Mini Review: Backpack
At my work, I have a million little things I need to keep track of. I've tried a lot of different solutions, and for varying reasons none of them quite fit. As a new GTD experimenter, I need a bucket for my stuff. Nothing terribly complicated, just a place that I can get things out of my head, online and in easily manageable form.
Backpack is a great solution for this. It lets you track lists, notes, and reminders. While this seems pretty simple, it allows for tracking a lot of activities. Their website does an excellent job of demonstrating the possibilities.
With Backpack, anywhere I have a net connection, I have access to my lists. Along with backpack, when I'm on one of my macs, I also use the Backpack dashboard widget. It offers quick easy access without hitting a browser. This is a really slick little widget.
I do wish there was a normal desktop application for Backpack that kept things cached on the hard drive when I'm away from a net connection.
If you need to get your life organized, make sure to check out backpack.
Quick Powerbook Comparison
Just some quick notes for people trying to choose between the 12“ and 15” powerbooks.
1. Screen
15“ has more space than you would think from looking at the resolution numbers.
15” is much brighter and clearer.
2. Keyboard
Illumination is awesome.
12“ keyboard is much more firm. The 15” has issues with its adhesive coming unstuck and the keyboard flexing. Annoying.
3. Sound
15“ is much louder and clearer
4. Feel
12” feels like a tank. Very solid.
15“ has lots of flexing with various parts of the case ”giving“ when lifting it one handed. Nothing terrible, but annoying given how solid the 12” is.
5. Ports
15“ is a big winner here, most accessory ports are on the right side, and has one USB on each side, great for mousers who are left or right handed. On the 12” USB is on the left, which can make for awkward mousing depending on length of mouse cable. The 15“ has FW800 and Gigabit ethernet. Both a big deal for professional users. Love to see external SATA on the next rev.
6. Memory
12” maxes out at 1.25 GB. Not terrible but not enough for Photoshop work. With slow laptop hard drives, you want to swap out as little as possible to keep speeds up. The 15“ can take 2GB. Enough for any casual user, and good enough for moderate photoshop use.
Overall
The utility of the 15” for me far outweighs it's current shortcomings. I'd like to see a more re-inforced case, but I should mention that it's light-years beyond the flexing of the titanium powerbooks. The keyboard issue is an extremely annoying issue and a design flaw in my opinion. The keyboard is held down with both screws and adhesive, and apparently neither is enough to keep the flexing out. The adhesive seems to unstick as the machine warms up, then re-stick as it cools down. It also seems to get worse with age. Some people have claimed that this is better with the new 1.67 machines, but they are so new, it's hard to say what will happen in a couple of months. These keyboards also seem to have an issue with shedding keys as they age, which is probably a plastics issue. But it's not a big deal in comparison to the stinky ibook keyboards.
Mini-review: Seritek 1EN2 and 1VE4
Firmtek is one of the leading providers of SATA solutions to the Mac world. Their line of external and internal SATA cards offer driver-less convenience and best of class speeds.
Why SATA? SATA is currently the fastest external drive solution short of SCSI. It blows firewire 800 out of the water, especially considering the flaws of the G5 logic board which keep it from achieving fast FW800 RAID speeds.
I recently ordered a combination 1VE4 and 1EN2 enclosure for a backup solution.
The external enclosure is a lot smaller than you would think, and the two drive trays are very simple and sparse. This is mainly because the 1EN2 has the drives plugging directly into the backplane of the case instead of having an intermediate board or cable in between. This means less interference and less chance for corruption.
The cable connections are scary firm and hard to plug into the card. I was afraid of breaking them I had to press so hard. I'm not sure if this was because of the shielded external cables or just new plastic on the card connectors. In subsequent plugging and unplugging this got easier. Be warned though, I can't imagine reaching blindly around the back of the computer to plug these in the first time.
A couple of people carry this case around the net including cool drives, Although I haven't found anywhere that sells it significantly cheaper. But if you don't care about boot-ability you can get a cheap 2 port SATA card for mac here.
With these enclosures, each individual drive gets an SATA cable, meaning if you have a 4 drive setup, you will have 4 cables hanging out. Not necessarily the prettiest solution, but by far the fastest. There are cases that will give you a single SATA port to string to your computer, but this will limit you to 150MB/sec max.
