Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Configuration, Hardware, Review, Software, Utility
Monday Jun 16, 2008
There are some Mac models that come with a built-in camera - if you have one of those, you’re golden, at least until the camera malfunctions or you want higher resolution. But if you didn’t get a built-in camera, or for whatever reason you want to use any typical off-the-shelf webcam, you will find that Apple’s support for webcams sucks. I mean it REALLY sucks. You can take a perfectly good webcam that works great under Windows, and just try to use it under OS X. It will see that the camera is connected, but unless you are very lucky, it just ignores the camera’s output.
This is generally NOT a hardware incompatibility, although it can be, particularly if the webcam is an older model. However, there is a very nice third-party software program called macam, which is a driver for USB webcams on Mac OS X. The developer’s site explains that “macam consist of an application and a component. Run the macam application to verify whether your camera works with your Mac and your USB setup. The component is the actual driver that allows other applications to access the video-stream.” Macam currently supports just about half of the known cameras out there.
photo credit: mangee
The problem is that that even with Macam installed, Apple’s bundled software won’t work with it. Got Photo Booth? Forget about using it with your unsupported webcam, although macam’s application (and some third party software) will let you snap single images of yourself or your kids. Want to have a video chat? iChat refuses to recognize a USB-connected webcam unless you purchase a third-party program (which we might have tried and reviewed, except that once we installed it and tried to use it one time, in an attempt that was unsuccessful due to an unrelated problem, on the second attempt it immediately thought that its seven day trial period was up and refused to run!). But you have to wonder, if a third-party program can make iChat work with a USB webcam, how hard would it be for Apple to enable this capability? It’s exactly this sort of thing that sometimes makes us wonder if we made the right choice by getting a Mac.
Of course, if you want to use Yahoo! Messenger, you can install their Mac client and use that to chat with your friends. Although we haven’t had the opportunity to fully test it yet, we do note that it at least recognizes our webcam (presumably using the macam driver) and displays a preview. That’s more than iChat does. As for AIM, for some inexplicable reason they distribute AIM 4.7 for Macintosh using a .bin format file, which must be expanded using Stuffit Expander. That put us off a bit, and since every review we’d read about it didn’t exactly give it a stellar recommendation, and since nowhere on the page for the Mac version did they say that it supports video chats, we decided to forgo attempting to install it for the moment - though we may revisit that decision later.
Oh, and before anyone comments that Adium has got a “mebeamIntegration” plugin that handles video - if you can get it to work, more power to you! We have it installed and when we try to access it (by right clicking on a contact, for example) it simply does not appear in the menu of choices. But then, we would add that the majority of comments we read about it (the plugin, not Adium itself) weren’t exactly glowing (though you could tell the hard cider drinkin’ boys in the bunch - their attitude was that if you got it for free you shouldn’t complain about it, even if it lays there like a giant turd on your hard drive and works poorly or not at all. After all, what did you expect for free, you ungrateful cheapskate?).
Come on, Apple - you put USB ports on your computers, and people expect that they can just plug in standard USB devices and they will just work. We will even put up with a little aggravation to get a device going, but when in your arrogance you decide that you simply won’t support an entire class of hardware, that’s simply going too far. We know that the hard cider drinkin’ boys will always think you can do no wrong, but those of us who have switched from Windows aren’t going to talk your products up to our friends and relatives if you can’t even support basic USB hardware properly. And yes, we do understand that you can’t support every older-than-dirt Webcam that was sold for use with Windows ‘98, but you should at least be able to support those webcams that are supported by the spca5xx/gspca Linux webcam driver project (which is given credit in the macam documentation). If the Linux folks can support these webcams, why can’t Apple? The answer is that there is no good reason why not, they just haven’t felt it’s a priority. Well, Apple, I suspect that many of your customers may feel differently about that.
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Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Hardware, Review, Software
Saturday May 3, 2008
Unfortunately, it happens to many Mac owners. Usually it happens after you install some piece of software, or even a software update (even one from Apple itself). Sometimes it happens for no discernible reason. You (re)boot the system, and nothing happens. Or, the bootup stalls at the Apple logo, or maybe at a blue screen (yes, there is such a thing as a “blue screen of death” on a Mac, but it’s a solid blue screen with no text!). Or maybe you get as far as the login prompt, but it just keeps looping around and asking you for your login over and over, and you know you’re entering the correct name and password.
What do you do then? If you have access to another computer, you probably go online and look for a solution. But what if your only online access is the computer that’s now refusing to boot?
