Alex Hardy

I use Firefox as my primary web browser. This is partly down to it doing a satisfactory job of rendering web pages, but also because I use Chris Pederick’s Web Developer Extension and Google Browser Sync to keep my bookmarks in step between work and home Macs.

Lately though, my Firefox had kinda lost the plot. Browser Sync had stopped working properly and I was even getting rendering problems on webpages that I wasn’t seeing on other computers.

So it was time to un-holster AppZapper for the first time. We all love the drag and drop simplicity of installing most software under Mac OS X, but removing it is another matter. Apps distribute preferences and other support files around your system that aren’t removed just by trashing the app.

AppZapper bills itself as “the uninstaller Apple forgot” – drag an application onto its window and it will identify the related components. A press of the “Zap” button causes a cute screen flash and all that junk is moved to the trash.

$12.95 promises free upgrades for life, for when a fresh start isn’t so simple.

My newly installed copy of Firefox 2.0.0.2 is working fine.

I’ve been trying to find an explanation for the colour shifts we experience when exporting from Photoshop. When we preview graphics in ImageReady or open them in our Mac browsers, they appear noticeably washed out. We found the process tremendously frustrating when building the John Smith’s website, and we needed a solution.

To be honest we’d blamed Photoshop, but it turns out the Mac itself is behind it. Ironically the problem does not arise because Photoshop is stupid, but because it is clever.

Now, professional colour management is a black art that I do not claim to know. I’ve been able to gather some information, and I’ll relate my understanding:

The Problem

• Gamma is a colour setting that is most noticeable in the mid-tones.
• The Mac ships to this day with a display gamma of 1.8. This is due to its print heritage which predates the dominance of Windows and widespread use of the Internet.
• Windows displays colours in sRGB (standard Red Green Blue) with a gamma of 2.2. This setting is a de facto standard shared by TV, scanners, digital cameras and the vast majority of computers on the Internet - which are not colour managed. This is why graphics on Windows appear darker and with more contrast than on the Mac.
• Photoshop is clever enough to display an image in 2.2 gamma for editing.
• However, it can’t possibly know how to preview your image when saving for web, because there is no single display profile for the web.
• So it takes its best guess, which is to render the image to your monitor profile (if you are on a Mac, the odds are its gamma setting is 1.8).
• You will observe a colour shift in the Save For Web window, but confusingly not when you reopen the image in Photoshop (see fourth point).
• Open the graphic in a non colour managed application (like a web browser) and the shift is visible.

The Solution

As is often the case with technology, there is no 100% Right Answer, but a series of steps and choices. You have to decide for yourself which you consider to be the lesser of evils.

Firstly, you must ensure that the working RGB space in Photoshop is sRGB IEC61966-2.1 (Edit menu / Colour Settings). The easiest way to do this would be to select an Internet preset. I’m using “Europe Web/Internet.”

Work away! What you see is what Windows users will see (barring monitor variances which can’t be accounted for). You can preview how your work will appear to Mac users by selecting (View menu / Proof Setup / Macintosh RGB) and turning Proof Colours on. There’s our colour shift…

Now we come to export and where we make our choice. There are those, such as Don MacAskill of SmugMug, who recommend setting your monitor profile to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 for an easy life. Your monitor profile will match your working space, so hey presto! No shift!

In practise, I don’t like this method. It produces an undesirable blue cast on my iMac’s screen. Buried away in Aperture’s online support docs, Apple’s recommendation is:

Unless you have a color management expert instructing you otherwise, select a 2.2 gamma and a D65 white point.

I did this – From (System Preferences / Displays / Colour) I walked through the “Display Calibrator Assistant” and created another monitor profile called “iMac calibrated.”

This is a hotly debated step. Print professionals argue that this is not a solution for them. They go on to contend that sacrificing colour quality on your Mac screen to see things in the same way that the masses do is unwise. Better to accept the colour shift.