The Firmtek solution is a very nice one. Paired up with fast SATA drives and OS X's built in striping, you can have a very fast drive solution. Of course, you can add more of these external enclosures and drives to make faster solutions.
For speeds and other stats check out the following excellent reviews:
Review: Dell 2405fpw Monitor
A 24 inch LCD for $1000? Sounds like a great deal. And it is. Despite some shortcomings, this bargain LCD is a solid performer at a very good price.
4 out of 5
The Dell 2405fpw is a lot of monitor. It measures at 24“ diagonal and includes DVI, VGA, Component, Composite and S-Video inputs. It has 4 USB 2 ports and a card reader built in. It supports Picture in Picture and split screen for its inputs. A great package.
The Display:
This monitor shares the same resolution as the 23” Apple cinema display, and it's a lot of real estate. The bezel is thin, but looks a little cheap compared to the Apple Display, but on par with normal displays not made from Aluminum.
The stand allows for a wide range of movements and adjustments, including tilting the display into portrait mode. Unfortunately it doesn't pass any information on to the display. Tilting the monitor into portrait mode and splitting the screen between 2 sources would be very cool. Unfortunately I could find no way to accomplish this.
I currently have an XBOX, 12“ Powerbook and G5 all hooked up to the display, something I couldn't do without expensive adapters and switched with my previous Apple monitor.
Color and Brightness:
Color is very good for an LCD and on par with the Apple displays. When comparing profiles of the 2, there is little to choose from. Each beats the other in different areas of the gamut, but only narrowly. I doubt anyone would be able to tell the difference when both are calibrated.
Out of the box, the monitor was very bright, measuring 265 cd/m at 50% brightness. I ended turning it all the way down to 0 in order to end up with 160 cd/m. Some people might want to run them at full brightness, but I'd be afraid of getting a sun tan. These panels are freaking bright.
Support:
Dell has a very good customer support ranking and I can't for the life of me figure out why. My first display had a high pitched whine emanating from the back right corner. I read up about it on the web and it looked like they just did replacements on them. I guessed it was a down converter board that supplied voltage to the backlight as it sounded a whole lot like capacitor whine.
So I called up Dell. They immediately ask for a service tag, which is present on their towers, but not on their monitors. Without this tag, you're pushed way down on the queue apparently as I had to wait for 45 minutes to talk to someone. I eventually ended up talking to an fellow from a call center in India. It was readily apparent that Dell is not used to supporting monitors without an accompanying Dell computer. What followed for the next 30 minutes was an excruciating ordeal.
It should have been a simple process. Without any other input but power, while the backlight was on, the high pitched whine was there. When power was off, it was gone. I still had to sit through him walking me through troubleshooting he himself did not understand. What refresh rate are you using? Right click on your desktop.. (No, despite me telling you I'm not running windows 5 times already you keep asking me to do this. I can't). Try degaussing it... ugh. He clearly was only trained to follow a script, and didn't have a good script to work with. On top of that, he didn't seem very comfortable with English at all.
I finally got transfered to someone else, who seemed to be tier 2, and also not very well equipped to deal with the problem. He was surprised that Dell sold a 24” LCD. After explaining the issue once again, because the previous fellow I talked to only noted in the case that I didn't have a Dell PC, and nothing else, he began to walk me through the same troubleshooting steps. I stopped him and gave him the 1 sentence run down. Makes the noise when the backlight is on. Period. Well, refresh... NO. If the backlight is on, it makes the noise. He finally got it.
Then it came time to transfer me to someone else who would coordinate the shipping of the new one. So I'm then transfered to a department that has been closed for an hour. Ugh.
I called the next day, got the India call center again, and had to forcefully explain that I had a case number and just needed to talk to the TQC department. He didn't know who that was. I was pretty angry at this point. So long story short after some insistence on my part that I get transfered to someone who knew what was going on, I finally got to TQC and had the monitor shipped out.
Over all, I probably spent 3 hours on this issue. Unbelievable. The new one has sporadically had the whine, but nothing like the constant scream of the other one. Some people have claimed it goes away after a couple of weeks, so I hope this one settles down. If not, I'm not sure I will have the strength of will to deal with support again.
