Steve Jobs - a leader, an icon, a legend.

Upon hearing the news that Steve Jobs has passed away, my  reaction was to check every news source I could to make sure it wasn’t some mistake like last time. Sadly, this time the news came directly from Apple’s board of directors and Steve’s wife Laurene. The world lost one of the most creative, ambitious and charismatic person of all time. However, the legacy and the inspiration of Steve Jobs must live on.

Live for the future, not the past. Steve always said “we always look forward”, and that’s exactly what he built at Apple – a forward looking company that does not just deliver what consumers need, but more importantly what they WILL need.

Live for doing what you love. Steve often spoke openly about death, and using death as a reminder to not waste your life doing something again you own intuition. “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked, there is no reason not to follow your heart.” I think this is perhaps the greatest advice he has given me. You have to love what you do, or any rational person will eventually give up.

Live for achieving your goals. Steve is such a goal oriented person and he never gave up on what he believed in. Even after being fired from Apple, Steve kept going. “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.”

Live for perfection, don’t settle. People in the tech industry often say, “Microsoft takes about 3 tires to get something right.” Steve Jobs on the other hand always want to get it right on the first try. His pursue of perfection and this fanatical attention to detail define the very existence of Apple.

Steve Jobs taught us all that one man can “make a dent in the universe”; he taught us how too live.

No support for legacy authentication method in SMB or AFP

As previously mentioned, OS X Lion does not support logging into NAS boxes running Samba or AFP servers that employ the DHCAST128 authentication method. Apple documented this as a security update, in which they outright disabled DHCAST128 in Lion.

People who are running type of NAS system – FreeNAS or store bought boxes will not work in Lion!

Now some people have figured out a workaround to manually enable DHCAST128 in Lion, so if you don’t mind a little hacking in the system go ahead and use it. Otherwise try to enable NFS on your NAS. NFS is support by most NAS boxes running Linux. However, note that NFS does not provide any option for user authentication.

Option 1 – Hacking the OS

SMB/CIFS solution:

1. Upgrade FreeNAS to the latest stable build.
2. Setup your SMB/CIFS shares accordingly.
3. Go to Finder, click on Go->Connect to Server  or simply press command + K.
4. Connect to your server by typing smb://your.ip/hostname or use cifs://your.ip/hostname
5. Login, and you should be good to go.
6. If you don’t see the login pop-up, connect to smb://user:pass@ip  instead.

Do not use the link in Finder under the Shared category. It will not let you connect. It could be my settings somewhere that’s causing the problem, but so far I can’t figure out why it won’t let me connect straight from the Finder shortcut. However, the Connect to Server option works just fine.

Leave a comment if you encounter problems.

AFP solution:

1. Launch /Applications/Utilities/Terminal and do:

• sudo chmod o+w /Library/Preferences

• defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.AppleShareClient afp_host_prefs_version -int 1

• Now restart your computer.
2. From Finder, select an AFP server, or use “Connect To…”.  This will cause the AFP Client to create the full preferences file
3. Launch Terminal again and do:

• sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.AppleShareClient afp_disabled_uams -array "Cleartxt Passwrd" "MS2.0" "2-Way Randnum exchange"

• sudo chmod o-w /Library/Preferences

• Now restart your computer.

To disable DHCAST128,

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.AppleShareClient afp_disabled_uams -array-add "DHCAST128"

Credit for these command goes to Alexander Wilde, please visit his site for the original post. All credits go to him!

Option 2 Enabling NFS

In FreeNAS, go to Services – > NFS and enable 4 NFS servers.

then configure your NFS shares, the easiest way is to point the share to your main storage folder under and share all sub-folders underneath.

Configure NFS shares

Note that if you do not “Map all users to root” you will not have write access to the share!

Save and apply. Then go to Disk Utilities on your Mac.

Click on File – > NFS Mounts, click on the ‘+’ to add a new mount.

Configure NFS mounts in Disk Utility

Replace the IP and folder names according to your FreeNAS share. Then click on ‘Verify” to close the dialog and close the window to save your settings. You may be asked to login to your admin account in order to save the setting. The mount will be auto-mounted to your system at boot time.

After you set everything up in Disk Utility. Quit it and wait a couple of minutes for it to show up in Finder. Note that even though we mounted it to a folder on the Desktop, it will NOT show up! The easiest solution here is to go to your Desktop in Finder and create an alias to the mounted folder. Or, create an actual folder on the Desktop beforehand then mount the share to it.

This isn’t the safest approach since NFS in FreeNAS does not have any authentication support. But for my personal needs it’s actually quite nice, especially when NFS is about 30-50% faster than SMB in some cases. For many home networks, it’s the only way to stream HD videos over the air.

So please give NFS a shot if you don’t want to hack your system to use AFP!

Mac OS X Lion

Today, Apple shipped MacOS X Lion via the Mac AppStore. It sells for $29.99 USD, and it is topping the charts at the store.
This is the first time Apple went with a complete Internet-based approach to dealing with an OS upgrade. In fact, it’s the only time I have ever heard of an OS being sold strictly via digital download. Words on the street seem to suggest that if you go to an Apple retail store, they will install Lion for you through a local cached version of the OS. Thus, saving you the hassle of downloading 3.5GB over the net. It’s not really a life saver if you ask me, but it’s interesting to see how Apple is handling things for now, and the days to come.

My initial impression of Lion was fairly positive, but not overly impressed with the changes.

Pros:

1. No major compatibility issues with applications. Everything minus a few utility apps works fine on Lion out of the box, or requires a quick downloadable update. I’m guessing since most apps these days were written in Cocoa already, it wasn’t much of an hassle to fix the few kinks in Lion.
2. New Mail app is great! New UI with an option to switch back to the classic view if you want to.
3. System icons are mono-toned. This may be my personal preference, but I think colours can sometimes look a bit messy and disorganized.
4. System pop-ups, and transitions are super fast and smooth. Apple really took everything they learned from making efficient 2D effects on iOS to the desktop.
5. iTunes was rewritten for Lion in 64-bit! This is not really a Lion feature, but it sure has been a long wait.
6. New features – Air Drop, Versions, Resume , Full Screen, FaceTime etc.
7. No notable increase in disk space usage. It didn’t bloat unlike many Windows Service Pack updates.

Cons:

1. 

   No support for legacy authentication method in SMB or AFP

   Major compatibility issues with accessing Samba and AFP shares! This was certainly bad news for us who are using my FreeNAS build guide and are accessing files through either SMB or AFP. Apple decided that the authentication method – DHCAST128 was insufficient and they disabled support for it in Lion! This will break compatibility with all over-the-counter NAS boxes, including our DIY NAS. However, there are remedies that you can follow to work around it. Check out my later post.

