January 16, 2008
MacBook Air Smells Bad
Yesterday at Macworld 2008, Apple announced their newest model of notebook computer, the MacBook Air. It falls short of being a complete product in a number of ways:
- It does not have an optical drive (for CDs and DVDs) built in. If you need an optical drive (Who doesn't now and then?) you can either buy an optional external USB drive or share an optical drive attached to another computer on your network.
- The USB optical drive can only be used with this MacBook, not any other computer. It must be plugged directly into the MacBook, not through a USB hub. This is due to some nonstandard things Apple has done with the USB connection, including higher power output. This makes me wonder how many USB peripherals will be fried when the power is accidentally kicked up to optical drive levels. Or it could happen intentionally, as part of a virus or other malware.
- The battery is not easily removable. Changing the battery requires partially disassembling the computer. That is a real problem for me, because I carry an extra fully-charged battery around with my MacBook Pro, which I can easily swap for the battery currently in the computer when its power is low. (I also will not buy an iPod because the batteries aren't easily replaceable.
- The screen is reported as being glossy. An anti-glare screen would be much better.
- The computer doesn't have a "target mode" for the hard drive. That's a feature that users of prior models of MacBooks and PowerBooks enjoy. Rebooting the computer into this mode makes it act just like a FireWire disk drive, which is great for performing backups, repairing a corrupted OS, or data recovery. FireWire isn't available on this computer anyway, but at least target mode could work through the USB connection instead.
- MacBook Air has only one USB port. This is not a major problem, as long as a USB hub can be used. However, as I mentioned above, the optical drive can't be used through a hub. So any time the optical drive is in use, you can't use any other USB devices.
Don't misunderstand me, though. Apple did get a few things right with the MacBook Air:
- It's smaller. I like the 15-inch screen on my MacBook Pro, but some people might like smaller. The Air has a sturdy aluminum case, which makes it more rugged than the regular MacBooks (non-Air, non-Pro models) with plastic cases. But being small just for smallness' sake at the expense of all the drawbacks I already mentioned is not worthwhile.
- The trackpad is larger and has more capabilities, similar to the iPhone. It can use the pinch and stretch gestures with two fingers, two fingers can also make a rotation gesture, and three fingers held together can "swipe". However, I don't understand the difference between that last gesture and the two finger scrolling gesture that's been available on MacBook trackpads for a couple of years.
What I would really like Apple to release is an iPod Touch that I can easily install or write applications for. If I had one, I would put a terminal application (probably iTerm, which is much better than Terminal.app) and ssh on it so I can access servers. (Hey, Apple! Give us a new Newton!) Or else, give us a tablet computer with touch sensitive screen, but don't strip out all the nice feature we already have on our MacBook Pros!
Posted by lsloan at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2007
Tolerating MS Exchange Calendar
In my organization, I am required to use Microsoft Exchange's Calendar system for accepting and creating meeting invitations. Ugh...
Fortunately, since the web access has been enabled for our Exchange server, I don't need to run Microsoft Entourage to access the calendar. At least, not most of the time. It turns out I do need to have it installed for a few rare occasions.
Since I won't use Exchange's email system (I will continue using my trusty IMAP account via Mozilla Thunderbird or Horde Imp), I want to make sure that my Exchange inbox contains only meeting invitations and not other email messages. The reason I get other messages there is that there are some people here that use Exchange for email. Whenever they compose a message and choose my name from the user directory or enter my email address as a recipient, the Exchange server sends the email to me in two places. It sends it to my Exchange inbox and it also sends it to my IMAP account. That is a system configuration, I guess. There isn't any forwarding option that is set in my own Exchange account. So I end up with extra messages in my Exchange inbox.
The IT support folks here anticipated that some users, like me, didn't want to use Exchange's email features. They prepared a file of Exchange rules that would put all messages that are not calendar invitations into the "deleted items" folder in Exchange, which is automatically emptied periodically. The problem is that this rules file (a .rwz file) can only be used by MS Outlook for Windoze. It will not work in MS Entourage, which is for Mac OS X. I was told this ahead of time, but I tried it myself just to be sure.
The solution is to go to somebody's computer that is running Windoze and has Outlook, set up my account there, load the rules, then delete my account settings from that computer. That didn't appeal to me. Given MS' record, how can I be sure that computer won't be able to access my Exchange account at a later date? (Yes, I'm probably acting paranoid.) I happen to have Entourage already installed on my Mac as pat of MS Office 2004. (Just in case OpenOffice or NeoOffice had trouble reading a document and I needed to use Wurd.) So I decided to use Entourage to create the necessary rule on my own.
I sent myself a meeting invitation from the Exchange web interface. I examined the invitation messages carefully (message source and full headers) within Entourage, Exchange web, and my IMAP client. I found that invitations always included an attachment with MIME type "text/calendar" named "meeting.ics". So I set up a rule in Entourage to move all messages that don't have an attachment with that name to my deleted items folder. When executed, the rule moved all messages, including the invitations, to the deleted items folder. Not good. So I moved all the messages back to my inbox and altered the rule to look for messages that don't have attachments. Again, when the rule ran in Outlook, it moved my invitations as well. Strangely enough, though other email clients recognize these invitations as containing attachments, MS Exchange clients do not. (I should expect MS software to be broken, shouldn't I?)
Looking at the message source and headers again, I found this header in the invitation messages:
Content-class: urn:content-classes:calendarmessage
So, I set up a new rule to move all messages that do not have a "Content-class" header that contains "calendarmessage" to the deleted items folder. I moved all my messages back to my inbox and tried the rule. This time, I had success. All invitations remained in my inbox, while all others went to the deleted items. Hopefully this rule will be robust enough to work properly for a very long time.
What's in the rule file that the IT support folks sent me, I don't know. It's a binary file that didn't include any text other than the name of the rule. That makes me think they used some criteria other than searching for a header string that contains a certain substring. Oh well. I could ask the IT folks what's in the rules file, but they will just ask me why I didn't give in and use it on somebody else's Windoze computer.
Posted by lsloan at 09:26 AM | Comments (0)