Overall
This is an amazing monitor, for a very good price. At the time I bought it, it was $999, but others using Dell's coupon system have managed to get them for around $750. Look around on the net and you'll probably find something.
Its wide variety of inputs and its flexibility in displaying them really sets this monitor apart. If you're in the market for a large LCD, you would be remiss to not consider this one.
Review: MySql Administrator for Mac
The fine folks over at mysql.com have finally released their MySQL Administrator Package for Mac OS X. You can snag it here. As a long time user of PhpMyAdmin for administering my databases, I am interested in whether or not MySQL admin can take it's place for my meager administration needs.
Now, I should point out up front I am by no means a big SQL nerd. I know only the basics that I have needed to know to administer my web pages and some basic data storage. This particular review covers its ability to replace a management package like PHPMyAdmin for people like myself with little SQL ability who need access to basic administrative tasks.
I stumbled across this app the other day while playing around with CocoaMySQL. CocoaMySQL did most of what I was looking for, but unfortunately didn't allow for GUI based user administration. Sure I could go in an edit the MySql table data, but that was so inelegant compared to PHPMyAdmin. Along comes MySql Administrator.
This program is capable of many things the PHPMyAdmin and CocoaMySQL are capable of, and much more. The functions of the program are broken down into 3 main focuses:
1. Gathering server info
Administrator gives you access to the startup and error logs for your MySQL server, info about the server itself, current connections and health reporting including traffic, queries, and memory health.
2. Administration
You can start and stop the server, set a wide variety of options to tune your setup including specific options for MyISAM or InnoDB, networking performance, replication and security. Also available are great backup and restore functionality.
3. Catalog Management
You can view, add, remove and edit table structures, schema and indices.
My aim was user management, and MySQL Administrator does an excellent job with this. Adding and removing users from various hosts is very easy, and assigning privileges is very straight forward. Just what I was looking for.
The backup and restore functions will be of particular interest to casual MySQL users as a simple and quick way to get functional backups of a running database. It offers a couple of different options for the execution with emphasis on data integrity for the type of tables you're running. The only weird thing here is that you have to create a “Backup Project” before you can back up anything which seemed a little strange to me. The Restore option allows for a full restore, or you can choose individual tables. Very handy.
You can edit Table structures within Administrator, but you can't edit table data. This is a function performed by MySQL Query Browser, which has not yet been ported to Mac. This means for manual data editing, you're back to PHPMyAdmin or CocoaMySQL, at least for the time being. MySql now has a cocoa programmer, so they are undoubtedly working on it.
Truth be told, for my light SQL needs, Administrator is much more than I need or would use consistently, but I will keep it around for convenient user management and backups. I'll continue to use CocoaMySQL for pushing my data around at least until the Query Browser is ported over. For middle to heavyweight SQL users, I'm sure this app would be a welcome addition to their toolkits making their lives a little easier day in and day out.
VESA Mounting a Cinema Display
Apple's new Cinema display line allows for a variety of mounting solutions based on a standard VESA mount adapter you can buy for $29 from their store. I've got a desk with a monitor shelf that's just a little high, and wanted the flexibility of movement offered by the “lamp” iMacs. I thought I'd give VESA mounting a shot.
So I picked up the adapter, a Kensington Desk Mount Monitor Arm and a new 20 inch Cinema Display to replace my old “fat bezel” 20 inch display. This combo will take about $120 out of your pocket, but for some of us, it's well worth it. Short synopsis? Pretty freaking cool.
Update 3/23/05: Increased the thumbnail and image sizes so things are easier to see. Sorry for their initial smallness.
Update 3/24/05: Make sure to click on that “See all buying options” button on the Amazon page if you're interesting in getting one of these arms. It will save you about $80
Pics and blow by blow after the jump
I chose the Kensington arm frankly because it was cheap. There's a lot of arms out there to meet a variety of solutions and most of them cost a lot of moolah. Turns out the Kensington is a viable performer. It has a wide range of motion available including 180 degree swing of the whole arm, a 9“ or so extension and left/right/up/down tilting of the display.
