I’m shopping around for a new phone. I obviously lust after an iPhone 4 being the apple fanboy that I am. Having said that I am in no position to afford a phone even half the price and have no need whatsoever for a contract.

So out of curiosity I went to see what the networks are offering. The iphone is priced on the following sites: scanmalta.com, klikk.com.mt, vodafone.com.m and go.com.mt at between 649 and 699

Melita in their wisdom claim that the phone is priced at €900. And even on their contracts it’s more expensive than the prepaid or contract versions.

OK, I’m very happy with my macs at the mo. Snow leopard solved some of my biggest gripes with new finder features (thumbnails icon size slider) and since 10.5 they’ve got rid of the horrible finder crash/stall when disconnected from a network drive. As well as much improved printing and a multitude of other little features such as hitting CMD -r in a file requestor to show the file in the finder.

Now that Lion has been announced with some nifty launch features I’d like to take this opportunity to list some of my top wants for the new OS.

Add an iOS layer. It is obvious that at one point the 2 OS branches will meet down the line and with the line blurring between Mac devices and iOS tablets, I reckon we’ll see a gradual move towards a reunified OS. Apple claims that touch doesn’t work on large screens, I agree but they are working and will support touch via things like the touch pad. Having said that, ever since the studio was equipped with new 27″ iMacs, no client has resisted the temptation of touching the screen (much to the design monkeys’ chagrin) and one even asked if it’s a touch screen like an iPhone, mimicking the pinch to zoom gesture! However, the smaller macs like the new MacBook Air would definitely benefit from a tablet mode where the screen would double up as a touch panel. It would make it the fastest iPad out there but with a physical keyboard and camera! This might finally truly fulfil the promise of those early tablet pc attempts. Also, developers will suddenly have another 4 million or so devices running iOS per quarter and these are users who spend more time with their devices on and are a more captive audience than the normal iPhone user.

Next major updated – Finder

1) Spotlight: For the love of god improve spotlight searching! First add more control on how it operates – I do not want search as you type – slows most machines down, even a powerful machine will lag if you have 12TB of attached storage. Make options more straightforward too – the privacy tab should be something more obvious like “exclude from spotlight search”! And there should be options to schedule the indexing. I’ve been mucking about my mac pro, exchanging HDDs whilst trying to upgrade to snow leopard, it had lots to index but I couldn’t wait for it (48hours???) also, had to re-index when I swapped back to Tiger! That ate 10-25% of my CPU not to mention the constant disk accessing. When running a busy studio from this computer the last thing I needed was spotlight indexing to eat away at my CPU cycles. I’d like to have the option to index later and have the computer shut down when done.

2) Finder list view: Is it that difficult to allow me to sort by whatever parameter/meta tag I like? Searching is more cumbersome in many cases where I need to isolate a number of files in a folder by file type. At least I’d expect to have the same filters I have in a normal Finder window when I browse through search results. As any user knows that is not the case! Likewise, why can’t I sort through files in open save dialogues in the same way.

Server technology

Now that apple has discontinued the Xserve and doubts have arisen over the future of OS X server, it’s time that Apple consolidates its OS into one offering even further. A lot of the server features come from modules, many of which can easily run atop OS X client. 3 features I definitely would like to see in the client version -

1) A GUI for creation of multiple sites through Virtual Hosts. Utilities like headdress and virtualhostX do an admirable job of providing a simple UI but I think that enough people use macs as web development machines that this could be simpler and built in.

2) A DLNA upnp server: Again this can currently be taken care of by 3rd party software such as eyeconnect and playback. I do understand that Apple might wish to avoid this as it circumnavigates their iTunes ecosystem. However this comes built in most versions of Windows OSes these days and I think many people would find it useful.

3) Home iHub :- they could add more home server features, besides the above DLNA media server, some power monitoring features and something like an app update server for both iOS and OSx. OS X server has the nifty feature built in where you can download 1 update and it will be installed on chosen machines on the network. Wouldn’t it be great if a central computer would be able to handle all software updates for all apple devices in a household? Why do I have to waste so much bandwidth if apple releases a 1gb update (I Have 4 macs and 2 iPod touches at home).

GUI – Consistency and refresh

1) There are many GUI elements that aren’t visually or behaviourally consistent anymore (many never were in spite of Apple’s guidelines). There are too many different types of window and dialogue boxes. I want most of my GUI to be similar – that’s why there is an OS GUI in the first place – imagine if every app developer reinvented the wheel with each app!