Well, you might be in slightly better shape if you have access to this little printed guide, called My Mac Won’t Start! A Tiny Guide. It prints out on a single page, which you can cut and fold according to the instructions, and tuck away somewhere. Take it with you when you’re on the road, or keep it in a safe place at home (maybe in the sleeve with the OS X DVD).
Now, having said that, before disaster happens you might want to read up on the Mac’s “Archive and Install” installation option. This is basically a complete re-installation of OS X from your DVD, but if you have recently switched from Windows you may think that’s a pretty drastic step. Well, it is, but not the way it would be if you were reinstalling Windows. If you are careful to select “Preserve User and Network Settings” during the archive and install process, you will probably be surprised to find that when the process completes (usually after a couple of hours, give or take a bit depending on the speed of your system), everything appears to work just as it did before you had the problem. Of course, that may not be true if you had a catastrophic failure (hard drive died, for example), but otherwise it may look like you never had a problem.
Don’t be fooled, things have changed “under the hood.” You should now have Internet access (assuming you have a working ‘net connection), so the very first thing you should do is click on the Apple icon in the upper left hand corner of your screen, click on “Software Update” and install all software updates. Surprisingly, even if it was an Apple software update that appeared to cause the problem, very often after an “Archive and Install” you can go right back and get the same software update and this time it will install without a problem. The next thing you need to check is whether any firewall settings you care about are the way you want them (they get set to the default settings), and then you may need to reinstall drivers for any external devices you use, such as printers (this is not universally true - if OS X supports the device natively you’ll likely be okay, but if you had to download and install a driver then it would be best to keep the driver install package in some safe location on one of your hard drives, so you can reinstall it if you need to). If you are using any antivirus software, check to make sure that it is operating okay - it may need to be reinstalled as well.
It probably won’t take you much more than an additional hour (after the Archive and Install) to have your system up and running again. There are a few things that don’t seem to be preserved. For example, if you installed Xcode (Developer Tools) from the OS X DVD, you will probably have to do that again. But anything you have installed in your user directory, or in the Mac’s Applications directory should be preserved, along with any software keys, etc. Of course, we can’t guarantee this will be true in every single instance of an “Archive and Install”, but we remember that any time we had to reinstall Windows it took days to get the system back to the way we had it, and invariably something never would work right again, whereas with the Mac we can be 99.5% functional within about three hours of starting the “Archive and Install” process.
There are some caveats to this: Archive and install won’t work if there’s not enough room to store your existing settings and data in a temporary folder (this doesn’t require as much space as you might think, because it’s not backing up the entire drive - the last time we did an Archive and Install on an 80 GB system drive, the resulting “Previous Systems” folder was a bit under 14 GB in size. Your experience might be different, but if you try to keep at least 20% of the primary drive space unused you will probably be okay), and there are a few other considerations as well. You really should read the two web pages of documentation on the Apple web site (#1 and #2). We strongly suggest that if you have never used this option, you take a few moments to read those pages now, and perhaps even print them out, so that you will have access to them when you cannot connect to the ‘net.
Archive and Install is not something to be used lightly, but if your system just won’t boot and the cause is not a catastrophic failure, Archive and Install is often the quickest way to get your system running again, particularly if you’re not a Unix guru. It’s not exactly a “quick fix” but on the other hand, it’s a lot quicker than pouring over obscure documentation or searching through web pages for hours, trying to find another way. Ultimately it’s up to you to decide whether you want to resort to an Archive and Install, bearing in mind that it probably will break a few things, but hopefully nothing you can’t fix with several minutes’ additional effort. Whatever you decide, we wish you good luck, and remind you that the best preventative step to avoid losing important data is a good backup (which Time Machine makes ridiculously easy, so if you are using Leopard you have no excuse!)
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Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Hardware, Software
Wednesday Apr 30, 2008
One issue that some Mac “switchers” have encountered is that the colors on the Mac display look just a bit washed out compared to those on a PC. It’s generally not enough of a difference that anyone would complain; in fact, many new Mac users would think it was their imagination, or would attribute the difference to hardware variations (different display or graphics card).
In reality, however, there is a difference, and it is due to a configuration choice made by Apple. There is a page that describes the issue in some depth:
A solution to Mac “Save For Web” colour discrepancies
The gist of the problem is that Apple has chosen to, by default, go with a gamma setting of 1.8, whereas other systems use 2.2 as the default. On the above-mentioned page, it gives this bit of wisdom: “Unless you have a color management expert instructing you otherwise, select a 2.2 gamma and a D65 white point.” However, the white point is not as important as the gamma, and you may wish to use the default white point that has been determined to be right for your display. It’s most important to change the gamma setting, and calibrate the display in the process. How do you do this? By setting up a new color profile. This is fairly easy to do.