It mounts via 2 rather long beefy hand turnable screws attached to a clamp that you secure to the desk first. The rest of the arm is then screwed into the clamp with some phillips screws. My only real gripe with this setup is that the clamp screws are very long, and can be a pain on a multi-level desk like mine. They are good however for people mounting the arm on very thick surfaces who need the extra length. All of the joints are extremely stiff out of the box but are fine once they are moved around for a little bit. You should be able to mount either the 20” or the 23“ Cinema displays with this arm, but the 30” is probably too heavy.
Next up we're going to have to remove the standard stand from the Cinema display and attach the VESA mount adapter. Apple provides a nice hex tool for the job and removing the stand is pretty easy. Make sure when you're removing the stand that you're taking the proper precautions to protect the LCD. I laid mine face down on a soft towel for the removal.
Mounting the VESA mount adapter is also pretty easy. Once the original stand is off, there remains what looks like a block of metal with screw holes in the sides standing out from the back of the display. You attach 2 little bumper pieces of plastic to the adapter, center it and screw it in. Unfortunately the adapter obscures the oh-so-hip Apple logo. This makes us sad.
Because we've already got the arm mounted to the desk, we have the bring the monitor to it. This can be a little awkward. Here I'm using a pillow to gain the needed height to secure the screen to the arm. It's also protecting the screen from the desk surface. You could also have a friend hold the monitor while you secure it to the arm, but I did this late at night, so a pillow it was.
Now we have the monitor mounted up and we just need to swing things into place. The left and right tilting offer a little more flexibility than the “lamp” iMacs in that you have a left/right turning ability as well as the ability to rotate the screen like a steering wheel. I wasn't able to mount the arm in the center of my desk due to its construction, but I'm still able to use it because of the left/right turning.
Now my display floats above my desk freeing up a good bit of space for the ton of crap that inevitably accumulates on a day to day basis. I've also got it lower and closer, the two key points of this exercise. Now I can also easily get the screen up and out of the way if I need the space for something else temporarily.
Over-all the procedure is pretty painless and offers a lot of mobility and adaptability to your workspace. For crowded desks or complex setups, this is a great solution.
Ratings:
Kensington Desk Mount Monitor Arm: **** out of 5
Excellent product for a great price. I'd like to see a little more flexibility in the mounting clamp and better quality plastics for routing cables. Stiffness out of the box can be disconcerting and encourage users to loosen joints when they shouldn't. It isn't the prettiest thing on the market, but very few VESA arms are attractive. The arm is available in black as well which some may prefer.
Apple 20“ Cinema Display: ***** out of 5
This is an impressive refresh of Apple's 20” cinema display. Whites are noticeably brighter and contrast is higher. The new, smaller bezel is attractive and takes up much less space. Obviously kudos go to Apple for allowing a VESA mount. Check out our previous review of this monitor for further info.
Review: Mac mini
You've already seen a ton of Mac mini reviews out there, but I thought I would throw my week of experience in there for the heck of it.
The Packaging: Apple really nailed this. The box is very small. It was a smart idea for Apple not to include the keyboard and mouse both from a price perspective and for the box size. The psychological impact of buying a box this small is much different than buying a G5 or even an iMac. It's easy to grab that little box and head to the register. It doesn't feel like you've made a huge purchase that you may regret.
The Machine: Apple is bridging the gap between consumer and pro machines with the Mac mini, and they show it in the case. Wrapped around the front and sides is the brushed metal finish we've come to expect on Apple's pro products, and on the top in the glossy white iMac finish with a grey Apple logo. As many others have said, it's hard to get a sense of how big this thing is from pictures. It's small. Truthfully it's not much bigger than a regular hard drive.
Popping the case reveals the intricacies of Apple's engineering. It's an impressive, tightly rigged set up in there. One thing to watch out for when adding extra ram (which you will probably want to do) is the back ram clip cannot fully disengage because of the stiff RF shield on the back of the machine. So you will have to do a little manual pulling to get the chip out of the slot. Not a big deal, but something to watch out for.
The machine is dead quiet. While there is a fan in the machine, it is inclosed in a vent which dumps the hot air out of the back of the machine. You'll probably never hear it. Putting a cd in the laptop sized drive seems to make an unbearable racket in comparison. Because it's so quiet you may notice drive activity from the notebook hard drive that would wouldn't notice in normal conditions. Mine tends to make a rhythmic clack every 20-30 seconds. I checked my 12“ powerbook and it makes the same access sounds, which I had never noticed before. It's really soft, but discernible when the machine itself is so quiet.
