Status-Q

A very cool new utility included in Tiger is Grapher, which draws lovely graphs of equations in 2d or 3d, and does a whole lot more too.

This is z = 1-sin(x)+sin(2y), but there are some much more complicated and beautiful examples in the ‘Examples’ menu:

What you can’t see here is the fact that it’s rotating gently, and you can turn it in any direction you want using the mouse…

Worth investigating.

Bonjour, Bonjour!

Apple’s Rendezvous technology, largely an implementation of the Zeroconf standards, has been renamed to ‘Bonjour’ for trademark reasons.

Following yesterday’s not-entirely-smooth upgrade process, I now have my main machine running Tiger, and, apart from a few wrinkles, it’s great. (Here’s a very minor wrinkle for UK users: if you install the weather widget in Dashboard, it’ll cleverly select London as the location for the forecasts. Unfortunately, I think it’s selecting London, Ontario, or one of the other Londons; the forecast certainly isn’t right for us. Specify “London, United Kingdom” and it’s fine) Two and a half years ago, after installing Jaguar, I wrote that one of the good things about Apple software updates is that they generally make your machine faster, where Microsoft ones (in my now rather distant experience) tended to do the opposite. Well, the trend continues, and though there are some things that take more time in Tiger, in general the system seems noticeably snappier.

The following is an account of my experiences upgrading my Powerbook to the new “Tiger” version of Mac OS X – a long spiel which is probably of very little interest to anybody not likely to be doing the same thing… and probably not of much interest to them!

This turned out to be a very long post and only suitable for those with great stamina, so I’ve moved it into the Comments. Summary for the rest of you: Buy an external firewire drive if you don’t have one, do a complete bootable backup onto it before starting. Then reboot with a system CD and use Disk Utility to verify/repair your disk. Then do the install. Then reboot with the Tiger DVD and ‘Repair permissions’. That’s my recommendation, anyway, and you can read the rest if you want to know the reasoning.

Now that Tiger, Apple new version of Mac OS, has been released, those of us with developer licences can talk about the cool new stuff, and there are more new articles and websites to read this weekend than ever before.

Anyone with an interest in the underlying techie details as well as the visible might enjoy John Siracusa’s 21-page review at Ars Technica.

A very significant new feature for me is not much talked about – the ability, at last, to rotate external displays and use them in portrait mode. This is a godsend for anyone who spends a lot of time reading or writing pages of text. I’m not sure whether it’s supported on all Macs or just those with certain graphics chips, but it works on my PowerBook.

The very latest (2005) PowerBooks have a motion sensor built in to them. It will park your hard disk heads if you drop or bump the machine. But that’s not all it can be used for….

I’m often worried these days that something I see and find interesting on the web won’t be available if I ever go and look for it again, or it’ll be in some premium-rate archive and I’ve never yet stumped up the money for any of those. (Publishers, are you listening?)

Mac users, of course, can capture anything as a PDF using the built-in facilities of the Print dialog. But if you want to start doing some really nice things with your PDF files, you want to play with PDF Services, a little-known but rather handy feature of Mac OS X. This MacWorld article will get you started, and there’s more information on Apple’s site here.

The potential of this is starting to come home to me as I play more with a preview of Tiger, which will instantly index the text in any document you save to your disk. Including PDFs. It may not be long before I automatically capture the image of every web page I read.

I recommended Paul Graham’s article “How to Start a Startup” a few days ago. Here’s another good one on the Return of the Mac

Following on from my earlier post about the VGA output on the Mac Mini, there is at least a partial solution described here – there’s a hidden contrast control buried away on System Preferences under ‘Universal Access’. Tweaking that in conjunction with the monitor brightness & contrast controls certainly seems to help a lot.

In the meantime, we decided to order a Dell 2001FP display for Rose…. Should be here in a few days… but I don’t have any regrets!

Mmm. It’s too bad. I bought a Mac Mini today for Rose, which is in all respects lovely, except that the text just isn’t quite crisp enough on my VGA monitor. There’s something about the analog output of the Mini, via the DVI-VGA converter, which is not quite right. And I don’t think it’s the converter.

I’m far from being the only one with this problem; see this substantial discussion in the Apple forum, for example.

It seems pretty likely to be fixable in firmware, once Apple really acknowledge the problem. Until then I have to decide whether to return it or to get a DVI monitor…