The MacAlba

Rumour has it that we’ll see the iPhone in Australia in June. No carrier has been selected yet. I can only hope it’ll be Telstra and 3G (a purely selfish hope - we don’t get any other high speed mobile phone service in my part of the country).

Also rumoured is that the iPhone and iPod Touch will see an update in June that brings us 802.1x wireless authentication (which means that at long last these devices will work on enterprise campuses).

There’s no doubt that a few hundred thousand Apple iPhones have been sold in the USA over the past few days. It’s been highly anticipated and talked about and written about for months now. The new owners must be having a great time.

Then there are those of us in the rest of the world. Will it / won’t it be sold in Australia? The iPhone, currently, is a GSM device. Telstra, the largest carrier here, has pooh-poohed the idea of their supporting it - they’re moving away from GSM and CDMA to their new 3G network. If their advertising is to be believed, their nationwide CDMA network will be switched off in January 2008.

In the meantime, instead of the real thing, we’ll just have to make do by operating an iPhone by proxy. Here’s the link to the iPhone’s User Guide, read it, then imagine yourself using the new techno-thing.

If it’s any consolation, just remember that’s it’s never a great idea to buy something that’s version 1.0. Let others work out the bugs first.

I borrowed an Apple 23 inch Cinema HD screen from another system today and connected it to my new MacBook Pro. I’ve not run a dual monitor system before and wasn’t quite sure how to work with such a setup (and still amn’t). I sat the LCD screen behind the MacBook Pro and configured OSX to have the laptop screen below the Cinema screen in the display preferences menu. This works as you’d expect from a technical perspective - but I don’t really have a feel for how work-day workflow should run.

What do I mean? If I start Microsoft Word, for example, and open a document, the file opens in the laptop screen. That’s OK - I can drag the newly opened word window up onto the Cinema screen. The window is the same size as it was on the laptop’s screen though. I then have to manually increase the window size to enable me to see the entire word document at roughly actual size. I haven’t yet found an “adjust window to actual sizeâ€? command in Word - there may not be one.

I’ve been giving Aperture, Apple’s post-processing tool for photographs, a trial run and have been really impressed by the brightness and clarity of my photographs on the big 23 inch screen. The big plus though, is the ability of Aperture to present me with a fluid, natural workflow. I’m (currently) convinced that this software will, in time, replace my current use of Adobe Photoshop.

I’ll probably end up purchasing a Mac Mini for home use and connecting a 23 inch screen to that.

The Mac PowerBook G4 that I’ve been using at work comes to the end of its lease in a week or so. I took delivery of a MacBook Pro today to replace it. And, Holy CPU Cycles Batman!, my old PowerBook is now being shown up for the slow, memory-lacking box that it is.

The old box is a 1.5 Ghz G4 PowerBook with 1 Gbyte of memory, the new is a 2.33 Ghz Core 2 Duo device with 3 Gbytes of memory. I ordered a 3 Gbyte system rather than a 2 Gbyte device such that I can experiment with virtualisation using either Parallels or VMware Fusion.

The thing that impressed me the most, though, was the ease with which I could move from old to new system. I reinstalled OSX (just because that what I would do on any system), and, rather than re-install each custom application and copy my data files from an intermediate backup drive, I decided to try the “copy from the old machine via Firewire� routine. It took a bit over an hour to move over 40 Gbytes of files and the new system “it just works�.

After just a few hours using the new laptop I’m very happy with the brighter LCD screen, and the almost forgotten snappiness afforded by a system that can cope with the work being asked of it.

I realise that Apple will, no doubt, be announcing newer, zippier models next week, but the timing was just wrong for me.