Tough Choices: Like I said earlier, you're going to want more ram. I popped 512 in my machine, which is acting as a web server. If I was using it as a desktop, I would probably throw in 1GB. The less we can swap virtual memory out to that slow laptop drive the better. And speaking of that laptop drive, for some, it may be worth it to swap that 4200RPM drive out for a 60GB 7200RPM drive from hitachi. Newegg has a good deal on it. Of course you can also use an external firewire drive to boot from for that extra speed.
Of course, dropping $250 on more ram and a fast desktop speed drive seems to go against the cheapskate ethos inspired by the mini. I have started measuring purchases in my life by ”percentage of mini“. In this case, more ram and a faster HD could buy me half of another mini. Would I rather have another machine, or speed this one up? Tough choice. Thanks Apple, for giving me more tough choices in my life.
Mac mini as a server: In many cases, people use over-powered machines to run most of their server needs. For small offices or homes, there's no heavy lifting involved in serving up files or acting as a print server or serving up web pages. Even some business related server activities like e-mail, DHCP or directory services aren't particularly processor or drive space intensive. For these people a mini will do a great job. I'm currently using mine to serve up 5 web domains with e-mail for each, running movable type. Averaging 2000 hits a day across those domains the mini isn't even breathing hard.
It's important to note the mini in some ways out-specs the first generation xserve with a faster processor and bus speed. Given a 7200 RPM drive, and a gig of ram, it could even replace one for most server needs. If you're currently running a mac server, and haven't felt any particular need to speed it up, get a faster network card or bigger faster hard drives, chances are a mini would work out fine for you.
While OS X Server seems expensive, it can be had for as little as $250 education priced for 10 users. If you've got a student in the house, it's worth picking up.
The TechGoesBoom synopsis: The Mac mini is an extremely capable machine in a very quiet, very small enclosure. It fills a lot of needs for a lot of users, and it's going to make Apple a lot of money.
Review: Revolution in the Valley
Andy Hertzfeld's Revolution in the Valley collects a selection of the stories about the development of the Macintosh told on Folklore.org in a nicely designed hardcover book.
The main difference between the book and the website is that some extra editing has been done, and there are more photos in the book, including scans from Hertzfeld's own engineering notebook.
Basically, if you like the website, you'll love the book. One caveat for both the book and website is that if you are unfamiliar with the basic history of Apple and the Macintosh, a lot of the stories will seem like non-sequiturs, but for anybody interested in this piece of the history of the personal computer, the stories are endearing and create a series of intimate snapshots of the culture inside the Macintosh team.
Andy Hertzfeld has done a great service for both the Mac community and anybody interested in the history of personal computing with this work.
About Newsfire and Feed Readers in General
So there's a new newsreader on the block, Newsfire. Lots of people are raving about how awesome it is. I would like to give you an in-depth review of it, but shortly after launching, it promptly barfs all over itself and crashes. This may be because I'm using it through a firewall, but I'm not sure. But I can give you a couple of initial impressions from what I was able to figure out.
No grouping of feeds: Damnit people, this is a tried and true feature that is necessary for anyone with more than a couple of feeds. If you want to cook up a nice little metadata system (like id3 for feeds) so we can do some nice dynamic grouping, in a smart group ala iTunes, knock yourself out. But to not offer any grouping capabilities is just lame. I'm reading something like 300 feeds now. I want to sort. I don't necessarily care to have the most recently updated feeds float to the top. Sure it's pretty but not that useful.
Two Pane Interface: This is interesting, but I would have to see it in practice some more to see if it's more useful than something like NetNewsWire. As someone pointed out, the forward and backward buttons don't go to the next unread article. That's a bummer.
If you're looking for a killer feature for an RSS reader, I'll hook you up. Threading. Like gmail handles mailing lists, group related blog entries from various blogs so I don't have to see 40 entries about some piece of news I don't care about. Let me mark them all as read and move on. While a good search capability would mimic this, I'd like to have it automatically appended to each entry with links like "highlight items like this" or "mark items like this read". It would be a list of all articles that match, in chronologic order.
