Going through the macbook that I bought recently and saying my opinion on parts which I love and parts that I hate (there are more parts that I love than hate btw).  I thought the obvious place to start was iPhoto.  This isnt as cut and dried as the hardware, but I believe that this application solves a big problem for a lot of people and it does it in a clever and simple way.  So I reckon it might resonate with a lot of people.

When I opened the macbook up the first time, I found that there was this app which would run when I would plug the N85 phone, or my girlfriends iphone into the usb.  This is an example of what 99% of people want with their machines.  An application that can be left on, or turned off, that does exactly what it is supposed to do AND MORE.

When you plug it in, iphoto is auto-set to start running, this can be configured off if you dont like it, but I do, when it starts up, it’ll mount the camera and has options to import the new pictures.  You can choose to show only the new pictures, also after importing them, you can choose to delete them from the device to free up space.

When you think about it, this is exactly what people want, they want to do just this, it’s really simple, it’s really easy and it gets better.  You see, importing into your mac isnt the only thing they have done, they have shortcuts to EXPORT to online services built right into the application.

Select a group of images, click the facebook icon, enter your details, it’ll create an album in facebook for you, no fuss, no messing around, quick, easy, simple.  Same with flickr I’ve been told but I aint tried it, I dont have an account.  Also, the fantastic MobileMe is right there.

This is an application that blows what I see of the competition to bits, on linux? f-spot perhaps? if you like being anally raped by microsoft, go for it, but what else?  This is built into the macbook without any fuss, I can start uploading my pictures where I need to put them, MobileMe is a great way to keep control of your data, if you don’t trust that facebook will do what you wish when you mean DELETE THE FUCKING PICTURE.  But I guess thats always going to be a problem when you start using online services.  If you are that paranoid, you could just write your own gallery, or use Gallery2 which can be installed on your webserver (if you have one).

The other cool thing is, I can select some photos and create a calendar of them right away, I can also print that to PDF and take it to be professionally printed, quick and easy, you know, I tried to do this on linux, I found about 12 dozen crap windows utilities which basically were macros for excel and nothing else, you had to pay, with macbook? nope, you just use the built in tools.

Also, if you create an online gallery, iphoto keeps a connection with that gallery in iphoto, so you can basically update it with more pictures, I guess like a “folder”.  This is really handy if you want to add-remove photos from an already created album, you can even rename the album inside iphoto, but I had some problems with this, because it keeps reverting to the facebook album name, maybe they are fighting over it and facebook keeps winning.

The only gripe I have, is that playing videos, opens an external quicktime video window and doesnt play inside the iphoto interface, this I guess is a limitation of the system, or maybe just lousy programming, but I would like to see the next version has this fixed.

Also, if you want to create a slideshow, you can just select some files and do it right there and then, bingo, instant slideshow, WITH MUSIC (which some people see as retarded music, my dad would be very impressed with what he would do in a short time if he needed it, he isnt going to hunt for mp3s and shit like that).

Another great thing, is the information for each photo, if like you, I have GPS on my camera, iphoto will import that information and if you click the info button, it’ll flip over and show you where in the world that photo was taken (of course, depends on whether your photo recorded it to begin with).  And then of course, the other extended data.

Additionally, you get a faces browser, where it’ll do some facial recognition based on what it knows about faces and the more faces you identify, the more faces it will try to select you, you get the choice of overriding the selection, entering a new one, moving the “square around”, etc, etc.  This can be handy if you want to show people pictures of your brother, for a birthday party, you can just select his “face” and bingo, instant personalised photo album.

It’s hard to estimate how great this application really is, but one of the problems that I had in the past is that I have thousands of images on my computer and I needed to organise them just into simple folders.  Apart from f-spot, which I won’t touch, I couldn’t find any solution that would work on my fedora linux installation and windows? Neither, perhaps it’s just because the internet is a big place and I just couldn’t find it, but seriously, I turned the machine on, one of my biggest archival problems, eliminated, before I even opened the machine.  That just makes this one of the macbook’s biggest selling point, how many of you have thousands of images that you need quickly organising?  Macbook’s have it all built in, you want to go and buy a substandard laptop from HP, go right ahead, then please tell me how you managed to catalogue and archive all your pictures on it, document some steps, I bet you that your list of things in order to do it are larger than mine.