First of all, if you are using the “Shades” program (or any other program that gives you software control over display brightness or any other display parameter), go into the program or preference panel and turn it off before you begin this process, otherwise it may fight you at every step of the calibration process, turning an easy task into a really difficult one with less than satisfactory results.
Go to System Preferences, click on Displays, then go to the “Color” tab, then click on “Calibrate”:
Then follow the instructions. BUT, before you change the setting of your display’s contrast (using the control on the display itself), make a note of the current setting. You will be changing it as part of the calibration process but once you are all finished, you may decide that you want to go back to that setting, or something reasonably close.
During the calibration, when you are asked to adjust the monitor’s brightness, it will say to set it to where you can “just see” the oval:
The only problem is, Apple’s idea of “just seeing it” and yours might be a bit different. We wound up using a setting that was a bit more than where the oval was just barely perceptible, but still a bit less than where the two halves of the surrounding rectangle started to appear as different, and that seemed to work best. Originally we tried setting it where the oval was just barely perceptible, but then after the adjustments were completed we couldn’t get a monitor setting that we liked (everything was too dark for our liking, particularly on some of the wallpaper).
When you get to this screen:
You want to select the “2.2 Television Gamma” because that is the setting used on most non-Apple computers, and therefore that is the setting that most graphics (including those on the Web) are adjusted for. This is the setting that Apple probably should have used in the first place - at least they give you the option to use it, but we think it should have been the default. On the next screen you’ll be asked to select a target white point:
We suspect that “D65″ and “Native” are very close on modern displays (perhaps even identical). You can try both and see which works best, or you can just go with the recommendation from the above-mentioned article to use D65.
When you are all through, you are likely to see color in places that only looked grey or washed out before. That is because Apple’s default color profile and gamma setting tends to wash out certain colors. But, unless you have just acquired your Mac, it will look strange to you, because it’s not what you’ve become used to. You may have to try adjusting the monitor’s brightness and contrast to get something you like. The interesting thing is that whites may seem “whiter” than before and that may throw you a bit, but it will also show how screwed up Apple’s default color profile is. Try it for at least a day or two before you decide you don’t like it. We found that by setting the monitor’s contrast back to the original setting (the one we told you to note in the previous paragraph) and then using the brightness to adjust the monitor for best picture yielded the best results, but your results may be different.
If you decide you really hate the calibrated profile, you can always go back to the default Mac color profile for your monitor, but then you can expect displays on other computers to look strange. Keep in mind that if you’ve gotten used to looking at washed out colors, it may take some time to adjust!
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Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Crabapple, Hardware, Programming, Review, Software
Friday Apr 25, 2008
photo credit: mac_vegetarianWhen Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) first came out, one of the greatest new features - and, unfortunately, one of the most frustrating for some users - was Time Machine. Time Machine is probably one of the best pieces of backup software ever written, in that it makes it absurdly easy to retrieve previous versions of accidentally (or purposely) erased or damaged files. But the only problem is that for many users, it has only consistently worked well if you were willing to dedicate a hard drive (or at least a partition) to Time Machine.
Some users have other storage sitting out on their local networks (known as Network-Attached Storage, or NAS), and wondered why they couldn’t use that for their time machine backups. The funny part is that shortly after Time Machine first appeared, a company called Xiotios Software came out with a small program called iTimeMachine which had only one purpose - it enabled the use of AirDisks and Network Disks in Time Machine.
And it worked, until Apple came out with an incremental upgrade to Leopard, which promptly broke the ability to use external disks for backups for many users. Another upgrade, and some users have reported that they can use external drives, while other still cannot.
We think that what iTimeMachine does is the equivalent of opening a terminal window and entering this:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
… which is another method that some folks have used to allow Time Machine to access networked drives. But this alone doesn’t seem to be sufficient in some cases. Today, Mac OS X Hints published an article describing a three-step process to create a Time Machine backup on a network-attached storage (NAS) unit. 
photo credit: Kai HendryUnfortunately, it comes a bit too late for us - earlier this week we bit the bullet and dedicated an external drive to Time Machine, rather than making further attempts to save Time Machine backups to a drive connected to our “Unslung” Linksys NSLU2, which would probably have worked had we had the above information available.