Or you can do this like mail on Mac OS X does by putting an arrow next to the article title so you can expand or contract the list, and a number next to the title indicating how many related articles there are. It would be kind of nice to sort articles by how many related articles exist for it. You could even have a view much like Google News which will display feeds in order of importance as evaluated by how related they are. Say you have one blog post that gets a lot of attention and is linked to by 30 other bloggers. That post would be the headline, and underneath the list of all entries that link back to it.
With the volume of data that is out there, people need useful ways of consuming that data. The current spate of feedreaders out there, at least on the mac offer little flexibility on how to tackle huge numbers of articles makinging you deal with them one by one, with little information on whether or not you might care. There are ways of dealing with this however. There's lots of interesting metadata out there for making the situation better.
Say I really like articles from Zeldman's feed. Chances are, I'm going to like sites that he links to that include feeds. If I give Zeldman a rank of 5 in importance, associate a couple importance points to domains he links to that include feeds, like A List Apart. While we're at it, if I'm not subscribed to a linked site from someone with high importance, offer to let me grab its feeds. As I said earlier, importance can also be assigned by how linked to an article is. Importance can be expressed in a number of visual ways, like say blue titles for low importance, and red titles for high importance. You could also assign importance by how often the feed is updated (and incidentally schedule the reader to adjust its update frequency for this feed as a result). Parse out the article bodies for keywords, and make note of fact I read a lot of articles about neuroscience, assign these higher importance. On each article, let me rank it and learn from it like a spam filter.
As far as I can tell, Newsfire relies on only one importance factor, which is number of unread articles. This is a marginal importance value at best. I'm far more interested in feeds that consistently offer worthwhile things to read once a day than feeds that pump out crap 20 times a day.
A good importance ranking system would also help me decide which feeds I want to drop off the list. If a feed hasn't been updated in a month, pop up a dialog stating so and offer to unsubscribe. If a feed's importance ranking falls below a certain threshold make the same offer.
Obviously there are some special feeds you would want to exempt from this scheme, like a FedEx tracking feed, or your netflix shipping feed. So some gross categorization is still required even if it's just something like: work your magic on these feeds, but just display these feeds as they come. Or you could just offer a dial for the magic that goes from "leave feeds alone" to "I trust you to display these things in a way that's important"
Syndication is already becoming a major player on the internet scene, and one thing vital to its continued growth are feedreaders that make very large numbers of feeds manageable for someone who doesn't have all day to read them and sort the wheat from the chaff. This will be the next leap for feedreaders, and will take them from something that we get by with to something that is really useful.
Microsoft Wireless Desktop Comfort Edition
Microsoft has released a new keyboard and mouse combination, and once again, have eschewed wired USB ergonomic keyboards for wireless only. This new ergonomic design is available only in the wireless version, and only with the bundled wireless mouse.
I have been using Microsoft ergonomic keyboards for a few years now. They offer good value for sturdy reliable hardware. So I decided it was time to upgrade my keyboard and try out the new offering on my mac.
The keyboard is surprisingly light when you take it out of the box, and batteries are included for both the keyboard and mouse. The Keyboard comes with a software CD for both PC and Mac. I installed the drivers and restarted. Two system preferences are installed, one for the keyboard and one for the mouse.
The software enables the wide variety of special keys on the keyboard including control for system volume, and controlling itunes. There are also keys for launching mail, ichat, safari, ical and your documents folder. There are also 5 custom buttons that you can set to launch whatever you want. The calculator, log out and sleep buttons do exactly what they describe. There is also a very cool new control for zooming in and out in digital photos. This works in preview, photoshop and it looks like any application that uses command - and + to zoom, this includes safari. For those of us who spend a lot of time in Photoshop, this is a really cool thing.
The keyboard itself has wandered away from the spilt ergonomic design and has instead evolved into a curved design utilizing curved and elongated center keys. For those used to normal ergo keyboards, this does take some getting used to. After a few hours, I was typing normally again. The keyboard feels small, but is roughly the same size as previous designs. The gray and black finish complements the G5 very well.
Key travel is shorter than previous designs and is very plush. No clackety clack here. It is also very quiet, so it shouldn't be making a lot of noise for fast typists in quiet offices.