2. Time Machine does not work over non-Apple network shares! This is a huge deal for people who use a thirdparty NAS box to host Time Machine backups. Unless your box can support the latest AFP stack in Lion, Time Machine will NOT work! You can put a sparsebundle on it… but it simply will not work. Time Machine only works through the latest AFP stack.
3. New features.
• Air Drop is Lion-only. There is no Air Drop app for previous versions of Mac OS.
• Versions is only an API that apps can be written on. It is not a system wide feature, and it is up to the developer to implement.
• Resume can be really annoying if you are using Safari and don’t want your web page views saved all the time! The setting to turn it off is also very hidden. You have to go to System Preferences -> General -> uncheck Restore Windows when quitting and re-opening apps.
• Full Screen is also app specific and requires the developer to provide support. Don’t know why they could just implement it some other way to resize the window to full screen.
4. Mail database took a good 15min. It was surprisingly slow! Maybe I had too much stuff in there.
5. No Java runtime in the OS. But the OS is smart enough to automatically download it when you need it, through Software Updates.
6. 

   Multi-touch gestures in Lion

   Super weird scrolling and gesture changes! The scrolling direction by default in Lion is the complete opposite of what you are used to. Apple call this the “natural” direction. But it’s really not so nature to me – natural is what I am used to. Don’t fancy me Apple. Thankfully, you can change this through System Preferences -> Touchpad -> uncheck scrolling directions. Apple also changed gesture to do Expose (now known as Mission Control), honestly this will need some getting used to. There are no settings to give you back the familiar Expose gestures. (ex. four finger down = show desktop, up = expose all windows, no more 3 finger scroll to get to the top of bottom of a page)

7. Minor annoyance – Launchpad shows all the uninstaller apps as well. This is terrible if you have Adobe CS installed. You will get a bunch of uninstallers listed with the apps and it’s almost impossible to find your apps! Yes you can do folders, but if you have a lot of apps… good luck sorting all of them. Launchpad is especially useless in this situation when a Spotlight search can open you any app with a few keystrokes.

To sum up, I’m not overly impressed with Lion. Especially the decision to drop legacy SMB/AFP authentication! I think if Apple didn’t sell it for $29.99 I wouldn’t even recommend it to people. Some of the changes are certainly nice, but nothing groundbreaking as you would expect from a major OS release. In fact, many of the neat features you saw during WWDC are app-specific and it will only benefit you if the developers choose to use it. Apple likes to build only the API and leave the rest to the developers, where from a customer’s perspective we like Apple to implement it in the system so all apps may take advantage of it. This is especially true regarding Versions. Apple could have improved the filesystem to support version control natively.

Having said that, I do think it is worth the $29.99 it sells for and Apple is certainly on the right path of revamping its OSes to stay ahead of the curve.

For the longest time, we had to use the alpha Redsn0w release that not only required a 4.2b SHSH but the actual 4.2b IPSW which is only available to iOS developers.

The Greenpois0n RC 6.1 release is based on a different hack to the kernel that will allow untethered jailbreaking minus the need for 4.2b SHSH altogether. It also fixes the annoying DRM issue with iBooks.

Steps: (mirrors updated, please read on)

• Download Greenpois0n RC 6.1 (fixes iBook  and DRM issue)
  Mac | PC – I’m providing a mirror at this time since the greenpois0n site is very unstable
• Do the buttons combos as instructed.
• Don’t be alarmed by the “Can’t find fs_mount…” errors.
• At the last step, HOLD THE HOME BUTTON AND DON’T LET GO until the jailbreak is completed.

That’s it! Finally a jailbreak that works without hacks!

Note that the Loader app will not work until Greenpois0n’s site is back online. Just use Redsn0w to install Cydia for now.

HOWEVER… along with new features iOS 4.2.1 brought us more woes than ever before as well.

1. Battery drains EXTREMELY quickly with this release. I would have nothing running in the background of my iPhone 4… and the phone will get warm. It almost feel like the phone is constantly accessing something… and it just drains the battery right out.
2. Jailbreak is still tethered! This means you have to physically attach your phone to your computer every single time you reboot. so imagine putting your phone into DFU mode and uploading the jailbreak exploit every single time. Not fun!
3. Cydia and other jailbroken apps still cannot work well with iOS 4.2.1 yet. Although Cydia has been updated to run on iOS 4.2.1 it is still not very stable from what I could tell.

So to sum up… after having iOS 4.2.1 running for 4 days (3 days unjailbroken, 1 day jailbroken) I finally decided to revert back to 4.1
Also, the heating/battery issue was worse after jailbreaking… I tested repeatedly and found this to be true.

So here is how to downgrade your iOS 4.2.1 device to iOS 4.1 or earlier.

Before we begin, you will need

• A PC or Mac.
• Backup your iPhone / iPod from iTunes.
• Saved SHSH on Cydia. You cannot downgrade if you didn’t save a SHSH for your post-iPhone 3G/iPod 2G devices and chosen iOS version.
• Apple firmware restore IPSW (I’ve listed the 4.1 files)
  • iPhone 4
  • iPhone 3GS
  • iPhone 3G
  • iPod touch 2G
  • iPod touch 3G
  • iPod touch 4G
• iREB from here.
• iTunes 10.x

There are guides out  there like this one, but none of those worked for me. Every time I tried to restore to 4.1 iTunes spits back an error 1600 or 200… and won’t continue.
Here is how I made it work for my iPhone 4.

1. Point gs.apple.com to the Cydia clone.
   • Open your host file, and add

     74.208.105.171 gs.apple.com

   • This will fool iTunes to recognize your SHSH saved on Cydia. However, this step is not need for iPhone 3G and iPod Touch 2G (MC version) because older devices are not required to have SHSH verification with Apple’s server for every firmware restore.
   • Better illustrated in Step 3 of this guide.
2. Put your phone in DFU mode. Again check this guide if you are not sure how.
3. Connect your iPhone or iPod to the computer, and launch iREB. Click on the device you have, and it will upload a jailbreak exploit to the phone and prep your phone for the restore. Wait for iREB to tell you it has done the job.
4. Go to iTunes, it should recognize your iPhone/iPod in recovery mode.
   • On a PC, hold Shift and click on restore. Select the IPSW file you downloaded.
   • On Mac, hold Alt and click on restore.
   • iTunes will now extract the IPSW file and prepare your device for restore.

You device should successfully restore without any error. When I upgraded to 4.2.1, my baseband was also upgraded to 03.10.01. I just want to confirm for others that iOS 4.1 can indeed work with the newer baseband.

Good luck, and hope Apple fixes all the issues with another update soon!