2) The floating palettes: Firstly I’d suggest apple removes the micro window toolbars. You know the ones – they can be found on the character palette or the colour palette – actually on most palettes. Things have improved since moving to a unified toolbar but it’s still not the best solution. Also it’s time to update those tired palettes anyway! The font selector, the colour palette etc. – they are a great way to allow programmers to insert these tools into their apps but they feel they have been left behind.

3) Better gui widgets: We’re still waiting for vector based GUI elements and we can see that this will be great for app developers to create resolution independent scalable user interfaces – from the iPad to the 27” iMac. In the meantime we can have new scrollbars for OSX. ITunes appears to be the test bed for new GUI elements, and them scrollbars sure need to be smaller. Better selectors

Default settings

1) Dock magnification – turn it on – people always want it on, it’s the first and most prominent bit of eye candy OSX has to offer and yet it’s off as default.

2) Mouse setting :- increase the mouse tracking speed to more than half and for the love of all that is holy in the world of flying amphibians (chocolate, curry, pizza!) enable the 2^nd mouse button as default.

3) Limited open/save dialogues – WHYYY? Apple why do have to click on a disclosure button every time I load a newly installed app on a new machine. Mercifully it’s something that the app usually remembers and does not have to be set again. However a global setting somewhere should mean an end of this for once and for all

The iphone 4 graphic nicked from apple.com

I was pretty surprised to learn the iPhone 4 has become available to order via Vodafone Malta and iCentre (local apple distributor). I don’t know if this launch has been kept low key or it’s because I don’t really follow the local media at all but I came across this news through someone I shall refer to as “He-Man”  posted a query on her Facebook status asking whether she should go for the 3Gs or the iphone 4. The pages give the prices of the phone without contract – I’ll save you unnecessary clicking and your can read below for more information. I was shocked that the contract-less prices were reasonable when compared with those abroad! I will not go into the merits of comparing the contracts because I have to do more research – I’m a computer geek so the prehistoric technology that is the phone never interested me. The iPhone is the mac of the future in my pocket. Unfortunately I don’t own an iPhone because owning one would mean dropping it out of the holes in my pocket its cost would burn.

So there you go — expensive as you’d expect but not inordinately more expensive compared to some places abroad. It’s about the same price as it’d cost you if you had it shipped from the UK with courier delivery and insurance.  The frogbat’s recommendation: if you are in the market for an iPhone 4 and wish to buy one contract free, jet off to London on a low cost airline to buy one (and get a holiday). The warranty should be an international one and should be honoured locally too (that’s a “should”)  and it’s not like they’d repair anything here anyway. Just register the product immediately with Apple once purchased. Obviously the matter changes completely if you wish to purchase an iPhone with a new contract. With a contract, the initial outlay becomes a bit more affordable… but your mileage may vary.

I’ve just downloaded Safari 5 – perhaps a bit prematurely but I was curious. One bug that was plaguing my web browsing experience in Safari 4 was that the mouse pointer would not change back to its normal state after it was dragged off one of those annoying flash banners (you know.. the ones that invite you to shoot at stuff and turn your cursor into a target reticle). Bloody annoying – to get it back I’d have to drag the cursor off the page and click back in it. Safari 5 did not cure said bug.

So I decided to finally check out clicktoflash. Click to flash is a plugin that purports to stop loading flash items on a page till required. It hasn’t been updated in time to say its compatible with Safari 5 but it seemed to work fine for me.

Safari isn’t renowned for its extensibility and that’s probably due to its lack of a plugin api system such as the one used by firefox for example. Therefore 3rd parties have had to rely on less than straightforward means to extend safari such as developing their own plugin architectures such as simbl. This, however though useful, tends to break when apple updates the browser.

So Click to Flash’s installation was a doddle. Once installed and active, the plugin greys out the area that would’ve been occupied by the flash movie. A little widge appears on each instance which allows you to select from a few options including allowing the individual flash movie to load or all those on the page. Very quick and useful.

It also has some cool features that show it’s a mature product – namely a managed whitelist for sites you wish to allow flash (useful for those of us who have to check out “cool” flash website for a living). I’ve already reaped the benefits as it has cured those flash pointer probs. Another benefit I found – Click to Flash seems to have disabled those really annoying ads that move the whole content of a page down rather than the ad popping above the content (I’m looking at you italian sports paper websites!).

