Russell Finn’s Weblog

• Silver is the new white: With the new iPod classic coming in Black and Silver, it looks like the only remaining iconic white product in Apple’s lineup is the MacBook (unless you count accessories like the AirPort Express or Extreme).

• Is there anything more ridiculous than the early iPhone adopters whining about how Apple is being disloyal to them with the $200 price cut? What is this, high school? Was Apple supposed to not cut their prices, to show how much they care? What do they think all this whining is going to get them, anyway?

  Oh, OK. Huh. Hey, Beelzebub, send me up another iced tea, please. (I wonder if that will work elsewhere. “Hey, Mr. Honda, I bought this Accord a couple months ago, and now you’ve knocked $5000 off the price? I want my five large back!”)

• As a longtime Verizon Wireless customer, the iPod touch has just about exactly solved my next electronic device purchasing dilemma. Now (a) I don’t have to switch carriers, and (b) I can stop carrying a Palm PDA with me, as the iPod touch will do everything I need the Palm for, except doing crossword puzzles and letting my daughter play Bejeweled — and since the iPod touch presumably runs the same OS X that the iPhone does, those are just a matter of time. Bye, Palm; it was fun, but I’m getting off here. Have a nice journey into irrelevance.

So here we have what appears at first glance to be another entry in the “put iPhone in the headline and get unwarranted attention” sweepstakes:

iPhone Users Find Texting is 2x Slower Than on QWERTY Phones

but which turns out in fact to be more like the “write an egregiously misleading headline and get attention” technique.

Clicking through to the actual release reveals that if you take some frequent text messagers accustomed to physical numeric or QWERTY keypads and have them send six — six! — text messages on the iPhone — well, gosh, it takes them twice as long to do that as on their own phones … which they’re already used to.

(Apparently rubbing the iPhone on your head doesn’t cure baldness in half an hour, either.)

To their credit, they acknowledge this issue, sort of:

We were aware that participants’ prior familiarity with their own phones meant that there would likely be a learning curve associated with text messaging on the iPhone … Although participants were given one minute to familiarize themselves with the iPhone’s touch keyboard, their texting abilities on the iPhone were still at the novice level. [Emphasis supplied.]

So, apparently, they didn’t give the users any kind of advice on how to adapt themselves to the iPhone — the sort of thing any reasonably intelligent new user might do. Such as, oh, I don’t know, watch a video showing how it works?

Nor did they do the obvious followup and see how the users did after a couple of days using the iPhone — since it’s been widely reported that performance improves once the user adapts to the iPhone’s predictive key entry. Wouldn’t a usability research firm be interested in that information as well? Or would it just be satisfied to get a quick result likely to draw attention to itself, and send out a press release?

No, it couldn’t be that. What was I thinking?

So now Bandwagon and DreamHost are co-operating on a promotion: DreamHost members get a year of Bandwagon, and vice versa.

Well, I haven’t had a chance to set up my Bandwagon account yet — and, as has been pointed out, it may not be an optimal solution for large iTunes collections — but I’m a DreamHost subscriber, and my renewal date is coming up in a couple of months, so here goes. Now all three of you who read my blog will have something to chew on for another five months. (Hey, I couldn’t keep up with the blog when I wasn’t working full-time — what makes you think I’ll do any better now?)

Bandwagon launches tomorrow; it purports to back up your entire iTunes library over the Internet to their servers (or alternatively to your Amazon S3 box) for a flat rate. Updates occur automatically in the background. Sounds like a good idea, if they can pull it off. (Mac only at the moment, apparently.)

Disclaimer: This post is earning me, like others, a free one-year subscription.

Item on The Unofficial Apple Weblog: Apple Genius says: Moo’ing normal.

Same item as quoted on Powerpage: Apple: It’s Normal for MacBooks to Moo.

Now I’m not a professional journalist, but even I can tell the difference between one offhand comment by one employee at one Apple store, and an official position by Apple the corporation.

Also omitted from the quote on Powerpage: the part where the TUAW writer then called AppleCare and is having his MacBook repaired under warranty. (Of course, the Apple Genius should have handled this…)

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to take Jason O’Grady seriously. How he ends up writing for ZDNet is beyond me.