The Facts

1. Lithium-ion batteries start to lose capacity as soon as they are manufactured.
2. The battery further closes capacity with every FULL cycle recharge.
3. Extremely temperature hot/cold will degrade the battery either permanently or for the short-term.
4. iPhone apps in the App Store that claim to “trickle charge” your battery is completely useless. We will explain this later.
5. It is useful to have an app to keep track of your battery life and usage.
6. If your phone is jailbroken, there are some more homework you need to do to ensure a healthy battery.
7. All lithium-ion batteries are built with an overcharge protection mechanism, so do not worry about leaving your device to charge overnight. It’s perfectly fine.

General Care

• When you first get your iPhone you will realize the Apple had the battery partially charged. You can feel free to turn on and use the device on this partial charge, or you may want to charge it up fully. Either way it’s fine, there are no worries here! However, in the first two week of usage you should let the battery run dead completely and charge it back up to %100 – this is called one full recharge cycle. This initial full recharge cycle will help the battery “wake up” after sitting in the box for so long. I saw an increase of almost 25% of battery life after performing 4 full recharge cycles in first two weeks. Have not done one since, and the battery is running well.
• You do not need to do full recharge cycles are the initial ones you did. I’m not terribly worried about an uncalibrated battery meter. What you will see is that the battery levels will fluctuate. The first 10% may run down quickly and followed by a slow run down of the remaining juices. Not a big deal to me.
• Always charge the phone when you can, plug it in every chance you get. The partial recharge will slow the degradation and erosion of the lithium-ion battery. Try not to let the battery run own to less than 20% unless you are calibrating the battery meter.
• Apple ships the batteries with an approximate 40% partial charge because this is the magic number to slow battery erosion and keep the battery fresh until the device lands in customers’ hands. Therefore, charge you phone to around 40% when you are not using it for a long period of time.
• Put your phone on “Airplane Mode” when you are riding the subway or in a low coverage area. This will prevent it from constantly trying to search for a network.

iOS Push Services
Don’t be afraid to turn Push services on, after all it’s an iPhone! You have to be able to use it, otherwise it’s a useless piece of hardware. What you have to watch out for is the configuration of the Push services. There are a lot of apps that wants to send you Push Notifications, and I’m sure you do not need all of them – especially non-IM apps. So let’s turn them off, from Settings – > Push Notifications.

Second of all, Exchange and Push e-mail also require a constant server connection. You may think this may save you battery juice since the server is pushing data to you instead of your phone trying to ping it every 10 or so minutes… In real life it is not the case. The way Push email works is actually similar to Fetch, in the regard that the phone still has to ping the server to keep the connection alive. There are called heartbeats and different exchange servers requires different intervals in which a heartbeat signal must be received from a device to keep the connection active for Push. Therefore, there really is no way around it. However, sometimes the heartbeat interval may be misconfigured on your phone, or the server had something changed and your phone didn’t get the update. In this case, simply delete your Exchange account and recreate it on the iPhone. This forces the phone to resync with the server.

A misconfigured Exchange account can suck up your battery quickly, because it will attempt to send heartbeat pings to the server constantly. Apple has fixed this bug in iOS 4.0.1. However, if turning off Push email solves all your battery woes then try deleting the email accounts on the phone and recreating them.

iOS Multitasking
Multitasking was done very uniquely for the iPhone. It is actually NOT true multitasking, but it does solve most of our problems. When you switch out of an app it does not actually quit from memory. Instead, the app is put into a frozen state in memory and this allows to quickly switch back to it should you decided to. However, Apple also provided background daemons for frozen apps to keeping running specific tasks. These daemons include VoIP, Downloading/Uploading, Audio output, Location Services and Local Notifications. Apps can register a task to these API so that when it’s put to the frozen state, the unfinished tasks can keep running in the background.

The big question is: “Do frozen apps still use battery?”. The answer is YES they do! What they do not use is the CPU, but they still stay in RAM and RAM needs to power to keep the data intact. However, the power used by RAM is fairly insignificant so there is no real advantage to manually closing every frozen app you have in the task bar.

I feel that Apple has done a great job here to give users a long lasting battery, but at the expense of developers who have to rewrite parts of their apps to comply. So let’s wait patiently until every app is rewritten to use the new multitasking API. The users don’t need to worry much about it.

iOS Optimizations

• Turn your brightness to about 15% – 25% and turn on Auto-Brightness. The iPhone, especially iPhone 4 does a very good job of auto-adjusting the brightness. 15-25% is the magic range to get the most of your battery while still being able to use the phone in almost any lighting situation.
• Set a shorter Auto-Lock timeout. I have mine on 2min, and it works very well to turn off the screen when not in use.
• Turning keyboard/lock sounds. I find them really annoying, so I always have them off which saves battery as well.
• Turn off WiFi and Bluetooth when you don’t need them. Straight forward, I don’t have any Bluetooth accessories anyway.
• iPod Sound Check and equalizers also use a bit of CPU, and personally I find them quite useless. Spend a few more dollars on a good pair of headphones will make all the difference. So keep these off.
• Reboot your phone at once a month. Apple has done a good job to give us a stable OS, but rebooting will help it clear some junk in RAM and run smoother.
• If you experience issues with slow network speeds either on 3G or WiFi, consider resetting your network settings. Settings -> General -> Reset.
• Also consider resetting all of your phone’s settings. This is not what it sounds like. You will only lose your customization in Apple’s apps like Stock, Weather, WiFi password, word suggestions etc. You mail, calendar will stay intact. This reset is extremely helpful when Safari mysteriously crashes on certain web pages. It also helps to give you better battery life by resetting hidden settings in the system that may have been changed somehow.

Jailbreakers
I left the most important part to last. =) For all jailbreakers, there are some work we need to do in order to ensure there are nothing going on with these jailbroken apps without our knowledge.

• Install PrivaCy from saurik. This opts you out globally of usage tracking service employed by apps, and stops them from calling home. This not only saves you battery life, but ensures your privacy.
• Install a new host file to block traffic to ads and malicious websites. This stops apps from fetching ads and calling potentially unsafe scripts from these sites. Furthermore, it stops all apps in your phone from accessing malicious sites. It does not only make pages load faster in Safari and Cydia, it saves you so much battery! You’d be surprised how many jailbroken apps calls these advertising sites for either analytics or ads.
  • To install a new “hosts” file will require that you install OpenSSH on your jailbroken phone, downloading and extracting the hosts file to /etc
  • Make sure you backup your original hosts before replacing it.
• Avoid jailbroken apps with daemons, such as Intelliscreen, backgrounder, WinderBoards… etc.