I agree with MacAskill, that Apple is pleasing an expert minority at the majority’s expense. Print professionals are skilled at tweaking their colour settings, while the public in general are not – they just want things to work. It all seems a bit pointless if you can’t view your own work the way you intended it. I’ve retained the new profile subject to further experiments.

As Apple gets more consumer focused I expect they’ll quietly start to ship with 2.2 gamma by default.

… it’s the sound of Windows Vista launching. No, that’s not a joke about the general apathy surrounding the most important Windows since the hot topic was “who’s better: Blur or Oasis?”

There’s much debate about what Vista means - is it more secure or will the UAC nags desensitise people so much that they carelessly *OK* any prompt that appears (thereby making it less secure)? - are the additional bells and whistles timely enhancements or is it lip gloss on an old hag? Are the various multimedia apps a shameless rip off of iLife, or an essential response to the demands of today’s user?

MS, just like Apple, has its hardcore supporters and detractors. Reality (read: “the market”) lies between. The Apple camp who see Vista’s lukewarm reception as the beginning of MS’ end are deluded. The business world and most homes have computers that Mac OS X would refuse to run on. The greatest threats to MS are open source software (eg: OpenOffice.org) and Internet services (eg: Google).

It would please me to see Apple regain some market-share through Mac OS X and the so-called “iPod halo effect”. 10%, 20%? Who knows… Maybe that would bring the games developers. In any case, Apple will remain a niche player, and this is how it must be.

This has nothing to do with Mac snobbery - just realism. Apple users rejoice in the Mac’s simplicity, and pour scorn on MS’ uphill battle to rally countless disparate components together and call it a platform. To their credit they do a remarkably good job. Now flip it. Go to the Apple Store. You’ll find two classes of laptop, and three classes of desktop computer. Imagine that this was all the choice there was. Sound appealing?

If Apple became the dominant platform, the aspects that users praise as its key virtues would become its worst crimes. The only way to compete with MS would be to open Mac OS X to run on generic hardware. If they did, any stability advantages would disappear. Apple also consistently prove that they don’t have the manufacturing capacity even to satisfy the demand they have now. Fancy waiting six months for your new computer?

It works to think of the Mac as the Milan catwalk, or the Tokyo concept cars of computing. Ideas filter through to the mainstream, to George at Asda. Windows is a Ford Focus. Vista was never going to roll out to an Apple-style ta-dah: it will be routinely installed on every PC sold from now on. In three years’ time, most users will be on Vista. The ones that matter will anyway - the ones that spend money on such things.

It’s a fait accompli. The most important thing is that it appears to be a significant improvement. I’m looking forward to trying it out.

I don’t like Apple’s Mac adverts very much. The original 1984 ad is a classic, but the iMac ads with Jeff Goldblum felt misjudged, and the new adverts do too.

Goldblum appeared to be using a Mac because he was too inept to use a PC (which you might assume means “Proper Computer”). Witness him bumbling on about email…

The “Mac and PC” ads are not much better. Their objective is to win over new customers to the platform, yet all these adverts do is flatter the existing userbase while poking fun at the PC – and by extension, PC owners.

A computer is an expensive item that people replace every three or four years (my guess). How does it make sense to imply people’s previous purchasing decisions were foolish? My iMac G5 is my third Mac (after a much loved iBook G3 and Performa 6400). During that time I’ve owned two PCs (Evesham desktops).

Was it because I’m a dumb punter who hasn’t seen the light of Apple? No – the first time it was because I genuinely wanted to see if the grass was greener on the other side, the second time because I worked at J-Media and did all my work on Windows. I reckon Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop mean I’ll never need to buy another PC, but not that I’ll never use Windows.

Since when was iLife the Mac’s greatest selling point? What good does it do to name-drop Mac OS X without showing it, when many users don’t clearly understand what an Operating System is?