(By the way, my new black MacBook does not moo.)

In response to a challenge in the Mac forum at Ars Technica, I’ve banged out a quick service that adds “Search With Wikipedia” to your Services menu (right below “Search With Google”). It’s called PyWikit because (a) somebody suggested “Wikit” for the name and (b) I wrote it in Python, using PyObjC.

To use it, download it and move it to your ~/Library/Services folder. At the moment you will probably have to log out and log in again to update your Services menu. If I get motivated I’ll build an installer, someday. (Unlikely since I’ve only spent about an hour on this, most of which was taken up building a universal binary for PyObjC. While it is true that PyObjC rocks, its universalness is still a little, uh, rocky.)

Random thoughts on Apple’s new “Get a Mac” campaign:

• The name itself is significant: not “Switch” but “Get a Mac” — i.e. you can have both.
• The TV ads are funny and make their points without being smug. (I particularly like “Network”, the one with the “new digital camera from Japan”.) But then I’m closer to the fanboi end of the spectrum to start with.
• I’m not so sure about the Mac being a scruffy twenty-something — I guess they’re going for street cred, or whatever the kids say today. Perhaps they’re going for the all-important “Ed” demographic (of which my wife would be a key member) as the actor is the one who played the geek wanna-not-be Warren Cheswick.
• I’m sure people are worried about challenging the bad guys by claiming superiority on the virus front. So far they seem to be walking a careful line and not claiming Macs are virus-free or “bulletproof”. (Oh, and this line: “In order for software to significantly modify Mac OS X, you have to type in your password. You’re the decider.” Priceless.)
• #1 on the list of reasons to get a Mac: “It just works.” Amen. (I wish “design” weren’t quite so high, though.)
• I also like the list refuting reasons not to buy a Mac. One notable omission: “Macs aren’t more expensive” (for what you get); it would be tough to make this case in a few sentences (and tougher still with Dell desperately slashing prices…).

On the whole, it’s good to see Apple making some noise. Now if they can just get the new Intel-based iBook replacements out (before the education buying season)…

SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys is an excellent collaborative editor that I’ve used to help create session notes at past PyCons. Many people also use it as a programming editor, although to date I’m still in the BBEdit camp.

Now, as part of BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com, MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software — specifically, free SubEthaEdit licenses (if enough bloggers link back to the web site to reduce the license price to $0).

Obviously, the intention is to drive a lot of visits to the MacZOT site, but SubEthaEdit for $0 is a great deal no matter how you slice it. (And MacZOT is an interesting idea itself; I’ve used it once or twice to spring for software I might not have otherwise bought, when the discount pushed the price down to impulse buying levels.)

(Thanks to Matt Deatherage for the heads-up.)

Update: Yes, enough bloggers fell for the offer to drive the cost down to $0, and I got my free license code over the weekend — thanks, MacZOT and Coding Monkeys!

Amidst all the hoopla over the new Intel-based Macs, I’ve seen little coverage of this item: Developers who spent $999 to “rent” a Developer Transition Kit (a G5 case with a Pentium 4 inside) will have the opportunity to exchange it for a 17-inch iMac with the Intel Core Duo inside. For free. And yes, they get to keep the iMac.

I had privately conjectured that Apple might encourage developers to return their DTKs on time by offering a small incentive (like a $500 credit towards a new Intel Mac), but this is even better.

Looks like Apple has updated their Switch campaign. Now that’s more like it. I’ve been “advising” the neighbor on what computer to buy their son who’s heading off for college — his first volley was “Look, here’s a Dell for only $299!” — and this is the sort of information I’d like to have handy.

In fact, if Apple’s serious about restarting the campaign, they ought to be printing this up as a brochure to distribute at Best Buy (next to the Mac minis), CompUSA, etc. They should also have a version ready to go as a multi-page ad insert for glossy magazine and Sunday supplements.

And most importantly, they should have one of those MTV-style TV ads that shows beautiful happy people plugging their iPods and their digital cameras and their camcorders into Macs — each bringing up the appropriate application — and ending with the Apple logo and the URL www.apple.com/switch. Put it in heavy rotation starting this fall; get people fired up for it by Christmas.