After applying these fixes to my jailbroken iPhone 4, the battery gain more than 20% of life! It was incredible, pages in Safari load much faster… Cydia is also more responsive. The advantages just keeps going on and on… I would honestly recommend every iPhone owner jailbreak their phone just to update their hosts file. =)

Battery Apps
There are apps in the App Store that claim to give you better battery life… Frankly, nobody knows how these apps are supposed to extend your battery life. If there are ways to do that through software, Apple engineers would have thought about it long before independent app developers. Apple also did not publish any API in iOS to allow the developers to tweak how the battery is used or charged. Therefore, when an app tells you that it trickle-charges your battery… it is in fact lying. The truth is that most device manufacturers trickle-charges the lithium-ion battery to get it from 0%-20% by using low voltage current. The slow charge method minimizes damages to the lithium cells. Once the capacity reaches 20%, a more rapid charge is accomplished by using higher voltage current until the capacity reaches 80% or so. From 80% – 100% the devices again trickle-charges the battery. All of this is done at the hardware level already. There is no use for users to “trickle-charge” their phone through these apps… whatever the developers claim the app can do… it’s not possible.

However, these apps do have a logging feature that tracks how you used your phone and how much the battery lasted since last charge. So that might be beneficial if you want a clear picture of your battery usage. Just don’t expect these apps to do magic for you. =p

That’s it for now. Test it out guys, and let me know what you think.  and don’t forget to comment and follow me!

1. Voice Commands across multiple apps. You can literally talk to the phone to accomplish complex tasks.
2. True multi-tasking in the background. The app is kept alive in the background as a process, while the iOS suspends the app and stops it from running.
3. Flash support. iPhone has absolutely no support or future plans to support for Flash.
4. No need of a media player like iTunes. iPhone is completely depended on iTunes. You need iTunes to activate and install apps on the phone. Many people think iTunes is slow and quite buggy at times.
5. No curated App Store. You can run anything you want on the Android platform. There is not watchdog to dictate what you can run on your device.
6. Native Google Apps support, Google Voice, Google Navigation. Many Google client apps are not available on the iPhone. For one, Apple would not allow some of them in the App Store for whatever reason. Also, Google never published an iPhone app for it.
7. Better battery life than iPhone 4? Someone will have to do some extensive testing to confirm this one.

For iPhone 4, iOS 4:

1. Apple’s multi-tasking API allows for a much more efficient structure of doing background processes. Multiple apps share the same common background process, which gives more battery life and better performance. At the end, it accomplishes the exact same thing. You have to keep an app running on Android to receive offline line instant messages, iPhone uses Push Notification API while the app quit.
   
2. Flash support is quite immature on any mobile platform. I have been trying to run it ever since the Windows Mobile days on a XScale processor running at 624MHZ. It was slow and generally unusable. Even worse, it eats battery! It’s rare that you can’t find an alternative to a popular Flash game in the App Store. For videos? HTML 5 + Apple Quicktime X work wonders. I streamed Apple’s last media event LIVE on my iPhone! It worked both on iPhone 3G and iPhone 4.
3. iTunes is thankfully the most useful and popular media player in the world. I admit its performance is lacking in some areas, but I’m sure a company that is worth more than the mighty Microsoft will eventually release something faster. Having said that, there is a reason why people use iTunes. If you care about the quality of your music, and your library isn’t full of MP3 rips you got from P2P… iTunes really works well. iTunes uses 256k ACC format which is several times the compression ratio than MP3, and the quality is just night and day. Get a pair of descent speaker or headphones and you will hear the difference.
4. Curated App Store is not always a bad thing. It’s a watchdog to make sure bad stuff doesn’t end up on your phone. The Android app market is perhaps too open for the same reason we ended up installing anti-viruses and firewalls on our PCs. While the review process is not perfect, but I feel a lot safer that Apple at least does look at every app that gets into the store. It’s all about quality and standards!
5. GV Mobile was just approved by Apple to the App Store. So go download it if you use Google Voice. There is MapQuest Mobile on iPhone that will give you what Google Nav has. Google just chose not to release a Nav app on the iPhone… Not really Apple’s fault. It’s dirty competition which both sides did play.
6. Are voice commands that useful? Would you be speaking out loud to your phone when you on the bus? Walking down the street? or even when you are at home? Sure you may be able to do a lot of cool things with voice control… but I still feel more reassured to use my fingers. Voice commands are subject to interpretation… fingers are still much more accurate and trouble-free.
7. Battery life is awesome on the iPhone 4. People just need to know how to use their phones! The reason why Engadget and Walt Mossberg both nearly got 38hr of battery life on the iPhone 4 was because they knew how to work it! Read some of my findings here to get a longer lasting iPhone. I don’t have a Droid X to test it with, but I’m heavy user. I have 4 Exchange accounts, and 10+ apps with Push Notification enabled. I’m always on 3G and I listen to music and stream podcast occasionally. Ever since I got the iPhone 4, I have never found a single situation where I wanted to use the phone and the battery is out. The iPhone is always on, and I charge it every one or two days. I will be writing more on iPhone battery life management later on, I think there are a lot user out there who don’t know how to use the battery, and Apple really did not do a very good job of conveying that knowledge to users.
8. The Retina Display on the phone is amazing! It’s the sharpest display I have ever seen in my life. It’s super bright and super crisp! It also offers A LOT more pixels than any Android phones! For the Droid X, it’s 409,920 vs. 614,400 pixels! That’s a big difference.
9. People say well, so for you iPhone users to do what Android does you have to jailbreak and void the warranty on your device… Well if you go around and speak to iPhone users… they’ll ask you… what do I need that requires jailbreaking? While it may be apparent to geeks, the truth is that most people already got what they need directly from Apple! The phrase “there’s a app for that!” didn’t just come from nowhere.
10. This last point is against Android as a whole. There are how many different versions of the Android OS now? The most current versions can’t even run on older devices. However you can still put iOS 4.1 on a two year old iPhone 3G, and Apple had fixed all the performance issues. If you go take a look at numbers published by Google. You will realize that because there are so many different versions of Android and so many different devices… the market-share of each OS release is extremely inconsistent. This can be quite problematic for developers. Furthermore, from what I can tell… you cannot run OS 2.2 Froyo on older devices. The carriers still dictate what OS is available on your phone! That’s something iPhone stood against on day 1.