Mac users have a bit of a reputation for being elitist and smug. If anything, PC guy is more comical and likable than Mac guy in these adverts. Mac guy just looks like a smartass. There are plenty of retorts that could be made to these ads, and Youtube is stuffed with tedious parodies. Heaven forbid PC guy should mention availability of games…

Apple obviously considers themselves far too boutique to do anything as vulgar as showing the Mac in action, so there’s no point suggesting it. They do need to adjust the tone of their advertisements though.

So my predictions turned out to be 100% wrong Some random thoughts:

Perhaps it should be called Appleworld! The Mac didn’t get a sniff! Where were the hardware upgrades? Now that the Intel transition is complete, I’d have expected a refreshed form factor on at least one product (probably the Mac and MacBook Pro)… Where was the extended preview of OS X Leopard? Where was iLife ‘07? Where were representatives of Adobe and Microsoft, with CS3 and Office 2008 demos and release date commitments? Not even one more thing?

Apple TV is an interesting little gadget. I’m not remotely interested in using a videogame console as a music / photos storehouse. I’ve already gone to the trouble of importing and organising that content on my computer. The hard drive means that users won’t need their computer turned on to use it, which would have been a fatal flaw were that not the case.

I wouldn’t buy one for £199 though. I use my PS2 as a DVD player and I’ve got a nice amp, to which I’ve connected a dock - I don’t need to sync my music because I just plug my iPod in. I’m not fussed about looking at my photos on telly, and I’ve no plans to buy shows or movies from iTunes (a moot point in the UK). Without PVR features, I don’t care about it.

iPhone was a surprise to me. It’s long been a favourite on the Mac rumour mill, but until yesterday appeared to be nothing more. Wow, though. Wow. I have to confess, I want one and if I can ever come up with even the feeblest justification I will buy one.

I look forward to seeing what the other phone manufacturers come up with now. It’s already hurting RIM, Palm and Nokia’s share price so they will have to respond quickly. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to describe the iPhone as a generational leap in phones; hopefully Apple won’t find themselves out there with little incentive to innovate further.

There are questions to be answered about iPhone - does Apple intend to aggressively improve on it through software (I want an RSS reader, general purpose QuickTime player and touchscreen tetris!)? Will it be open enough for third parties to create additional software? Will they add other hardware features such as a video camera and sat nav? Time will tell.

Does anyone think that this issue of the options backdating at Apple, and the question of Steve Jobs’ involvement will end up as anything other than a whitewash?

Apple - much like Microsoft - is an icon and a champion of the so called American Dream. Steve Jobs is a very rich man and has powerful friends. It’s in nobody’s interests to ruin Apple and cripple an industry. If anything at all happens, I expect it will involve a Very Big Fine, some public shame and some scapegoats. Not Jobs though - he will remain as CEO and business will pretty much continue as usual.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I have enormous respect for Jobs. When I read Jobs described as a visionary, I nod my head. On the other, when I read Jobs described as a volatile character and a total son-of-a-bitch to work for, I believe it. I don’t want Jobs to be forced out (not unfeasible in worst-case scenario) because like others such as Walt Disney, he is the heart and soul of Apple. His departure with no suitable successor would be the slow death of the company as almost happened once before.

But it’s one rule for men like Jobs, and another for the rest of us, no? A lesser businessman with a smaller company, caught fiddling his books (or allowing others to do so through negligence) the way large corporates do every day, would go to prison for fraud. It’s been said that were a corporation a person, that person might be deemed a psychopath because of the utterly amoral way that they operate.

It may be best to go live up a tree.

It’s traditional just before a Macworld conference for all the mac websites to whip themselves into a salivating frenzy, trying to guess what Steve Jobs will announce in his keynote speech, and what will be that “one more thing”…

So why not have a go myself I’m as well informed as any Wall Street analyst (which is to say I have no bleedin’ clue what they’ll do), so here goes:

• Since the iSight camera has been withdrawn from sale, a range of new displays with integrated iSights.
• They don’t dwell on iPod at Macworld (so no video iPod or iPod Phone - which I think is nothing but baseless rumour anyway), but they will announce the addition of the Beatles back catalogue and a movie studio or two to iTunes (probably not Universal, I’d guess Dreamworks).
• Core 2 Duo Mac Mini.
• Quad core Mac Pros with blu ray drives.
• 15.4 inch MacBook with an improved graphics chipset (black) - the current screens are a wee bit small and it’s about time that price premium was about more than just colour and an obscenely overpriced extra 40Gb of hard disk space!
• More of the iTV feature-set will be revealed, but it won’t be released. Personally, unless it has PVR functionality I’m not interested in it.
• I thought Macworld magazine’s prediction that the release date for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard will be announced as March 24^th (the sixth anniversary of OS X’s release) looks pretty convincing. Now that Windows Vista is released, we’ll get to see features that Apple were previously keeping tight-lipped about.
• A new version of iLife and other apps that incorporate some funky new features resulting from Apple being all cosy with Google. iPhoto/Picasa, iCal/Google Calendar, iWork/Google Docs integration anyone?

Those are minor things though… They let their 30^th anniversary date slip quietly by but are hyping Macworld. There has to be something big and Mac-related on the cards.

There are a couple of mumblings around that we may see a 30^th anniversary mac, as they unveiled the 20^th anniversary mac back in 1997…

… which would be nice, but Apple have since perfected the all-in-one form factor with the iMac (what can they do? make it thinner still?), this wouldn’t be enough of a big deal to get the press and the ol’ share prices excited.

To be honest, I’ve no idea at the moment what the “one more thing” will be, but I think it would have to be an entirely new class of mac.

[UPDATE] The keynote is scheduled to be two hours long, which is much longer than usual. They’ve obviously got plenty to say for themselves.

Hmm. I think this is irresponsible, self-serving and disgusting. If their aim was to make computing more secure for users of Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla etc products, they would inform the company in question and give them an opportunity to fix the vulnerability, rather than advertise it to people who would exploit it. Of course, their aim is to sell their services.

I would quite like to see a scenario where a company wasn’t able to fix a vulnerability that these wankers had announced before an exploit was created and doing harm. I’d like then for those who suffered disruption or data loss to sue them.

Apple gets analyst upgrade as iTV features stealthily emerge

Nothing has emerged, stealthily or otherwise. What’s happened is an analyst has raised his share price estimates based on what he *guesses* the iTV will do. This is news?!?

These people get paid to sit around making stuff up! Brilliant.

He also stressed that the iTV video streaming product may have features “beyond streaming video content”. He noted the possibility that the device may have an internal hard drive and employ “advanced user-interface software”.

May have. May have. This clown doesn’t know a damn thing about what it is or isn’t. It’s a brushed-metal hat stand for all he knows. He has no inside knowledge, and if he did, Apple’s ridiculously over-zealous legal dogs would be all over him.

The analyst also observed that Apple will need to release “incremental products” early in 2007 to protect itself against the impact of seasonality on sales.

So a company will have to improve its products in order to compete. Fuck me, that’s revolutionary.

Next!

… that perfectly illustrated the difference between the Mac and Windows, it’s this:

A group of Mac shareware developers set up a competition. They call it My Dream App. An ‘X Factor’ for software if you like, the general public are invited to suggest an idea for an application. The prize: some hardware (iPods, MacBooks etc) over the rounds, after which visitors vote for their three favourites. The winners will see their applications built for real, and get a royalty on each sale.

They get some high profile judges, including J Allard, Steve Wozniak, Guy Kawasaki and some other well known mac developers such as Cabel Sasser and Gedeon Maheux. Respected bloggers and podcasters like John Gruber and Amber MacArthur, too.

The entrants demonstrate fantastic enthusiasm and talent. In the end the winners are Atmosphere, Portal and Cookbook.

A certain Stefan Miganowicz of Leominster, Massachusetts is suitably impressed. He decides to create a website. Called, imaginatively enough, My Dream Windows App. Well… look at it. Seriously. Look at it. They’d probably appreciate the hits.

I thought this post about it on My Dream App was incredibly diplomatic.