Ihnatko

Ihnatko: Putting on Airs

Posted on Mar. 3, ’08, 4:11 PM PT by Andy Ihnatko

Category | Ihnatko

Yes, the MacBook Air, Apple’s first modern entry into the Ultralight category. Like Jesus Christ, its coming was foretold ages ago and its arrival was eagerly anticipated…and now that it’s finally here, we’re dealing with a crying and bawling newborn that demands to be fed and adored with gold. $1799 worth, and I know that’s in American money but it still stings.

As usual, I had a private briefing on the day that Steve Jobs appeared unto the shepherds in the field and announced his tidings of great joy.

“Wow…it’s really sealed up tight,” I said, flipping the Air over and looking for seams and access hatches. “How does one upgrade the RAM on this?” I asked.

“You don’t.”

“And that would be the answer to the ‘How do I swap batteries’ question, as well.”

“Bingo.”

One USB port. One. But that’s considerably more than double its combined total of Ethernet and Firewire ports, which is Zero.

This was the sort of revelation that provokes a confused arching of the eyebrows instead of an actual, articulated question.

“We think we have a clear picture of the sort of person who will buy an Air instead of a traditional MacBook,” Apple said. “And this person would rather go wireless.”

Noted. I’m sure that on hot days, this typical user would probably rather go shirtless and trouserless as well. But should he? Consider America’s obesity epidemic.

Ordinary People

Posted on Sep. 18, ’07, 11:40 AM PT by Andy Ihnatko

Category | Ihnatko

When the new edition of iLife came out a while back, I made some noise about my disappointment with iPhoto ‘08. Big surprise. My complaints about iPhoto tend to come out about as frequently as new Harry Potter books. The only real difference is that J.K. Rowling seems to have lost interest in her subject after only 5,000 pages. And (I wish to add, by way of insisting that I’m way, way better than she is) I didn’t need $1.2 billion dollars’ worth of motivation.

My motivation was a timeless, pure and holy one: smug self-righteousness.

“The glass ceiling is still way too low,” I sniped. “A great app like iMovie inspires and motivates the user to become more passionate about a task that he once considered to be dull drudgery. But with iPhoto, managing and editing photos is still utterly mundane.”

Fortunately, I’m a regular on several podcasts, so there was absolutely nothing stopping me from completely contradicting myself the very same week.

“I know that lots of hardcore iMovie users are really upset about the latest version,” I said. Upset? Users keep driving to the home of iMovie’s lead developer and rearranging his lawn ornaments into lewd positions. “But you know, I find that when I approach iMovie as a brand new app, I rather like it. iMovie ‘08 is a terrific upgrade when it comes to the simple task of turning 60 minutes of raw footage into a five minute video that friends and family will happily watch without text-messaging Amnesty International halfway through.”

I got lot of emails that were more hurtful than your earlier opinions about what my clothes say about my personality. Oddly enough, most of them made an identical charge: that I don’t know what I’m talking about, because I’m not a normal user.

Ihnatko: A love song for Aperture

Posted on Aug. 15, ’07, 1:47 PM PT by Andy Ihnatko

Category | Ihnatko

Well, all right: clearly I’m getting into Aperture fairly late in the game. If you’ve been waiting for me to weigh in with my opinions on Apple’s professional (-ish) grade photo editing app all this time, I apologize and explain that I got distracted by a personal project.

And with absolutely nothing to show for it, might I add. It turns out that Guinness doesn’t even have a world record for Greatest Number Of Origami Birds Folded Out Of Beef Jerky And Eaten In One Year. Ha ha, the joke’s on me, I guess. I invite anybody and everybody even remotely associated with the creation and upkeep of Wikipedia to go straight to hell.

But the point is that I’m using it now, and I love it in a way that God never intended for a man to love a gender-nonspecific sequence of ones and zeroes.

Like all true, profound love, it’s based on a re-channeling of hatred for another individual: iPhoto, in this case. Oh, friends… the years I wasted in trying to make that relationship work. But you grow and you mature.