I’ll let it end there for now, and this is a rather hot topic so please voice any opinion you may have. However, I’d like to say that at the end of the day… it all boils down to personal preference. You will also choose what works best for yourself. While we may disagree, that doesn’t we have to be rude about it. Like what Steve Jobs said during the D8 Conference - “Just because we are competing with them (Google) doesn’t mean we have to be rude about it.”
I think the point of this debate is bring good ideas out in the open, so we can learn from other users’ perspectives and go back to the manufacturers with an updated list of demands. =p

This Blog
I’m really quite happy how this little blog has turned out so far. Right now we are getting a steady stream of 3100+ visitors / month, and 75% of them are unique visits! That is quite great for a personal blog that has only been live for a few months. I will continue to focus mainly on DIY projects and the latest gadgets that I own. The point is to give you an unbiased perspective of a honest user who is trying to maximize the value of his investment.
There is not corporate agenda here what so ever. The Google Ads you seen are only there to help pay for some of the hosting cost, nothing more. If you’d like, please do click on them, otherwise feel free to adblock them. =p
Lastly, thank you everyone for your support and kind words in the comments! Please always feel free to voice your opinions! Cheers!

New iPods
So here is the more interesting stuff… Apple recently announced a new lineup of iPods – Shuffle, Nano and Touch (iPod Classic was NOT refreshed).
First of all, I must say that I wasn’t particularly excited about the announcement since I just bought my beloved iPhone 4, and was not going to flip out more cash for iPods. However, the new devices from Apple just weren’t that interesting this time around.

• Shuffle
  • Same old features like the previous generations. They took away the buttons in the 3rd generation, now they added them back for the 4th…
  • It is cheaper than previous offerings. However, I think at the price range of the shuffle there are better offerings from competitors.
  • Voice control is cool but impractical to begin with. Will you really yell out the commands while you are on a bus? or walking on the street even?
• Nano
  • This was an interesting overhaul of existing Nanos. Apple completely removed the clickwheel, and reduced the screen size similar to the size of an Shuffle.
  • Multi-touch enabled screen is again cool to have but there isn’t much screen real estate to make it robust.
  • Now that the Nanos are taken over by the iPod Touch as the most popular iPods, I feel like Apple is taking a new approach to further dethrone the Nano.
  • No more watching videos on this thing!
• Touch
  • Apple actually added some very nifty features to the most popular iPod model, but this is NOT an iPhone 4 without the phone.
  • Retina Display is very very sharp and resolution is the same as the iPhone 4. However, it is NOT an IPS LCD panel! The viewing angle and colour production is certainly not as great as the iPhone 4, and depending on your taste and neediness you may or may not notice.
  • Apple managed to added TWO cameras to the iPod. However, the cameras are NOT the same high resolution sensors as you find in the iPhone 4. Sorry, no 5 Mega-Pixel camera on this thing, only a 920 x 720 camera on the back. (still takes 720p HD video)
  • The A4 chip in this thing sure makes the package a lot more interesting. The battery life is actually very exceptional, and performance is also unprecedented. It’s definitely the good apple out of the bunch.

iTunes 10
Ever since Steve Jobs showed the new icon of iTunes 10 there have been crazy discussions and flaming of it. To be fair I understand Apple’s reasons for changing the icon… but I think the critics are right… the new icon does not look very pleasing… especially in iTunes’ weight class.
There are certainly some interesting improvements to iTunes in this version. I’m a big fan of the album view which now displays your album arts! The new movies and TV shows rental are also quite nicely done. It’s cheap and high quality.
One thing I hate, and I mean HATE are the grayscaled icons in the left navigation panel! I want my colours back! It’s difficult to make out which item is which when you are so used to the different colours.

Apple TV
Apple completely abandoned the previous generations of Apple TV’s philosophy and decided to focus mainly on Hollywood movies and TV show rentals for cheap. I think this is definitely an interesting concept, and can definitely help Apple TV to gains some momentum in the market. The much reduced price of $99 puts the device on par with competitors. However, unless you own other Apple made devices like an iPad, iPhone or Mac… Apple TV is of little meaning to you. It no longer carries any storage option to store your content, it only allows for streaming content from your other Apple devices to your TV.
There are recently comments from Steve Jobs regarding the possibility of creating an App Store for Apple TV. He of course did not set a particular date for it, but Apple TV in its current generation is incapable of running apps. Unless Apple will one day flip the switch to allow users to stream apps from iTunes???

DD-WRT Routers
Let’s take a break from all the Apple fanfare… for just one minute. =)
I know there are tons of people out there who are frustrated with routers… router firmware… and constant reboots. I know a few friends who keep multiple routers around and use them as backups. The question is… is that necessary? What can we do to get some decent devices around to keep that Internet running without having to reboot the damn thing everyday?
The truth about consumer routers is that they are underpowered computers that were designed to be affordable. These companies usually don’t want to spend a lot of money on firmware development, and the internal hardware. That’s why projects like DD-WRT and Tomato Firmware were created. These projects use a specially-compiled Linux kernel to perform basic routing functions. However, despite common believes… They are not going to magically solve the freezing and reboot issues.

The reason here is simple. The router is a little computer, and it has the same concept of CPU, RAM and storage. Whenever one of these elements becomes insufficient to accomplish a particular task, the whole system becomes slow and unstable. In most cases, the RAM is the most determinant factor. Most consumer routers are equipped with 16mb – 32mb of RAM, which professional Cisco routers can easily have several times that. You can do the math.

Personally, I have used many many routers and firmwares over the years. However, only recently I found my ultimate router! It’s the ASUS RT-N16!
This little device is so powerful that people say you can probably put Quake on it if it had a display! LOL

• Broadcom 533MHZ CPU
• 128MB of RAM (unprecedented)
• 32mb ROM
• Gigabit Ethernet
• Wireless 802.11 N 300mbps
• Dual USB ports for printers and external drives.

Since it is a Broadcom based device, you can happily run DD-WRT and Tomato on this router. The router is a bit pricey, but I think it’s worth the money. I never had to reboot it even once. It’s super stable, and it has plenty of power to handle large file transfers to my NAS.

I would suggest to everyone to take a look at it if you are in the market for a new router. Cheers!

Antennagate
The story of “antennagate” has died down ever since Apple’s press conference where CEO Steve Jobs acknowledged the iPhone 4′s alleged weak spots in its antenna system.

The myth of “antennagate” states that when you touch the bottom left side of the phone, especially where the black strip is… your signal goes way down and may cause you to drop a call. The science behind it is that the human body is a natural conductor, and once you bridge the two pieces of the antennas (as separated by the black plastic strip) you effectively change the length of the antenna. That length is crucial when you are trying to receive a specific wavelength of energy. People also found by putting a layer of insulation over the antenna joint will ease the problem. Therefore, cases and the so-called “Antenna-aid” methods came to play, and eventually forced Apple into giving out free cases to all iPhone 4 users.

I got my iPhone 4 on August 13th, and went home and began testing these myths of “antennagate”. I found some very interesting results that I would like to share.

