含蓄的张扬

Apple’s “Back to the Mac” special event has just finished, having watched the partial event video, here are some random thoughts about this event.

About the Lion

I think one of most important things I’m looking for is the sneaky peak of the next OSX release, the “Lion”. We do have a lot of expectations about this release having to see the code name — the King of the jungle. Another thing that is worth looking at is that having the last major architectural improvement from 32bit to 64bit, apple could now concentrate on providing us with new features. The following is some of the new features introduced in this event:

• App Store
• Mission Control
• LaunchPad
• Full Screen App

Well, the concept of app store is good. Having one central location for finding and installing all software is really nice. The open source community (e.g. Ubuntu) has been doing this for years. However, since this is the Apple who is doing it. I do have the concern that I need to ‘jailbreak’ a Macbook in order to install softwares. Do note that Steve Jobs said “it’s not the only way for installing apps”, ‘jailbreak’ a Macbook probably won’t that necessary in the near future, but it is a possibility. The app home page and mission control are the very nice small things that Apple is really good at. Making small things really enjoyable to use. The overall feeling is that Lion does not have that much of improvement Maybe I’m asking too much.

About FaceTime

Video chat, Apple introduced this produce like it has never been done before, and they are the inventor of Video chatting. I think this just gets over blowed. I mean, what are the key difference between FaceTime and Skype, and many other softwares that supports video chatting (e.g. gmail, msn, qq etc.)

About TouchScreen

Yes, I completely agrees, touch screen is a useless for note book computers. I mean who wants to have there fingers touching around their computer screen? It makes the screen dirty overtime, and it’s just not comfortable.

Some Little Things

I noticed that in order to watch the event video right after the event. The first browser that is able to do it is Safari. If you’re using other browsers, you just have to wait a bit longer. Here are some screenshots when I was trying to watch the video earlier:

Using Safari on Macbook Pro:

Using other browser (Google Chrome) on Macbook Pro:

Woke up this morning, with WWDC news flying all over the Internet. iPhone 4, Safari 5 and many others. This shows that Apple is still the innovation leader, with every product released with a “WOW”.

I have removed firefox away from my dock, and start trying out the new Safari 5. Will it actually replace firefox? I see the light, but it will not happen in a long time. I have only used it for 10 minutes, so this is a very early review. Welcome to leave your thoughts in the comment.

Start with what I noticed immediately, tab management:

Now, we can finally configure (not using the command line) Safari 5 to open new pages in tabs instead of windows. Seriously, this should be enabled a lot earlier. What’s the point of having tabs while still using many windows? Remember how we use to do it in command lines? You don’t have to any more.

The Reader:

The reader function is pretty cool. I don’t really mind to read articles within the web pages, but the nice feature about reader function is how it prints the web article. You can use “Shift+Command+R” to start or stop the reader for particular website article.

The Search Engine:

Another feature is more built-in search options (Bing search). This doesn’t excite me much. How about let user decide what search engine they want? How about Google Scholar? How is this helpful to have 3 options but they all offer the same functionality? Think about it, it does not make sense. So give me other options for other search engines, or let me decide.

Safari Developer Program:

Among all these new features, this is very good news. Yes! Extensions! This is why leaving firefox is heart breaking. Let’s see how this works out. Really looking forward to it!

A few days ago, I blogged that the new Macbook Pro i5 and i7 does not do auto sleep very well. It seems that most applications that run in full screen mode breaks the auto sleep for both display and system. More details from here.

It seems that we have figured out a solution to this problem by manually download and install this official update. The question is, why this cannot be found by the system’s autoupdate, but have to be explicitly downloaded and installed.

UPDATE (01 June 2010): This update doesn’t work. More people have encountered the same issue, and currently there is no known solution

UPDATE (25 June 2010): This problem has been fixed by 10.6.4 update

The new Macbook Pro has been released not long ago. There are a few problems I have noticed and listed in the following:

Problem No1. Automatic graphic card switching.

The 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro models come standard with two graphic cards — Intel HD (low performance and low energy consumption) and Nvidia Geforce 330m (more powerful but more energy consumption). Both computers support automatic graphics switching. Quote from apple official website "It’s a breakthrough technology from Apple that switches graphics processors on the fly to give you performance when you need it." and "MacBook Pro transfers the workload between the powerful discrete NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M graphics processor and integrated Intel HD Graphics so seamlessly, you won’t even notice." But when I start to notice which graphic card I'm using. I am surprised that I'm always using the Nvidia card (which is the high performance one) simply because I have skype (and some times 1Password) open. I don't see why skype is a graphic intensive application nor 1Password. Common apple, if you cannot implement such function correctly, at least give users the option. My guess: the graphic switching function is implemented depend on whether an application use some part of the API. If it does turn on the NV graphic card, otherwise use Intel. This is not smart, and not a smart judge if an application is graphic intensive.

Now gfxCardStatus v1.6.1 has a experimental function that force the graphics card switching, which is good news.

Here is a incomplete list of applications that triggers the Nvidia Graphic card:

Tweetie
HyperSpaces
Skype
iWeb
iMovie
GarageBand
Parallels 5 Desktop
Microsoft Office 2004
Microsoft Office AutoUpdate daemon
RapidWeaver
PathFinder
Mathematica
Warp
Droplr
1Password
Clips
NetNewsWire
Koolclip
AppZapper
uTorrent

You can find complete discussions of this issue from apple support forum and macrumors.

Problem No2. Auto Sleep

I have noticed that sometimes the auto sleep for display or computer is broken. The system does not sleep when it is supposed to be. E.g. I set the auto display and system display to 1 minute, after half an hour, the display or computer still wouldn't sleep. After a bit of experimenting we found that this may be caused by running a full screen mode application (e.g. Need For Speed, World of Warcraft).

Problem No3. Trackpad Scroll Momentum

The new macbook pro came with a new feature called momentum scrolling. I like this idea in iPhone, because we have limited screen. Glad Apple have the option to turn this off. However, everytime I restart the computer, the momentum scrolling function are back on. It just won't go away! Of course I can turn it off manually every time after restart, but it is really annoying. Please have it fixed apple!