Newton’s Lore

Recently I swapped out a 100Mb (annoyingly capitalised) NETGEAR FS108 switch for a 1Gb D-Link DGS-1008D switch. Unfortunately, after having done this the Airport Express that was plugged into the D-Link switch would repeatedly hang, dropping the wireless connection and requiring power cycling the Airport Express.
Unsurprisingly this didn’t take long to get annoying, so I did a quick trip to pick up a 1Gb NETGEAR GS108 switch. After removing the D-Link and putting the NETGEAR in place, the Airport Express hasn’t fallen over yet. Conveniently the NETGEAR “Prosafe” versions (more expensive but in a nice solid metal case rather than plastic) have their status lights above each port on the front of the box, which makes it easier to see which cable is doing what, despite it being a bit uglier with all the cables hanging out the front.
I’d previously heard about the dodginess of D-Link, I guess I was overdue for a reminder.

In case you’re wondering which Macs you can put an Airport Extreme card into, Apple has a list of Airport Extreme compatible Macs.

You might want to check out this documentation if you want to set up a redundant DHCP system.

The very cool Eye-Fi wireless memory card is now available (at least to those in the US). With 2Gb of RAM for photos, and a WiFi card built in you can upload photos directly to your Mac or PC (I believe it was demoed at WWDC uploading into iPhoto directly). Or you can upload to the Eye-Fi service and into your favourite photo site (Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, Facebook, etc.)

Apple have posted a list of some 300 new features in Leopard.
Looking through them, the interesting ones that I haven’t noticed being mentioned before (well, mainly) are listed below. Notable absence of mentions go to Java, iTunes and QuickTime.

• Transparent overlay of DVD playback in DVD player (ala TransLucy)
• Screen sharing from the Finder (sort of a poor man’s Apple Remote Desktop?)
• Share any folder (just like in the days of System 6,7,8,9…). The cool part is that you can authorize people in your AddressBook to use the shared folders
• Braille support (presumably external Braille ‘displays’?)
• DVD playback in Front Row
• 20 new CoreImage Filters, CoreImage enhanced for multicore processors, support for colourspace information from EXIF tags
• iChat - Recording, Screen Sharing, Low Delay AAC-LD codec, iChat Theatre, SMS Forwarding
• Image Capture - More tethered camera support, more Canon and Nikon models supported, Wireless image importing, Sharing of scanners over Bonjour.
• Instruments - (Originally called X-Ray I think), lets developers analyse performance metrics and record and replay user interface events.
• Mail.App - Data Detectors - Another System 8 technology back from the dead. Photo Browsing of your iPhoto Library. Sync Mail Notes via .Mac. Archive your Mailbox.
• International - Russian, Polish and Portugese, better multilingual Spotlight indexing, Pinyin and Zhuyin input methods, Russian and Danish Spell Checkers.
• Networking - New Airport Menu, Automatic TCP buffer size adjustment
• Parental Controls - Set time limts for kids, violate their privacy by logging websites and applications used, list people who have chatted and keep a transcript (I hope nobody uses it on adults!) Control parental controls remotely, and filter profanity from the Wikipedia (That should prove amusing).
• PhotoBooth - Make video clips, add backdrops, export animated GIFs for use on your website.
• Preview - Better leverage of Core Animation. Add better annotations, including links to websites or other pages inside the PDF. Highlight text. Save your annotations (really wouldn’t be much good without that last feature would it?). Relevancy ranking of PDF searches. Automatically add your name to annotations for collaborative work. Remove Alpha background or select irregular shapes. Adjust white and black levels automatically. Re-order PDF pages. Perform batch image operations. Send images to iPhoto. Use GPS Metadata support to open a photo’s location on a Map or in Google Maps. Woohoo!
• Printing - Simplified by making common settings presets (Yay!). Kerberos authenticated printing. Location-aware printing (so it doesn’t print your home porn to the work IP printer over the internet Support for printer driver updates via Software Update.
• Safari - Presumably you’re already using the Beta
• Screen savers - Arabesque, Shell, Word of the Day, Clock Overlay, Collage or Mosaic from your Picture screen savers.
• Security - Downloaded applications are tagged and you’re prompted when you open them. Apple Applications are signed (Hmm… That could make modding stuff more difficult!). Application specific firewalling. 256-bit AES encryption (previously only 128-bit) for disk images. VPN client supports Cisco Group Filtering, DHCP over PPP. Sandboxing of applications (Bonjour, Quick Look and Spotlight indexer are sandboxed) to restrict what they can do. Multiple user certificate support. Smart cards to unlock FileVault volumes and the keychain. Supports PIV standard for Feds and contractors to them. I hope FileVault is finally ready to use without hosing your files! Library randomisation to frustrate hacking attempts (and cause developers to find more bugs :). Windows SMB packet signing.
• Spotlight - Search any Mac on your network (woohoo, great for those of us with big numbers of documents on a central server). Now understands boolean searches, dates and category labels. Also (like Google) does dictionary definitions and calculations). Recently visited web pages are indexed too. Search by Filename (ala System 6, etc.). Search system files.
• System - Icon mode in open and save panels (Yay!). iLife browsing from open panel. Live partition resizing in disk utility (assuming you’ve got space Auto-purging guest accounts (Yay!). Grammar checking. Scroll non-active windows (yay! Although we move ever closer to focus follows cursor). Empty Trash button (Yay!) Eject some or all partitions of external USB or FireWire volumes.
• System Preferences - Hot corner for sleep display. Control click accounts for advanced (ie dangerous, unixish) account options (User ID, login shell, home directory)
• Terminal - International character support (Use vi on your Mandarin Save multiple terminal window locations and settings as a workspace.
• TextEdit - Autosave. Open Document and Word 2007 formats. Hyperlinks. Go to Line. Print header and footer. Smart quotes. Smart copy and paste (meaning it now confirms to Apple’s HI Guidelines?)
• Time Machine - Asks you if you want to backup to a drive when you connect it (My, that will get annoying when you want to copy one file and disconnect!). Automatically stops and resumes. Browse other time machine disks. Use Migration Assistant to move users from a Time Machine backup. Manual Backup if you can remember to hold down the control key and cilkc the Time Machine icon in the dock.
• Universal Access - Braille support during OS install. Support JAWS and Windows-Eyes numeric keypad commands. Portable VoiceOver prefs via flash drive (Hmm… I wonder if that could be parlayed into a security problem). Notification of changes in screen hotspots. Drag and drop via keyboard only. Audio misspelling alerts. Audio positional cues. Enhanced VoiceOver accessibility in new Leopard Apps.
• UNIX - AutoFS to mount/dismount network filesystems, Separately threaded (Yay!). Wide Area Bonjour. Streaming IO (Is this TCP streams?)