Our “Crabapple of the Week” gets tossed at Apple, for not making Time Machine work well with network-attached storage, or even their own AirDisks, in the first place, and for not yet fully supporting them even as I write this. Of course, those hard cider drinkin’ boys will have already run down to the Apple store to buy a Time Capsule, but for those of us not ready to open our wallets every time Apple comes out with some new (and, dare we say, sometimes overpriced) gadget, information on how to make Time Machine use our existing devices is much appreciated. And another Crabapple goes to Apple for giving out questionable information (this is a quote from Wikipedia’s page on Time Machine):
….. According to Apple, it can only be backed up to network drives if they are being hosted by another computer running Leopard (including Leopard Server). Further, the volume needs to be formatted with the HFS Plus file system, with journaling enabled. External hard drives typically are pre-formatted with the FAT32 filesystem. To use Time Machine, the hard drive must first be formatted, which erases all data. The hard drive will not require formatting if it is already using the HFS filesystem.
Except that for a period of time after Leopard was released, we were making successful Time Machine backups to a drive attached to the aforementioned Linksys NSLU2, which runs a version of Linux, not Leopard. Oh, and the drives were formatted using EXT3 (the format used by the NSLU2) and we did not reformat them, and Time Machine did not erase any data on the drive. So, if the above information from Apple (as reported in Wikipedia) is true now (and we do not believe that the above is entirely true), it’s because Apple changed something during a recent Leopard upgrade. Would Apple deliberately try to make users think they have to purchase a Time Capsule, or at least use a dedicated external drive, even if that’s not strictly true? We won’t speculate further on Apple’s possible motives for spreading questionable information, but we do wish they would just go ahead and fix Time Machine to play nicely with whatever external storage the user may have available.
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Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Hardware, Software
Sunday Apr 13, 2008
In our last post we were exploring the keyboard settings in the International preference panel in the Mac OS X System Preferences. Today we’re going to look in the Keyboard & Mouse preference panel.
Under the "Keyboard" tab you can change things like Key Repeat Rate and Delay Until Repeat, but you can also change the action of the modifier keys - see the button that says "Modifier Keys?" If all you want to do is, say, swap the operation of the Control and Option (a.k.a. "Windows" on a PC-style keyboard) keys, you can do it here - you should not need to run another piece of software.
But the real action in this preference panel is under the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, where you can change a multitude of settings.
Note that you can actually set up application-specific keyboard shortcuts. Click the + button, select an application you wish to control, enter the exact title of the menu command you want to add in the text field, and then in the last text field you simply depress the key combination you wish to use to invoke that command.
Normally it’s probably not a good idea to change the Mac’s defaults, BUT one exception may be the commands invoked by using the function keys. Sometimes I use iTerm to connect to a remote system that runs Linux, and I don’t want keys like F8, F9 and F10 bringing up Spaces or application windows, because those keys are used in the software I’m running on the remote system. So I either disable the combinations I don’t use, or change them to something like Control+Function Key.
Anyway, if the System Preferences do not give you enough power over the keyboard, there are free programs you can download that will give you many more options. Just be sure you don’t install both of them at the same time on the same Mac (more in that in a moment).
One rather popular program of this type is called DoubleCommand - as you can see from the screenshot below, it allows you to do several types of keyboard modification. It actually adds a new preference pane under System Preferences and by checking the appropriate boxes you can select any of the modifications shown.
However, our preference in this type of program is KeyRemap4MacBook, which we find to be far more versatile than DoubleCommand - and despite what the title may imply, it should run on any Mac using OS X (it has been confirmed to run on the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini).
Those of you that have recently switched from Windows (or who are simply more used to Windows-style keyboards) will want to pay special attention to the settings under the "For PC User" section.
KeyboardRemap4MacBook has far more available key mappings than DoubleCommand (there is a list of supported remappings on their web site), but this is a case where you should choose the program that best does what you want it to do. We will note that if you are using a PC-style keyboard and like to use the directional keys on the numeric keypad (rather than the numbers) then KeyboardRemap4MacBook is definitely the one you want.
Before we close we must give you one warning, based on experience: NEVER INSTALL BOTH DOUBLECOMMAND AND KEYREMAP4MACBOOK ON THE SAME SYSTEM!!! These two pieces of software both try to use the same "hooks" into the system and if you install both, neither will work, and more than likely your keyboard will stop working. And now you are really in a pickle, because in order to uninstall the one you don’t want, you’ll be asked to enter your password - which you can’t type in because the keyboard doesn’t work! Furthermore, even a power-down reboot will not help as long as both programs are installed. Remember our discussion of the Keyboard Viewer in part 1? That’s the only way we know of that you’ll be able to enter your password in order to uninstall one of the two programs (by clicking on the Keyboard Viewer keys with your mouse). So don’t get yourself into this mess in the first place - install only ONE of the two programs, and if you want to try the other, completely uninstall the first one before you install the second.
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