Ihnatko: The end of iPhone innocence

Posted on Jun. 27, ’07, 4:35 PM PT by Andy Ihnatko

Category | Ihnatko

Friday is the official launch date for the iPhone.

This date has made a great many people very, very happy. At least the ones who are eager to spend $499 for a device that allows you to be sitting on a reed mat in a Buddhist meditation center serenely focusing on your mindfulness of breath and contemplation of impermanence one moment, and explaining to your extremely honked-off boss why you chose to switch to a different contractor for breakroom coffee machine maintenance the next.

Well, good for them. As for me, my elan has been dampened. My joie is nowhere near as vivre-ey as it once was, and I find that someone has gone and installed a screen door on my submarine.

Why? Because I have only a few more hours of lording it all over people that I’ve already used an iPhone and they haven’t.

Damn.

Read the rest at Macworld.com…

Ihnatko: Gettin’ that old-time Mac religion

Posted on Apr. 24, ’07, 7:02 AM PT by Andy Ihnatko

Category | Ihnatko

Dammit, I think I owe you folks an apology. I re-read the past few months’ worth of my columns recently — ever since North Korea and Iran got nukes, the Library of Congress gets pretty anxious if I don’t keep sending him my latest stuff for safe archiving — and it seems as though I’ve been a true grumpy-britches. Always finding something to complain about.

Which isn’t in itself a bad thing, but I’ve been complaining about Apple. And the one time I did manage to write something upbeat and positive recently, it was (oh, dear) about Windows Vista.

So I have embarked upon a ten-day campaign to directly and effectively evangelize Apple and the Mac OS in my own community:

Ihnatko: Sibling Rivalry

Posted on Apr. 10, ’07, 12:45 PM PT by Andy Ihnatko

Category | Ihnatko

Folks speak of the “family” of Apple products. I’ve always mocked this notion because… well, sadly, because it’s my way.

But also because as one of five siblings I can say with confidence that true family members never get along this well. My iPod has never had to take my Powerbook aside and say “Look, I don’t know why you’re not communicating with the iMac and I don’t care. But maybe you should know that the iMac has been having a really tough time at work this week, and her old man forgot her birthday…”

They’re always there for each other, you see. I plug my iPod in and moments later, the two are completely in sync with each other. My siblings and I don’t have that sort of harmony. But then again, I suppose that the iPod never swiped all of the iMac’s Barbie dolls and buzzed off their hair so that they’d look like the chicks in “THX-1138.”

I’m starting to come around to the “Apples as family” concept, however. It’s obvious that cracks are finally starting to form in their cozy harmony. There’s no question about it: the Family is now dealing with Cindy Brady Syndrome.

You know, the kind of itchy, destabilizing stress that sneaks in when the youngest child is so much tinier and more adorable than the rest. “We love each of our kids the same,” Mom and Dad say. Nonetheless, all of the older kids are getting sensible clothes for Christmas (“See, sweetie? You can wear it to church, or school!”) while Cindy is outside burning donuts into the front lawn on her shiny red quad-bike.

The Curse of Cindy has been laid upon the Apple family… and Cindy’s name is iPod.

Waiting for Leopard

Posted on Feb. 28, ’07, 3:00 PM PT by Andy Ihnatko

Category | Ihnatko

Okay: seriously, dude: where’s my Leopard?

Yes, I’m that befluxed and kerstrummelled. Not only am I forced to just make up brand-new words to describe my present state of agitation, to the almost certain perhormulance of this column’s hard-working copy editors…but I’m also reduced to quoting the title of an Ashton Kutcher movie, for the love of God.

To recap: Steve Jobs demonstrated some key new features of Mac OS X 10.5 (aka “Leopard”) last August at Apple’s annual worldwide developers’ conference. We got our first look at Time Machine, a new automatic backup system that makes retrieving a long-deleted Word document as simple as evading a Kr’Nolian Singularity Field in the original series of “Star Trek.” Meaning: there’s some technical mumbo-jumbo that you don’t need to get into, but it involves staring into a starfield on your main viewer and saying “Engage, Mr. Sulu.”