Apple Hot News includes a message in which Steve Jobs announced an SDK will be available for the iPhone and iPod Touch as of February.

Due to a press event scheduled for the 18th in the UK, rumours are abounding that the iPhone (euPhone?) will be announced then. ThinkSecret indicates it will only be “2.5G” and will not be available until November, with a 3G version available as soon as February 2008.

Apple have revamped the iPod range with

• iPhone price drop - Apple has dropped the 8Gb iPhone to $399 for “this holiday season”, some US$200 off! Probably to align the pricepoint with the iPod touch. You can now set a 30 second soundgrab from (some several hundred select) iTunes songs as your ringtone for only US$0.99.
• iPod Shuffle - “new hues” (PRODUCT) RED, silver, black, blue and green
• iPod Nano - now in a new form factor with a 60% brighter display with 320×240 resolution display at 204 pixels per inch, it plays video. Colours: Silver, black, blue, green and (PRODUCT) RED. Includes new games Vortex, iQuiz and Klondike. AU$199 in Silver (4Gb) and AU$279 for 8Gb models. iPod nano TV ad here.
• iPod (now “iPod classic”) now with AU$349 for 80Gb or AU$479 for 160Gb or storage (as much storage as my laptop!). Available in Black or Silver
• iPod touch - with an iPhone like touch interface and wireless connectivity (it detects when you enter Starbucks and lets you download music from the iTunes store free of download charges (I think)). Flash based, the touch comes in at AU$419 (US$299) for 8Gb or AU$549 (US$399) for 16Gb. Shipping date estimated at 28th of September. Assuming you don’t wait until the iPhone arrives in Australia of course
• iTunes 7.4 - Syncs songs you’ve downloaded onto your iPod touch. Automatically grabs incomplete downloads from your iPod touch and completes them. Larger video viewing area.

Highlights of todays announcements

• Sexier iMacs with sexier keyboards (minus the Apple logo on the Command key)
• Airport Extreme ports bumped to 1 Gigabit
• Mac Mini bumped to Core 2 Duo and 1Gb memory (still no 802.11n or better graphics chip)
• iLife ‘08 (interestingly iMovie now requires a G5 or better, so no PowerBooks!)
• iWork ‘08 (now with “Numbers” spreadsheet)
• Xserves get a build-to-order hardware RAID controller for US$999

Interestingly both Numbers and Pages mention that they’ll import AppleWorks documents, and have a US$249 site licence deal for K-12 schools (not Higher Ed).

Just in case you want to know where to put that second aerial in your Intel Mac Mini.