special Event. Yesterdays keynote is available here, but I actually wanted to talk about the previous Apple Special Event in August. Because that was the one that was available on the Apple website yesterday, so I watched it (hadn’t done that before) and I think that even though the room was much smaller, the announcements in August were much bigger than yesterday.

.Mac
If you’re nog a Mac user, you’ve probably not heard of .Mac (dotMac). I knew it existed, but hadn’t paid any real attention to it so far. In August Steve Jobs demonstrated the new iLife ‘08 software. And though I don’t know how much of it already was available in iLife ‘06, the combination of .Mac and iLife ‘08 is impressive.

iPhoto
The first thing Steve showed was iPhoto. Now ‘events’ is a nice feature, but not as amazing as Steve thinks. Publishing your pictures to the web is something that any Flickr-user can do also. But in this case it works just a bit nicer. The .Mac Web Gallery looks really nice. You can see an example Gallery here.

It is easy to synchronise pictures from iPhoto to the Web Gallery, but since you can also allow others (you decide who and whether they need a password) to add pictures to the Gallery, it also synchronises those new pictures to your iPhoto.

The ’scrubbing’  effect that was added to iPhoto works in the Web Gallery, and that also works in Safari, Firefox 1.5 and up and Internet Explorer 7 both on the Mac and on Windows. If you’re using Internet Explorer 6 on Windows you’re warned that the feature set is more limited, but you still get access. I tried it on IE 6 and besides that fact that it is significantly slower, I couldn’t detect any missing features.

And yes it does have video
Still not supported by Flickr, but .Mac does support video. You can upload the video directly from the new iMovie ‘08 to .Mac and just like the different picture sizes on Flickr, you now have different video sizes for you video on .Mac and depending on your bandwidth you choose which one to view.

iMovie ‘08 looked nice also. Apple added scrubbing to the video also and the selection options included probably really make it easier to make short video clip. And of course you can also directly upload it to YouTube from within iMovie.

Garageband
I still haven’t tried Garageband yet for podcast creation, but the Magic Garageband feature looks like a fun way to waste a couple of hours. Don’t know if anyone really is going to produce something with that that is good enough to use for say a DVD (using iDVD) they want to create, but who knows.

iWeb
I think iWeb was the only application in the pack that I didn’t care about. I mean, I don’t design webpages anymore.  Way too much work.

Buy?
iLife ‘ 08 sells for 71,40 euro in the educational section of the Dutch Apple store. That is a lot more than I paid for Office 2004 (13,75 euro) but still reasonable.
For .Mac you pay 99 euro per year. That is not cheap and the 10GB storage room sounds like a lot but isn’t if you’re also uploading video.

So no, since it isn’t my personal Macbook, I haven’t bought iLife ‘ 08 yet. But I think we should.

Since I’ve got Microsoft Office 2004 installed (see this post), I can use the Microsoft Messenger that comes with it to connect to the Office Communicator service that Fontys has setup for all its employees.

What I didn’t know was that there is also a browser based version (in our case located at http://im.fontys.nl/). It has limited functionality in that it only handles chat, no video, no audio. But it works on a Mac in Firefox without a problem.

I know, it is of limited use if you don’t work for Fontys or if your company doens’t Office Communicator. But otherwise it is something to remember not just when using a Macbook without Office 2004, but also if you’re not at your own PC and want to see if your colleague is available to answer a question.

Videoconferencing isn’t something that we take advantage of as often as I would like. But the facilities available to us get better and better every day. When SURFnet started offering Macromedia Breeze (now Adobe Connect) about a year ago it meant that we gained access to virtual meeting rooms.

Roomsystems
There always has been this division between the desktop videoconferencing systems that use webcams and relatively small video screens and the roomsystems from companies like Tanberg and Polycom. Adobe Connect aims at the webcam scenario, Click to Meet has support for both desktop systems and roomsystems.

Big disadvantage of Click to Meet is, I think, that it requires Windows and Internet Explorer. You can’t use the client in combination with Firefox and you can’t use it on a Macbook or on Linux.
But luckily for Mac users there is an alternative to using the Click to Meet client: XMeeting.

Both the Polycom (we have a VSX7000) and Click to Meet use the H.323 protocol to communicate, and the freely available XMeeting has support for both SIP and H.323 build in.

Advantage of the way the conferencing infrastructure is setup at Fontys is that you can use a phone number to ‘ call’ the Polycom, but every conference room that you create in Click to Meet automatically also gets assigned a phone number. So in XMeeting I would just enter the number of the room to get access to it. Although that does mean you have to be registered to a gatekeeper that is connected to the SURFnet network. I used the Freelove gateway at 192.87.102.230 for XMeeting.
A huge problem when doing this from home behind NAT is getting the port forwarding setup though.

