Tag Archives: apple

Reality Distortion Field

Safari 4 beta

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The good people at Apple released Safari 4 beta yesterday. For those not in the know, Safari is Apple‘s web browser. According to the traffic analysis for The MKX® (more on that sometime next month), a large amount of readers are still using Internet Explorer.

At home, I’ve been using Safari for years. Before that I used Camino. At work, I had been using Firefox, but switched to Google Chrome a few months ago and liked it very much. Now I’m giving the new Safari 4 a spin both at home and at work. Call me a browser slut if you’d like, I’ve been known to use iCab and the now free Omniweb in the past, and even IE for Mac back in the Mac OS 8 days.

I like it so far. For example, on Windows I can make the fonts look like they do on the Mac: much better – but perhaps a personal preference… from someone with better taste. I also like the new tabs (heavily borrowed from Chrome) and the fact that it will sync my bookmarks with my home computers and iPhone through my MobileMe account.

You can download it and test it here.

Reality Distortion Field

MobileMe does not like Chrome (updated)

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MobileMe + Chrome

Every year I struggle with the decision of whether to renew MobileMe (formerly .Mac, formerly iTools) or not. This year, for the first time, it’s a no brainer: The family pack covers myself, my two brothers, and my parents for a total of 8 Macs and 4 iPhones.

So I’ll pay. But it won’t be all happiness: I’ve been using Google’s new and excellent browser Chrome at work for months now. It’s stable, lightweight, simple, and fast. All of a sudden, MobileMe stopped working on Chrome. There is an interesting discussion on the topic at Apple’s Support Discussions. In summary, MobileMe started doing a browser check and it breaks if Chrome is the browser. If you fake the user-agent string, MobileMe works just fine.

C:\Users\me\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe –user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_6; en-en) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/525.27.1″

This is very annoying because it proves that there is no technical reason (that anyone outside of Apple can gather) for MobileMe not working on Chrome. A big part of MobileMe is the “Cloud” part: You *should* be able to access it from any standards compliant browser. A big problem if it doesn’t work, especially for paid for service!

We will see how this pans out.

Update 1/13/2009: The shortcut above did not work for me, but I saw this today here and it did the job: MobileMe works in Google Chrome. Too bad you have to fake Google Chome’s identity. Instructions: create a shortcut to Google Chrome, right click on it and select Properties. Modify the target string to look like the one below, but substitute “mkirsch” with your user name. Hopefully it works for you as well.

“C:\Documents and Settings\mkirsch\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe”  –user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Safari/525.19″

Update 1/13/2009: Looks like it’s fixed! Today I noticed that if you go to http://me.com in Google Chrome, you are shown the “Unsupported browser” screen. You can choose to ignore it and you are taken to full MobileMe. Just in time for my renewal :).

Reality Distortion Field

Boxee

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For some time now I’ve had a Mac mini connected to my TV and I love it. Everything that plays on the TV goes through the computer: Live television (via a tuner), DVD playback, music, music videos, streaming TV shows, streaming movies, photos, etc. Great little HTPC.

However, I’ve been constantly struggling with the 10-foot user interface. The built-in Front Row is too limited for my needs. Sure, I can do everything with a bluetooth mouse and keyboard; but it’s hard to control the regular Mac OS X interface from a couch. My eyesight is good, but not that good.

Continue reading Boxee →

Reality Distortion Field

Computer Detox

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It‘s been almost three years since I bought my trusty 12″ Powerbook G4. It still is the best Mac laptop ever released in such a small form factor. That’s why they are still selling for decent prices on eBay.

With both Macworld and the end of my AppleCare extended warranty fast approaching, I decided to sell. The auction ended and I shipped out my computer this morning. My reasoning is that there is a very good chance Apple will introduce a new small Mac laptop (MacBook mini?) and when they do, the resell prices of the 12″ Powerbook G4 will drop harder than Edgar.

What this means for is that, for at least one month, I will not have a laptop at home.

Truth is, I have another machine at home. But there will be no browsing the news (yes – the news) over the internet while in bed; at least for a while.

If they release some super small portable next month, I will be very happy. If they don’t release anything, I will be dissappointed and just buy a 13″ MacBook. Keep those fingers crossed!