Just another reason why Apple has got things right.  Next up, Time machine.

(I took the images from http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/what-is-iphoto.html, hopefully nobody will sue me )

Hi,

This is the first in a series of posts, that I hope will explain to a new macbook user (that is currently myself) why mac osx and macbooks, are just so awesome and why you should learn to love the Apple, even if you dislike other things.  You can’t ignore what they have done and how different they are from generics and how everyone, if they had any sense, would just copy them and give up.

The first thing is the hardware, it’s amazing.  Simply put, construction wise, it’s the best laptop you can buy, I think the only laptops that come close, are from Sony and they cost like 2x the price and have other drawbacks.

The bodywork:

The entire thing, is built from a single piece of aluminium, save the battery cover, which is supposed to come off, so is separate.  The laptop is so light, I can pick it up, comfortably, with a single arm.  No heavy strength required, no strain past a minimal force required.  I tried that with some laptops at the weekend, they are all about 2x as heavy for almost the same spec.  I guess thats all the steel and plastic coming into play.

It’s also tiny, compared to my similar specced laptop that died recently, it’s about 1inch smaller on dimensions and 50% as tall as my old laptop, this was a HP 2xxx series laptop, compared to acers and others, the HP was small, compared to the macbook, the HP is enormous.  Compared to my previous laptop before the HP (another HP), it’s absolutely tiny.

Apart from that, there are no fans on the base.  This is just plain common sense, why nobody has thought of this before, I dont know, what are acer and asus thinking here I dont know.  The heat from a cpu and northbridge comes to about 60 degrees when under load, and all of that heat, is being expelled through the base of the laptop.

Think about that for a second, the base of a laptop, where does that happen to be?  What does it usually come close to?  Thats right my clever friend, THE TABLE, THE DUVET, THE TABLECLOTH, ETC, ETC.

Now try to explain me WTF are these guys thinking? you are trying to expel, at 4000 RPM, the quantity of air inside the laptop, THROUGH THE BOTTOM OF THE LAPTOP, where it’s almost always blocked by something.  Put your laptop on the desk, one where you can see underneath it.  Now, look underneath at the gap between the desk and the laptop, about 5mm, right?  Put a tablecloth beneath it, how much space now?  Oh, whats that? you can’t see because the tablecloth blocks your view?

OH DEAR LORD SAVE US FROM THESE IDIOTS!!

Laptop overheat often?  Have your cpu temp at 90 degrees?  All of these things, caused by stupid fucking designers who havent thought for long enough to reach past dinner time.  How does apple solve this incredibly difficult and technically challanging problem??

Thats right, it puts the fan beneath the laptop display, in the “hinge” of the display where it connects to the base, then, to follow up, you put a piece of material to “divert” the heat upwards, then, all the heat, comes out of the fan area, which because it can be as wide of the hinge, it is about 3x more area to expel air through, then immediately gets diverted upwards (where funnily enough, hot air WANTS to go) and what do you get as a result?

No burned testicles, for a start.

Sorry to put it bluntly, but how does it take a company with about 1% mindshare on laptops to get this right, whereas for years, all the PC manufactures combined, got it wrong, COMPULSIVELY.

The Battery:

The second act of genius.  Laptop batteries are actually the same shape normally as the batteries you buy for your walkman, or other portable equipment.  Cylindrical.  The problem with this shape, is that as you learned when you were 1 year old, or thereabouts.  Cylinders, dont fit into square holes.  Not without much forcing and hammering anyway.  Which I doubt would do much for your battery life if you happened to try that one.

So, how does apple get it right where again, everyone else has failed (except those who now source the same battery design).  Build square batteries!!! OH NOES!!! Seriously, thats how they increased the battery life.  Square batteries, for a square hole.  GENIUS!!

Actually, the battery isnt technically a square, it’s lots of “plates” of batteries on top of each other, like sheets of paper is apparently the way it’s constructed.

Not exactly rocket science, but again, nobody else thought of it yet (unless by this time, they are all buying the same kit, but at the time of writing, almost everyone has cylindrical batteries inside a square looking casing.  Not exactly the most amazing piece of design ever.