1. “antennagate” certainly exists in Canada as well, despite other reports.
2. One may lose 2-3 bars in an area with mediocre signal strength by bridging the antennas.
3. A simple tape or band-aid does not solve the problem. Only a case can effectively eliminate it.
4. Myths about Apple applying a non-conductive coating to the phone to solve the problem is bogus.
5. I have yet to drop a single call despite numerous attempts to “death-grip” my phone.
6. While calls did not drop… 3G data throughput did die.
7. I was getting 2-3 bars with my iPhone 3G in this area, but now with the iPhone 4 I get 3-4 bars. The new antenna really is better than the old generation… well when it works.

Before we get into the details one must understand that “antennagate” can only be produce under certain conditions where the signal strength is at around 3-4 bars. When you are in an area where you receive 5 bars (and possibly even more but the phone does not display) you do not experience any noticeable degradation in signal strength. Therefore, you cannot antennagate in all areas and it is true that when you “death-grip” any phone the signal will indeed drop by a certain amount. While it is true that you can ease the effect by sticking a piece of non-conductive tape on the antennas, the tapes are simply too thin to create a radio-penetrable space for the antenna to work efficiently. Therefore, only a case with measurable thickness will eliminate the effect of “antennagate”. The claims and wishes that a non-conductive coating on the phone will help with the issue is completely false. Unless Apple will spray on half inch thick of coating… it will not work.

However, even if you use the phone without a case the drop in bars will probably not cause a drop in calls. I have tried numerous way to bridge the antenna with my finger, my palm… my palms (both my hands)… I simply could not get the call to drop! The phone would work perfectly fine with one bar of signal. The same thing could not be said for the data connection. Once you “death-grip” the iPhone or simply touch the antenna joint, the data throughput goes way down and virtually dies. This drop in throughput was more noticeable with 3G than EDGE.

Lastly, the antenna on the iPhone 4 is noticeably better than the previous generations of iPhones. After updating to firmware 4.0.1, I could not get my iPhone 3G pass 3 bars, in fact most of the time it stays at 2 bars. On the same firmware, the iPhone 4 always get 3-4 bars very consistently in the same area. I don’t think Apple was lying that the phone’s antenna is in fact a better one… at least better when it’s insulated and not obstructed. In addition to signal strength, the data throughput on 3G has improved quite a bit as well. See the screen shot of my speed test: this was done with only 4 bars. However, I was a bit surprised about the awesome upstream speed, but other users in Canada and the US have confirmed to have seen the same thing.

Battery Life
There are many conflicting claims about the iPhone 4′s battery life. Aside from Apple’s official claims of up to 40% improvement over the 3GS, review sites like Engadget claim that the iPhone 4 can live for 38 hours without recharging and that’s under heavy use. However, numerous users claim to have much shorter battery lives than either Apple or Engadget.

From my personal experience, the battery on the iPhone 4 needs some burn-in to reach maximum capacity. When I first got the phone, its battery life was mediocre at best. After 4 cycles of complete discharge and recharge, it got significantly better. Right now it lasts about 30 hours before running down to 5% or lower.
I have:

• 3 Exchange accounts on push email and calendar.
• 1 account on hourly fetch.
• I usually play about 2-3 hours of games.
• Check the web regularly for stock updates.
• Send and receive about 50 text messages per day.
• 5 min or less of talk time per day.
• Network is on 3G and occasionally WiFi.

The battery life improvement over the 3G and 3GS here is definitely not as prominent as Apple had promised. However, it is definitely not bad. If you are experiencing significant lower battery life, I would suggest you do a couple of complete recharge cycles or take your phone back to Apple for a replacement.

Lastly, watch the signal strength on the phone. When you are in a low to no signal area, you might consider turning the phone off or into “Airplane Mode” to save it from constantly searching for network. You may also try to reset your network settings to resolve any conflicts by going into: Settings – general – reset – reset network settings (be sure not to hit any other command there).

Cases
Apple is offering every iPhone 4 user a free case through their Case Program at least through the end of September. For my phone I already ordered the InvisibleShield which is by far my favourite brand for iPhone cases. I also got a free Apple’s iPhone 4 Bumper, which goes super well with the InvisibleShield.

The Bumper is really the best case Apple’s free case program has to offer. In my opinion it perfectly preserves the iPhone 4′s essence of design by overlaying metal buttons for “ON/OFF” and volume controls. That way you still get the great responsiveness of the phone’s buttons and the buttons are not obstructed by the casing.

While the Bumper offers minimal protection of the phone’s front and back, the InvisibleShield effectively compensate for the shortcoming.  At last… it looks awesome!
InvisibleShield also gives out pretty decent discounts on a regular basis.
Visit http://www.zagg.com/community/contest.php to get not only a coupon up to 50%, but a chance to win an iPad.

Please feel free to share your experience with this phone in the comment area. I’ll will keep this posted updated as I discover more interesting facts about the new iPhone 4. =)

Around 11:30 am, we saw a few shipments arriving at the store… but was again told by store officials that the delivery did not contain any iPhone 4… so time continued to tick. Around 12:45 pm people started to get excited because a few large boxes showed up! But again… NO IPHONE 4s! The good thing was… time knows no limits… and either did any of our fellow fanboys/gals! Therefore, another 3 hours flew us by… but the only thing it left everyone with was the ultimate truth – THE STORE WILL NOT BE GETTING ANY IPHONES TODAY!

People looked at each other in dismay… How could an Apple Store be out of iPhones and not know when the next shipment is coming in… but only to drop a definitive nuke after making people age while standing in front of the store? This just does not make sense! Why couldn’t the manager get this information sooner? Knowing that the information could be obtained… but only to tell customers that they have wasted their life waiting! I think the answer to this has something to do with the discussed “antennagate” problem. You see… the iPhone 4 does have a very prominent weak spot in its antenna structure. While the problem is not so evidential in all areas, it may cause your call to drop while in an area with less than optimal signal coverage. Steve Jobs then came out and introduced the Free Case Program for all iPhone owners. It wasn’t a solid solution, but it was better than nothing. After all, Apple rarely gives stuff away unless they mess up really bad. (Remember the whole free upgrade from MacOS 10.0 to 10.1 offer? MacOS 10.0 probably had more problems than Windows XP and Vista combined.) However, Steve admitted to the fact the new antenna system performed slightly worse than its previous generation design, but he insisted that the media had blown the facts out of proportion… because he think it really wasn’t that bad.

Maybe Steve was right, or maybe he was trying to cover things up… but everyone in the press room knew how much turbulence this pesky little problem had caused the mighty Apple. How can Apple fix this and defend its corporate image as “the best on the planet”? Here comes clever marketing!

