imac
Latest
Ask TUAW: Where do you put your Apple remote?
"Where's the zapper?!"A time old phrase uttered countless times in countless living rooms across the world, usually accompanied by an expletive or two. Now that Apple has standardized Front Row and bundled a remote with nearly its whole range, Mac mini, MacBook and MacBook Pro owners are also screaming out for their lost "thingy", "zapper" and "remote control". iMac owners are in the clear: they've got a nice little magnetic section on the side of their machine that the Apple remote will elegantly stick to. Mac mini, MacBook and MacBook Pro owners aren't so fortunate. Apple's forgot to give us non-iMac owners a place to stash our remote! The MacBook, with its magnetic lid, offers a semi-viable solution. The remote will happily stick to the left and right corners at the top of the screen where the lid magnets are. It looks pretty stupid though.One solution that Apple could use, for the MacBook Pro at least, is to adapt the Apple remote so that it will fit inside the laptop's ExpressCard slot. That would allow users to store the remote out of the way while the machine was closed (our less than elegant solution shown above doesn't tackle that problem). Have any TUAW readers come up with a way to keep the Apple remote with their Mac when they're not using it? Guides for Velcro mods, tractor beam construction manuals and levitation how-tos are welcome!
Rig of the Day: The floating iMac
This is fantastic. Flickr user Zennifer has mounted her G5 iMac on a swiveling arm, allowing it to "float" above her desk. I applaud the uncluttered, minimalist beauty of this solution."Floating iMac" posted by Zennifer.If you'd like to see your own rig featured here, simply upload photos into our group Flickr pool. We select one image to highlight each day, and crown a Rig of the Week on Sundays.
Rig of the Day: Where did the computer go?
Today's rig is more of an "anti-rig." When Apple released the iMac G5, they used the tagline, "Where did the computer go?" Flickr user *nathan takes the idea to a whole new level with this "faceless" iMac. Where did the computer go indeed."Faceless" posted by *nathan.If you'd like to see your own rig featured here, simply upload photos into our group Flickr pool. We select one image to highlight each day, and crown a Rig of the Week on Sundays.
CoreDuoTemp
Your new MacBook Pro runs a little hot, but how hot is it? CoreDuoTemp can tell you how hot your CPU is, as well as let you know CPU usages, and frequency. All of this for free? Well, donations are accepted.Sorry PowerPC folks, this one is Intel Mac only.
Rig of the Day: Many Macs
Check out this well-appointed desk. Flickr user dsiercks shows off a pair of Powerbooks, two iMacs (one with iSight, one without), one Powermac G5 (with an iSight of its own) and twin displays. We'd say you can get some work done with that set up."workstation" posted by dsiercks. If you'd like to see your own rig featured here, simply upload photos into our group Flickr pool. We'll select an image every day to highlight.
Gawker - record, share, combine time-lapse movies with an iSight
Gawker is a really interesting open source app that takes a very simple, yet powerful, approach to capturing time-lapse videos from an iSight camera - be it your own or someone else's. As you can see in this image, Gawker can utilize smart networking abilities of Bonjour to see if any other Macs on your network are running Gawker with an iSight, or you can enable iSight access over the web. You even have control over image quality, resolution and fps.Check out the project's examples page for some intriguing samples of what this software can do, such as sped-up footage of snow melting in Colorado and a PowerBook hard drive replacement.After a little tinkering, I must say Gawker is darn slick and drop-dead-easy to use. But before you ask: I'm not sure if other cameras are compatible. Head over to Gawker's project page for more information.
Apple Keyboard Update 1.0
An odd headline, I know, but it's true: last night Apple released Keyboard Update 1.0 for their Intel-based Macs including the MacBook Pro, iMac (Early 2006) and Mac mini (Early 2006). From Apple's site: "The Apple Keyboard Update 1.0 addresses reliability of keyboard and mouse functionality."You can grab the update either through Software Update or from Apple's Support Downloads.
Spy on friends and family with your iSight-enabled Mac
This post could also have been titled: "how to lose family and friends quickly with your iSight-enabled Mac." A poster over at macosxhints discovered that you can start a new video recording session in QuickTime Pro on an iSight-enabled Mac (for that low-profile surveillance look), and invoke Fast User Switching while the QT Pro session keeps on recording. For more stealth surveillance, you can set your display to shut off and, aside from the green light, most people will be none the wiser.Ethics and exclamations of 'how dare you?!' aside, I wonder if this 'built-in webcam' feature is going to inspire a new niche of unique video recording software.