The upshot of this new battery is, that I am not sure how to compare this against other macbooks, or previous designs with “normal” batteries, but when I use this thing, I get like 3 hours continuous usage of it and I plug it into the electricity once every two days, with my previous laptop, I had to charge it each day.  I have heard it’s quoted to 6 hours, but I am guessing that is for very light work, which I havent done any of yet, so I am going to leave that alone for now.

The Trackpad:

This, is amazing, on all laptops, mine, yours, everyones, I have always used an external usb mouse, because the trackpad really sucks, they are small, they dont work very well and the stupid scroll side thing they have, is annoying, especially when you do it by accident.  My very old HP has an OK trackpad, but it’s still not perfect, at least it works properly, except it’s quite small and you find you are always repositioning your fingers to the top or side to get “more space” to work with.  So then my newer HP is even worse, when your fingers get hot, which isnt a surprise if the laptop is running hot as well, the “shiny” surface just leads your fingers to stick, like on glass.  HP, please eliminate shiny trackpads, you might find people like them more, “rough” trackpads are just nicer, your fingers glide over them better.  I realise that shiny looks more cool, but cool isnt cool when your fingers are hot and sticking to the pad, making usage very hard.  The happy thing is, that HP decided to include a button to turn it off, so at least you can ignore it.

The macbooks new trackpad, is amazing, it’s huge for a start, the entire thing is a button and it supports gestures which arent completely retarded.  For example, right click?  Click with two fingers, detectability rating? always works, no problems.  There are other gestures which just work, no playing around, it’s fantastic, get this.

Two finger click: right click on mouse

Two finger drag in any direction: scroll current area (great for firefox/safari)

Four fingers down, show desktop

Four fingers up, expose windows

Three fingers left/right: prev page, next page.

There are others too, but I dont use them.  The trackpad also has zoom like on the iphone, but I dont use that anyway, although it sounds very cool.  To me, it’s useless, until I get an app which would use it (iphoto sounds like it might be worthwhile).

So, at the end, you find that you use these functionalities a lot, therefore, because the trackpad is large and FUNTIONAL, you find that actually, you dont want, or NEED an external mouse now.  The other upside is, no usb device, no extra power drain.  So more battery life, not much, but that has to be a plus, right?

The keyboard:

Now, this is where I think Sony and Apple sources the same hardware, the keyboard, like the new apple keyboard, not the old chunky one, it’s fantastic for long programming sessions or where you need to quickly touch type, the key travel isnt huge, so you can shorten your keystrokes and I think it increases my speed when I know what I want to type from memory.  Programming wise, like typing in different characters and keywords with special symbols, I find it easier because I can rattle it out a lot quicker.

This is very subjective, of course, people might be faster than me with a normal keyboard, but I found that with the right keyboard, which obviously can change per person, you find your rate can increase or decrease, I found the old keyboard a little awkward to use because the keys feel very large.

This makes a huge difference for me, so I love it, but I am guessing that if I spent 2x the money on a sony, I would be equally happy with the keyboard.  So I will say that it’s better than 90% of the competition, fairs fair?

The Conclusion:

At the end of this, can you see, I went from being a PC/windows guy, to someone who would put linux on their computer, to someone who would buy a macbook, why?  Because on mac I can run linux or free software, but I had other problems with linux at the hardware and system level, so for me, it made more sense, get rid of those problems and concentrate on something more important, like your work.

However, this post was just about the hardware, the next part, will discuss software and other aspects of the macbook which I think you might find interesting, please feel free to comment on things you disagree with.

From a hardware and construction point of view, is anyone out there willing to put their neck out and tell me that macbook doesnt present you with the best hardware that you can buy? Considering that a macbook, well, the macbook that I bought, was the same price as my previous PC laptop.  Which would you buy, think about the design desisions that went into the construction, would you trust more a creative and innovative constructor like Apple, or a tired old PC constructor like ASUS or ACER, who seem more interested in just pushing out any old crap?  For the same price? You’d REALLY buy another HP? another asus? another acer?

Fools and their money are easily parted.