If Apple only knows how to do two things… it’s marketing… and marketing! While the mighty Apple may have taken a few punches… those wounds can easily be healed by making a couple of customers stand  in line for the alleged “magical device”. While I was waiting in line, passer-bys kept asking us what we are waiting in line for… and we would prodly answer: “iPhone 4!”. There you go everyone, let Apple takes u back into the classroom with this one. I think this is why nobody knew when shipments will be in… but it needs help tell the story – that Apple fanboys/gals are crazy enough to wait for it even if they know the risks of wasting their lives!

You can call me a conspiracy nut or whatever… and I did see a lot of international college students waiting in line to grab a few phones as gifts when they return. So either all these phones have been grabbed by them and secretly exported to China… or Apple is taking advantage of the fact that certain people are looking to grab an iPhone for the bragging rights… or Apple is limiting supply to drive up the phones’ price in the grey/black-market.

Personally, I don’t buy that they can’t make enough phones after 2 weeks of launching the device. Judging by the number of people who lined up… the demand is strong and suggests that many people are without phones! Either way, there are lessons to be learned from all this. Never be too desperate for a phone, never be to evil to people who pay your salary because sooner or later they will catch on.

I came home to check people’s feedback on RedFladDeals, only to find many people selling their newly purchased iPhone 4s for twice as much as Apple is! Also, users confirmed that the “death grip” exist in Canada as well. Clearly, Apple did not make any hardware revisions to address the issue, at least not for this batch of phones. People were also concerned about the long wait to activate their phones on Rogers/Fido system. Their service kept crashing and people reported line-ups and wait times of 10 hours + at Apple Stores. Apple online store has a 3 week ETA for order and finally to make the situation worse, Fido and Rogers are directing people to local stores to buy the phone. They are not willing to take order over the phone anymore…

I have to say. This is all too much hype for a phone that is reportedly crippled by design. It is also obvious that the initial launch was affected by the limit stock the stores had. Could this mean Apple is pushing out the initial crippled batch and shipping in new ones? One can only guess…

Update: It appears that since launch date no stores in the country other than Apple themselves have been getting more shipments of iPhones. Rogers reported to receive a shipment that was ready to go on sale today (Saturday, Aug 7th). However, nobody has reported seeing any stock at Rogers stores… so the iPhone shortage continues…

Version 4 at first glance gives you a very refreshed feel to it. I think it’s mainly because the icons were made to be brighter, and the default screen brightness was a bit higher than my original… but none the less I liked it. The responsiveness of the OS also improved quite a bit over OS 3.x. This is especially evidential on older hardware like my iPhone 3G. The homescreen transitions are smoother, and icon animations are silkier. All of my apps from iOS 3.x worked flawlessly and games ran as they should.

To the more negative end of the spectrum. I wasn’t a big fan of the “you can never quit your app, unless you really try” scheme Apple used to manage background apps. It reminded me of the Windows Mobile 2003 days… you had to download a Task Manager app just to kill processes… On iOS 4, when you press the Home button once the app falls back to the background but still remains in RAM in an inactive state. If you want to kill the program, you have to double tap Home then tap and hold its icon… then tap on the little red “X” on the top. It’s just too many hoops the user has to jump through to quit an app. I’d much rather have something like the Backgrounder (jailbroken app) and let it default to “quit” and double press to background.

One other thing I want to mention, and this is to all iPhone 3G users like myself.  Our somewhat ancient toy can in fact multitask! Enabling it will require a jailbreak but the end result is worth while. My best experience with jailbreaking was achieved with the help of redsn0w. This little app runs on Windows and MacOS, it jailbreaks your iPhone 3G and 2G iPod touch directly. This means you can simply go to iTunes and update your iOS and then use redsn0w to jailbreak without wiping any data.

One tip to remember, older hardware like the iPhone 3G cannot run very well with the wallpaper enabled, the responsiveness of the screen greatly deteriorated when a wallpaper is set. Therefore, I highly recommend you to NOT enable wallpaper and just hack multitasking if you need it. Also remember to periodically quit your apps in the background because the iPhone 3G does not have a lot of RAM to work with.

iOS 4.0.1
This little update to the iOS is perhaps the most embarrassing update Apple ever had to release. It “fixes” the reception issue seen on the iPhone 4 and subsequent iPhones. Primarily, Apple realized they have been too generous when calculating the iPhones’ signal quality bars… so they made this fix to give you a better idea of your signal strength. Therefore, installing the update will give you less bars… but that is as it should be… at least that’s what Apple is telling users.

You can jailbreak iOS 4.0.1 with the same redsn0w release. Simple update your iPhone 3G or 2G iPod Touch to 4.0.1 and then fire up redsn0w. Instead of pointing it to the 4.0.1 firmware, point it to the original iOS 4.0 firmware. This is possible because the 4.0.1 did not change the baseband code, so you are good to use the old firmware so it’ll pass redsn0w’s verification.

To sum up, I think iOS 4 is a winner for the most part. Apple has done a good job to make it friendly to older hardware like the iPhone 3G. Furthermore, it is also a free update to all iPod Touch users as well! We can see that Apple is really trying to push this release to everyone. I’m not going to get into iPhone 4′s antenna issue since it won’t be available in Canada until July 30th. Until then… I’m glad iOS 4 gave my good old iPhone some new blood. =p

Update: For those who are having issues with iPhone 3G overheating after updating to iOS 4, I sometimes have the same problem and pretty sure it has something to do with the 3G/EDGE radio. I find that if Data is turned off or if I use WiFi, the problem is less evidential. It might also have something to do with Exchange and multiple Exchange accounts. I heard some of these problems will be fixed in iOS 4.1. So let’s wait and see how Apple does it.
For all jailbreakers, remember to not turn on Wallpaper, and don’t get multitasking if you don’t really need it. The biggest reason why I have iOS 4 on my 3G is the ability to do multiple Exchange accounts. If you can do without all these features, then staying on iOS 3.x is probably a wiser choice.

Solution: Go to Settings and clear your iPhone 3G’s network settings. This has solved most of the heating issues and network problems for me. It appears that the network was dead even tho the phone still shows 3G signal. Then my 4 Exchange account probably overloaded by constantly trying to establish a connection back to the servers. Let me know if this works for you.

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Apr 5th
iPad seems to be the hottest new gadget in town. Today Apple reported that 300, 000 units sold on US launch day, which is a lot better than the original iPhone. (but remember the original iPhone was a lot more expensive)

Personally, I never buy any first generation product, especially not from Apple. The company is known to introduce cool concept products into the market that need major polishing, especially on the software side. The iPad is essentially an iPod Touch with a 9.7 inch screen, and a slightly faster processor. It offers NO new features in the package other than the large screen real estate.

Apple is being smart in leveraging its position as a market leader to introduce a dirt cheap  tablet before anyone else and even before its own software team could finish iPhoneOS 4.0. It was a gamble but I think the odds are agreeing with Steve Jobs. Even if iPad doesn’t sell as well as iPhones and iPods, the launch is significant enough to position the company as one of the pioneers of modern tablet computers.