XMeeting isn’t limited to just showing the video from the iSight. You can also select to show your desktop instead. Useful if you’re trying to explain someone how an application works.

Presentation Sharing
You can show your applications on the Macbook to the other participants by selecting a different input. Because we’ve got the optional People and Content module, the Polycom can also transmit the screen of an attached laptop as video to the other participants.
If you plan on using th application sharing option in Click to Meet you’ll have to remember that only other CTM users will be able to see it. The Polycom and XMeeting won’t be able to show it in that case.

Conclusions
Nice to see a Polycom + CTM + XMeeting/Macbook connected. Systems from different worlds working together.
Not nice to see that at home NAT + H323 forces you to forward a number of ports just to make it work.

This is something that I posted about on in Dutch on the IT and Education blog last week but I thought it was something that should be mentioned here also:
On Windows you can add Flash animations into a Powerpoint 2003/2007 presentation. So you could for example create a screencast demonstrating something, export that to SWF and add it to the presentation. Take it a step further and you can embed a FLV player (which in itself is available as SWF file) and have that play video downloaded from YouTube or other Flash video sites.

But not so in Powerpoint 2004 for Mac OS X. Even the workarounds that existed no longer work. And according to this post it isn’t going to be fixed for this version either.

Today I’m recording another episode of the EduKast podcast (in Dutch). So it is time to think about how I feel about the Macbook after one and a half week.
I have to say, after that first day I hadn’t thought I would actually start liking working on it. Not using the Mighty Mouse that came with the Macbook btw because even with the two button mode enabled it often doesn’t detect the right click when I want it to. But a regular two button mouse works good enough.

I had a Twitter conversation with Fred Zelders, a long time Mac user, about my experiences so far andhe suggested installing XP or Vista alongside Mac OSX. I haven’t tried Parallels or Fusion yet though. I understand that they might require a bit more memory than the 1GB I’ve got installed and given the fact that is still isn’t my Macbook, spending money on either of them (and on a Vista license) hasn’t been at the top of my priority list.

Keeping a log of my experiences using the Macbook has costed some extra time but I’m sure it will help my colleagues to get to know the Macbook quicker once they have a go at it. I’m not sure if I can keep up the steady stream of posts, but if not, at least I’ve got the archive so far.
I’m a bit worried about the domain name thouh. I had registered it before realising that Apple doesn’t always play nice with sites that have a URL which includes one of their trademarks. So maybe I get a mail from one of their lawyers one day soon. We’ll see. Just be on the safe side I made absolutely sure that no infringement of any trademark is intended by including that information in the footer.

Until now I haven’t posted any links to the blog on either my personal blog or sites like Technorati. Maybe now the amount of posts is big enough to start doing that.

One of the things that I always thought was that on a Mac you couldn’t view WMV files or streaming WMV video. I could understand that because both iTunes and Quicktime Player on Windows can’t display WMV. This is the most important reason why I’ve always tried to at least provide a WMV and Quicktime version of screencasts that I create.

But it isn’t true. Mac users can view WMV files and live WMV streams on their Macs if they want to. So they apparently just don’t want to! And yes, you need to install two additional tools for it to work, but they’re free, not created by Microsoft and it is not as if those are the first two tools you need to install.

Flip4Mac
There is a Microsoft Window Mediaplayer for the Mac. But as you can read on the Microsoft website, they are no longer doing any further development on it. Instead they point you to a free alternative called Flip4Mac.

After I’d installed that, Firefox had no problem displaying the WMV version of the Google Earth screencast available here (post is in Dutch, but the video is in English).

It played the file in-line without complaining about the fact that it is a WMV.

VLC player
Another free player that I think every Mac user should install is VLC player. It will play just about any format that you can encounter online.
And it also was able to deal with mms:// links containing live WMV streaming video like is being used by SURFnet TV in the Netherlands.

Miro
And if you can’t find your favourite videoblog in iTunes because it doesn’t offer an Quicktime RSS feed, you should definitely check out Miro. I haven’t installed it on the Macbook yet, but have used it before on the XP laptop and it is great. Is has the VLC player integrated in it thus combining all the great playback features from the VLC player with RSS capabilities, torrent downloads etc.

Is this going to change anything?
I’ll probably will keep on creating Quicktime versions of my screencasts, but no longer just because it would otherwise mean that part of the readers/viewers wouldn’t be able to view them without that version. I don’t really care about the format wars in this. I’m not convinced either of them is going to be around in say 5 years time. But that is not the life span of my screencasts. Because applications change and within say a year or say the screencast, like any other instruction, will become outdated.