Apple posts firmware update
Earlier today, Apple posted a new firmware update for Intel-equipped Macs. According to Apple, this update will bring your Intel Mac to firmware version 1.0.1. You can find the update for the Mac mini here, the iMac here and the MacBook Pro here. Apple didn't provide a whole lot of detail about these updates, so let us know what your experiences are.
PC World welcomes Apple to their charts
In a move that's causing many to check out their window to see if the sky is falling, PC World has laid out a welcome mat for Apple's hardware into their Top Power PCs testing charts, thanks to Boot Camp. So far, no Macs have made the charts due to some policy quirks (they typically only test stock PCs - Macs don't ship pre-installed with Windows) and test compatibility hiccups, but from a blog entry covering their initial tests, the iMac running Windows XP fared pretty well.We certainly live in interesting times with Macs running Windows, rumors of virtualization in Leopard and now Apple's hardware being put to the test alongside its now (let's face it) PC brethren hardware. We'll keep our ears out for more results on just how well these new Macs stack up.
Solaris on an Intel iMac
The OSes just keep on coming! The latest non-Apple OS to boot on an Intel Mac, thanks to Boot Camp, is Solaris. That's right, a Sun engineer managed to get a build of Solaris up and running on his Intel iMac. It isn't fully functional yet, but I have no doubt that it will be soon.Macs are fast becoming the Swiss Army knives of computing.[via OSNews]
Boot Camp can run Vista, too
Some might say that using Boot Camp to run Windows XP on a Mac is so last week. Some enterprising hackers at the OSx86 Project seem to agree, as they have successfully gotten a preview version of Vista - Microsoft's upcoming Windows upgrade originally slated for 2003 - to run on an Intel iMac. Apparently there's some odd install hiccups to tinker with, as Engadget notes, so it sounds like this might not exactly be for the for the faint of heart Boot Camp Mac user.Nevertheless, if you are the lucky owner of an Intel Mac and have either a desire or a need to play with Windows Vista, check out this OSx86 Project thread.
BeLight announces winners of switcher contest
As you may remember, BeLight software recently posed the question to the Mac faithful: How would you convince a PC user to switch? They held a contest to find the best answer, and today they've revealed the winners. I thought the best advice came from Wesley D. Radcliffe, a contestant who said, "...Let them play. Sit your powerbook in your lap and use expose. Wait for them to ask how you're printing files, playing music, and using the internet at the same time, with not one cable touching it..." I recently had an opportunity to show off iMovie a bit, and after about 10 minutes I had sold a Mac to a long-time PC user. Another friend of mine (think of the most die-hard PC user you know) actually said the words "Macs are cool" after playing with a G5 iMac. The lesson: Never underestimate the power of the demo.
Apple's special deals section filled to brim, hemmoraging iPods
While I was pondering whether the introduction of Remote Desktop 3 was worthy of shutting down the Apple Store this morning, C.K. pointed out that Apple also updated their Special Deals section. A lot. I can't remember the last time I've had to scroll this much on a page in the Apple Store. It looks like they have refurbished items from almost every one of their products except the MacBook Pro, but they're highlighting the iPod mini with their Special Deals graphic (pictured) almost as if to say "go on iPod mini. 'Git!"I'd try linking Apple's Special Deals section, but I know that always gets wonky. Plus, the tips I've found like Ars Technica's don't cover linking a section, so all you get is a link to the Apple Store. You're on your own for the rest of the way.
A Weekend with an XP iMac
This weekend, I conducted a little experiment. I used Boot Camp to boot my 17-inch 1.83GHz iMac Core Duo with 2GBs of RAM and an external 24-inch monitor in Windows XP and then I forced myself to remain in XP. I didn't reboot into OS X. Instead, I explored the Windows performance on the machine. Overall, I have to admit, it was a positive experience. I still prefer OS X, but I can now see the advantages to booting into XP from time to time. One odd thing that I wasn't expecting was that I didn't find myself loathing Windows quite as much. Something about running it quickly on my nice iMac made it more pleasant than all of my previous experiences running XP on various PC boxes. It's still the fastest I've ever seen Windows perform. Half of this is probably that I didn't load it down with lots of crap programs, and I had it properly protected immediately after install with virus, firewall, and spyware protection. There were negative aspects to the experience. It hard crashed at least 5 times on me this weekend. This mostly happened when I was installing something... More after the jump...