My guess is that Apple probably already has the next generation iPad sitting in its vault somewhere. It probably has a camera or two built-in for video conferencing. However, the first fight that the company wants to win is PRICE, and they have already won even before the product shipped out. Its $499 starter unit price is unbeatable so far. Now come to think about it… the removal of that camera on the iPod Touch 3rd Gen could be related to the decision to launch the camera-less iPad.

Therefore, the bottom line is that Apple scored a winner either way. Competitors can easily beat iPad in features, but will fail tremendously in pricing. For the rational person… will he/she spend $500 on an iPod Touch XL or $600+ on a HP tablet that runs Windows? The decision is tough… and my answer will be NEITHER… but I won’t denied the appeal that the iPad has over the tablet PC.

Apple will be giving everyone a sneak peek at the iPhoneOS 4.0 on Thursday, April 8th. Let’s see what this software update can bring to the table. Either way, personally I’ll be waiting for iPad 2nd Gen before telling Apple my credit card number.

However, lately I realized my iPhone tethering is no longer working. The Macbook cannot see the phone in Network Preferences, and iTunes spits out an unknown error (0xE800006B). I did everything from resetting my settings on the phone, and deleting iTunes’ plist file. Nothing worked! Every time I plug my phone in, the same error message pops out… didn’t know what to do.

I eventually realized the problem was caused by the 64bit kernel and the lack of proper driver support for it… and apparently iTunes (as of 9.0.2) was not rewritten like most other apps for Snow Leopard.

That made me wonder… Apple has a Windows 64bit version of iTunes but not a Mac version?  What is going on here?

Anyway, I thought I’d let the world know since this problem isn’t documented by Apple.

Short answer… Fresh Install > Upgrading

Long answer… it depends on how the upgrade went and what you are looking for. I recently did an upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard and noticed very little problems. the most noticeable problem was the long bootup time… and I know that Snow Leopard had specific optimizations to decrease boot time. Furthermore, I had some apps that were incompatible with Snow Leopard… so I finally decided to give the system a good wipe and install from scratch. and since then… all the problems have been solved… especially after installing the 10.6.2 update. Just always remember to backup your data and apps before wiping things out. Time Machine is very useful in this respect.

On the Windows side, I successfully upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7 without a glitch. The two systems are extremely similar under the hood, and I did not notice any problem after upgrading. I even did a clean install of Windows 7 and noticed no improvements. To be fair, I didn’t have anything installed in Vista anyway… just Office and Adobe CS.

Since now I own both systems… I think I can bring some new perspectives and observations to the table.

First of all… I’ve been a loyal Windows user since the 3.0 days. and I guess that’s how long this endless debate has been going on for… However, we are looking at a completely different landscape than those old days.

The common myth that Apple made “better” hardware than your average PC is dead now that everyone is on the Intel train… and we have normal PCs running hacked versions of MacOS… and Intel Macs booting Windows XP and Vista. (official Win 7 support is also coming.) So if you really look at what Apple is offering and charging for… is basically your average hardware stuffed in a fancy chassis. Surprisingly enough… according to official stats there are now more people who are willing to pay the premium for Apple’s fancy design.

But here is my story… I’ve been a Windows user for quite a while… and the ONLY reason why I now own a Macbook Pro is because I needed to run the iPhone SDK. It may not have been the wisest 2 grands spent… but the new Macbook Pros are amazing looking machines! I have to say… cosmetically I have nothing to complain about the machine! The fact that I can get a Dell with similar specs doesn’t bother me at all.

What bugged and is still bugging the hell out of me… is when Mac users… Apple officials and loyalists portray their OS as the best in the world for anything you do!

This is simply UNTRUE! MacOS looks fancy but it is not the ultimate saviour when it comes computing! It is not! Even with the latest Snow Leopard release… it is not even close!!!
Like Mircosoft Windows… it has flaws! If you install too much stuff… it will get slow… if you don’t do regular maintenance… something will go wrong… The number one thing about OS… not one system out there right now will “just work”. If you don’t take care of it… it will not take care of you. Get used to it!

I’ll give you an example… ever since Leopard MacOS had this weird problem where it cannot open files if they were downloaded from the Internet. The only thing that will fix it… REBOOT! That is until Apple released an update a few days ago to address the problem. This is a problem that existed in Leopard and Snow Leopard. As you can imagine I was extremely annoyed by this problem… because even my Windows machine didn’t have to be rebooted this many times to fix a stupid problem like this.

Second annoyance – Video playback. The codec support for MacOS is extremely poor. Codec packs like Perian are still incomplete when you ever come across one of those rare codecs. Needless to mention WMV support… trying to play a HD WMV file on a Mac is simply PAINFUL. You can either use VLC or Flip4Mac… VLC doesn’t have great performance and Flip4Mac will not let you seek the file unless the file is completely buffered. Bottom line… video playback is years behind the performance you get on Windows.

Third annoyance – Lack of software. especially quality free apps. Trying looking for a decent MySQL client for your Mac… paid or free… I bet you cannot find a single one worth competing with SQLyog! Also… when Apple wants you to think that their iWork bundle is any competition to MS Office… DON’T BELIEVE THEM! I’m a university student, and I have to say Numbers is years behind what MS Excel is capable of… same thing with Pages. The only thing I like is probably Keynote… it makes your presentation looks a bit prettier. =p

If you are a Windows user. Be ready to tolerate these annoyances because they are likely to stay for a long time. You might miss that good old Windows UI… I’ll bet you on that one!

On the “dark side” of things… Microsoft just released Windows 7 not too long ago. and big thanks to the University of Waterloo I was able to get an early copy of the OS. I have to say… Windows 7 is everything that I hoped it will be. It is a smart and stable system that is light years away from what Windows Vista had become… and performance-wise Win 7 even leaves XP in the dust! I love it. and I am really considering switching back to Windows for my general computing needs… especially when more Windows Live apps are being released Windows-only.

The bottom line is… Mac was never meant to be a mainstream machine! Its design is amazing… but there are so many things that aren’t perfect on the software end. I honestly think you might find it useful to run Windows on a Mac to get the most out of it.
While Apple keeps bashing Microsoft for the lack of innovation… Microsoft has made a very strong point with Windows 7 and their Windows Live series of services and software. It will be interesting to see how the game plays on from now on…
However, as a consumer I think people should always remember that nothing is ever exactly as advertised. nothing is ever perfect. just because you have spent a lot of money on something… doesn’t mean it’s worth it.
To be happy with your purchase… you need to think about what compromises are you willing to accept… it doesn’t matter how much money you have… you can’t have everything. =)