The mouse has a good feel in the hand like previous models, but is sadly lacking in buttons. It has only the normal left and right buttons along with a wheel. For a keyboard with so many buttons and options, this mouse seems drastically out of place and will not be replacing my logitec MX 500. The people interested in buying this keyboard would not buy this mouse, and it's a shame that MS made this decision. I would really have liked to have seen this keyboard offered alone for $50 instead of bundling it with this lousy mouse.
All told, this is a great keyboard, and worth the price of the bundle. With less and less ergonomic keyboards on the market, it's nice to see Microsoft coming out with new products that cater to this market. While I would have liked to have seen it alone, and wired, it's still worth the money and the batteries.
Review: Apple 20" Cinema Display
UPDATE: The just-released 10.3.5 Mac OS X update brings the new 20" Cinema Display fully into the fold, with brightness controls talking correctly with the operating system as well as a throbbing power light during sleep.
Interesting that the display throb would be controlled by the operating system instead of being hardwired into the display itself. The power button still won't turn on the computer, though... END UPDATE.
The newly redesigned Apple Cinema Displays are sleek. So sleek, in fact, that when sitting down in front of one for the first time, there is no helping the voice of Austin Powers in your head saying, "You're a sexy, sexy bitch! Yeah, baby! Yeah!"
But all misogynistic objectification apart, it is indeed a gorgeous piece of hardware.
Spec-wise, the new 20" Cinema Display is very similar to the previous generation, at least when it comes to the actual display. The new display has the same pixel count as the previous generation, but is slightly brighter. Not having an old-school 20" display around to directly compare with, we'll have to take Apple's word for it. It is fiercely bright, though, that much is immediately obvious.
Physically, the bezel is a completely new design. ADC has been dropped in favor of DVI, and it features both FireWire and USB 2.0 pass-through. (Incidentally, are any manufacturers putting this kind of functionality in their displays?)
As the main update is the bezel design, let us focus on that. It is, as previously mentioned, a very nice piece of eye candy. Uncompromisingly sleek and austere, it makes a perfect companion to, natch, a G5 workstation. It seems that Apple wanted to mimic the "hovering" effect of the display of the flat-panel iMac, and they succeeded to a point--the stand recedes back enough that it helps accentuate the display's feel of thinness and lightness.
So far, so good. There are a few flies in the ointment, however: The brightness settings on the monitor do not communicate with the brightness setting in the Displays System Preference Pane, which feels a bit non-Macish. Also, you can no longer power on your system from the display. Looks like this functionality is a victim of the move from ADC to DVI. The same change also led to the introduction of a--albeit very sleek and nice--power brick to feed the display. Bah. But the brick gets hidden in the rat's nest of cables under your desk anyway, so it's not that significant.
For some strange reason, the power light on the monitor stays off during normal operation, but comes on when the workstation sleeps. However--brace yourself--it doesn't throb! No soothing lullaby from this piece of hardware, just a pin-point white light to indicate the unit is sleeping.
All in all, the new version of the Cinema Display delivers on fantastic industrial design, but suffers a little from some loss of functionality due to the drop of ADC; at the same time, going with industry-standard DVI makes the display series more appealing to Windows users, and indeed the box even sports a discreet "For Windows" logo.
One problem that is nice to have is that the Cinema Display makes other pieces of hardware on your desk seem clunky and obsolete.
Say it with me: "You're a sexy, sexy..."
Listening To: "Come on Home" by Franz Ferdinand 
Review: Running Mac OS X Panther
James Duncan Davidson's Running Mac OS X Panther provides solid insight into the inner workings of Mac OS X and is an excellent reference for system administrators and power users looking to enhance their understanding of this excellent operating system.
Running Mac OS X Panther fills a void in the current crop of titles about Mac OS X by focusing on the Unix-side of Panther where it differs from other Unixes in areas such as user authentication and property lists.
To this end, there's very little basic Terminal handholding; Davidson clearly expects his readers to already feel comfortable with the command line (or be epically brave).
There really isn't very much "new" in this title. If you have the time and inclination, you can find the information presented here somewhere on Apple's site, oftentimes buried in some 1,000 page PDF in some nook and cranny of the Developer section. By culling the most important of this material and presenting it in an interesting and coherent way, Davidson has provided the Mac OS X community with an excellent guide to Panther, one that is useful to anybody who administers a Mac OS X system.