Another tough-as-nails Mac
Last week, Scott wrote about a poor Powerbook that had been badly damaged, but continued to work. Oddly enough, I found the iMac pictured at right on my workbench this morning when I arrived at my day job. It seems that a student abruptly introduced it to the floor, badly cracking the case around the display. The good news: it still works. You've got to love these tough-as-nails Macs.
Vista successfully installed on a Mac
It was only a matter of time, but hey, for those closely monitoring the progress of Windows on Macs, it looks like peeps on the OSx86 Project forums have fully done the deed with Vista on an iMac. We're not going to get into the nitty gritty right here and now, but it sounds like the trick is to get Vista to stop trying to kill the OS X partition when installing with Boot Camp -- an urge in the installer that seems to be kept at bay by taking out the 200MB EFI partition. But if you're the type of person how wants to go for the gold and not just read about this stuff (which you probably are if you've gotten this far), we suggest actually looking into this a little further before knocking around partitions on your Mac just to get a beta Microsoft operating system up and running, mkay?[Thanks, Mike and Jon]
TUAW in Firefox in XP Home on an iMac Core Duo on TUAW
Subtitle: First Impressions of XP on a Mac.BAM! How's that circularity for you? Yes, folks. Last night, I bravely installed Windows XP Home on my iMac Core Duo and here's a Flickr set of my installation pictures (taken with my camera phone).What are my first impressions? It's pretty darn fast. Easily the fastest "Windows machine" I've ever worked on (and keep in mind, I used to run labs full of them). The installation was relatively painless, although I did have a few errors on my internal hard drive and had to boot off of the installation disk and run Disk Utility to repair the disk before Boot Camp would let me create the Windows partition. Unfortunately, you cannot resize this partition on the fly, so make sure you give yourself enough room. I thought I had done so, but once World of Warcraft started updating, it quickly ate up all the free space on that drive with its temporary files. So, I have to uninstall and then reinstall. I already activated this copy of XP though... how does that whole business work?Also, I chatted with Jason Clarke over at our sibling blog, The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog, via email last night, and I think they may be posting some helpful tips for any Windows virgins who use Boot Camp to install XP on their Macs. In the past, TUMW has been the sibling weblog that we've been in a fight with, but since yesterday's release of Boot Camp means that all things Apple will eventually overtake all thinks Microsoft (as if Apple were the Borg), I don't have any problem linking to any such posts which they will produce. *grin*My two cents: Run all the Windows Updates immediately upon installation and Download Google Pack so you have some spyware and virus protection. Keep in mind: some of those nasty Windows' viruses and worms are geared toward attacking Intel chipsets, and without OS X running interference, there's definite risk to your Intel-based Mac. Update: Title corrected. I took another pic of TUAW in IE too, but posted the wrong one. *sorry*
Mossberg goes to Boot Camp and survives unscathed
While some early message-board reviews of Apple's new Boot Camp software -- which was announced earlier today -- seem to show that there are at least some hazards to running Windows on a Mac (see the pic at right, which is apparently one of the first Boot Camp-assisted Mac BSODs), The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg has given the new boot manager a thumbs up. According to Mossberg (who was able to sneak a copy out of Cupertino a few days ago), after installing Boot Camp and Windows on an Intel iMac, Windows ran "blazingly fast," and all of the apps he tested ran "flawlessly." Mossberg put the install time -- including both installing Boot Camp itself and running the usual Windows installer -- at 57 minutes, 40 of which were claimed by the Windows setup program. Despite being generally pleased, Mossberg did find a few glitches, including having to reset the clock every time Windows is booted (apparently the system clock used by the iMac isn't recognized by Windows) and not being able to use Apple's iSight camera. All in all, however, Mossberg summed things up with what may soon become Apple's new tagline: "Whether you want to run Mac or Windows programs, an Apple computer may be the only computer you'll need."Read (sub reqd)
Apple releases firmware updates
Hot on the heels of the release of Boot Camp, Apple has issued a few firmware updates for Intel Macs. Specifically, an updater is available for the iMac, Macbook Pro and mini. Also available is Firmware Restoration CD v 1.0, which will restore your Intel-based Mac's firmware to factory settings, just in case things to haywire.[Via MacMinute]