Other benefits include the option to force youtube to play its videoclips through h.264 rather than flash. Most if not all of the vids on youtube have been converted by google so as to be viewed on iOS devices. Unfortunately this was a feature that never made to desktops. From what I can tell, the flash player on the Mac is a major resource hog and one of the biggest causes for system slow down. I’m guessing the h.264 codec and the quicktime plugin will ease the burden.

I won’t go into the pros and cons of flash cos well I’ve made a living thanks to flash and it can be put to great use – I’ll leave it to the Steve Jobs and the Adobes of this world to duke it out but one thing is for sure, since the arrival of technologies such as the scriptaculous javascript libraries and other javascript frameworks, a lot of the cool stuff we were forced to use flash for can be executed without. Whereas before I’d propose a hybrid html / flash site, I’d not propose a pure html site because I know I now have the tools available that would let clients still get excited… Should apple integrate this functionality into Safari? Not sure but it would be nice to have as an option.

Anyways if you wish to claw back the web for yourself rather than be forced to get out of bed at 1 am because of a flash ad deciding to play loud music by itself… download click to flash now (ps. it’s donationware so you can download and use for free).

After about 6-7 years in the same job i finally had a fun job… a quick video ad to promote a strip club. Unfortunately there was no casting sessions etc as it’s all stock footage… It was all done in Apple Motion and was the first time I ever managed to use chroma keying (knocking out a background aka blue/green screening).

I love using my macs – I have them at work, I have 3 at home.. I’ve had macs since the colour iMacs were released (mine was a blueberry one). It’s not that I ever particularly loved macs. I’m not a mac fanboy as people think me to be. I am however, a Microsoft hater. Their software is crap. From their OS to their Office suite… Since my other choices such as Linux or the long forgotten Amiga are really no-gos. I’ve had to make do with the Mac. Don’t get me wrong – OS X is great – it’s many times better than the MS world. It’s not without it’s flaws but that’s to be expected. However there are a couple of things MS have that I’d like to see in OS X.

Firstly is a finder that allows me to properly filter files by any meta data I should choose. On a PC I can list the files in list mode and sort them in many, many ways even for example by pixel size. The mac version of this feature is more limited.

Another thing that Vista has is UPNP DLNA support built in. What’s that? Short answer, it lets you turn your computer into an industry standard media streaming server which allows other devices to stream from it. For example, I like to play my content from my mac on my big screen TV using my PS3. To add this functionality I used a 3rd party piece of software called EyeConnect. there are others available such as Twonky media or Playback. Windows (or some versions) come with this functionality built in. Besides being able to stream from Windows Media player (from my understanding), DLNA shares on the network show up in the networks places area in Windows.

Apple’s solution is all based on their iTunes software and ecosystem. Since there isn’t an iTunes media store here then that’s a no go. Besides which there are other limitations. Apple would like you to by an Apple TV to play their media on the big screen. This has not proven to be very successful… Apple should know better than to release a single function device these days (what worked for the iPod once does not hold true today with consumers’ expectations of multifunction devices like the iPhone and iPod touch. I expect the Apple TV to develop into a fully web enabled games console one day… but I digress.

Since the derby half time! That match really took it out of me. Little did we know it would only get worse (e.g. Inter v Sampdoria) The referees int heir attempt to prove that they aren’t favouring the stronger side seem to be trying their best to damage inter or plain irritate. I don’t mind a referee that applies the rules in a strict fashion – but there are too many matches where that is going in one direction.

This year seems to be the year of things needing to get fixed – my car’s door needs attention aherm. So does my guitar – the neck pickup’s connection to the pickup selector switch appears loose though the whole pickup has always sat loosely compared to the other two.. Unfortunately I have no idea about wiring sound or guitars… Still pretty happy with the guitar though – The middle pickup gets the most work.. must resist the temptation to buy a new guitar this year.

On the computer front I’ve been fixing my dad’s mac mini. First he had a log in loop basically after logging in it fails to loads the desktop and throws you back to the login screen. For the first time ever I had to use single user mode to delete some caches. That seemed to do the trick the following weekend he turns up with the machine refusing to boot into the os. Seems he disconnected the mac whilst it was doing some updates. Ouch. I tried several solutions but nothing worked this time not even single user mode nor disk warrior. Ironically the bootcamp partition worked flawlessly. I managed to connect the mac mini to my macbook using a firewire cable and putting the mac mini in target mode. That’s a genius system, which allows one mac to become another’s bitch external hard drive. I managed to salvage a lot of files though the copying was timing out leading to my fear that though I solved the problem with a reinstall, the problem might reoccur as it seems to be a hard drive hardware issue. We will see.