(Actually, you don’t have to say that. But you’ve got this awesome animated starfield with a whirling nebula in the distance and your past Finder windows are floating around on top of it. Under the circumstances, you might get carried away and add an “Engage, Mr. Crusher” and a “Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dustin’ crops, boy…” while you’re at it.)

Safari will be able to “clip” live information from any website, and turn it into a desktop widget. A “spaces” feature lets you have multiple virtual monitors. A developer-level resource known as “Core Animation.”

And I enjoyed all of that. Truly, I did. But what caught my ear was one of Steve’s opening lines: that there was much, much more to come. He just didn’t want to give Microsoft any more ideas to copy.

Steve’s Macworld Expo keynote was the tree that me and my two good friends, Vladimir and Estragon, had been waiting near. We knew that the final, complete list of features was coming. Surely, this was the place. And yet, of our antelope-masticating friend there was not a single mention. Instead, we got two hours about some sort of cordless phone that Steve was all excited about for some reason. Who wanted to know about the iPhone?

Apparently, everybody. All right. I’ll grant you that. Still, why no mention of Leopard, due to ship by the end of the Spring? Why did I have to sit through a half-hour-long public demo on the convention floor to learn that Apple had nothing new to show that hadn’t already been up forever?

Is the truth out there?

Posted on Feb. 23, ’07, 4:27 PM PT by Andy Ihnatko

Category | Ihnatko

“Dear Andy,” asks a reader. “I wonder if you could help me with a personal problem. My boss propositioned me at the company Valentine’s party. He even went so far as to mention that he had a Wonder Woman costume right in his office ready to put on, and that if I wanted to dress as a superheroine, too, he could have a friend of his drop off a Catwoman outfit on just thirty minutes’ notice.

“I don’t want him to continue making a pest of himself. Plus, shouldn’t his wife be told that he’s not just a cheater, but a cheater who’s wearing a set of Size XXL star-spangled bikini bottoms under those pinstriped trousers?

“What do you think? Should I keep the secret, or spill it? — Selena in Syracuse.”

Well, Selena, I’d like to start off by applauding your fine instincts. My moral compass is an unfailing one; you were thus very, very wise to hand this one over to me, instead of your clergyman or maybe the guy who wrote Microsoft Office: The Missing Manual.

Onward to your problem. Secrecy, eh? Well, it’s a classic dilemma. Even huge corporations like Microsoft and Apple have to make decisions about Truth and the best time to reveal it.

Ihnatko: Windows Vista… doesn’t suck

Posted on Dec. 26, ’06, 10:31 AM PT by Andy Ihnatko

Category | Windows

With an eye on the calendar and the knowledge that in just a few days, otherwise peaceful men and women were going to be lacing up their golf shoes and preparing to step on the knees and necks of anybody who stands between them and the purchase of the new Tickle Me Elmo, I sat down with every intention of writing a nice, holiday-themed column for you folks.

I swear to God. A column filled with cozy yuletide carols and the scent of cinnamon and apples and the sights of Victorian-era people - not the scabby, greasy, smoky actual Victorians, mind you, but the way-better American version of Victorian England. The overall effect that I wanted to evoke could only be exceeded by ranks of gingerbread men organized into ruthlessly-efficient militas, fanning out through the city from street to street and house to house, peppering the baffled and terrified citizenry with chestnuts and holly leaves and mistletoe until they all beg for the sweet, sweet escape that only death can provide.

But how could my head and my heart have filled with such cheery things under these circumstances? Instead of visions of sugar plums, I’ve had thoughts of miserable stinking rat-bastards dancing through my head all month.

Folks, last month Microsoft has sent me the final (for now) release candidate of Windows Vista, due to be released to general users in January. And they couldn’t have deposited a more offensive thing into my stocking:

It doesn’t suck.

How could Microsoft have betrayed me like this?

Ihnatko: An iPhone In Your Pocket?

Posted on Dec. 6, ’06, 11:38 AM PT by Andy Ihnatko

Category | Ihnatko

Okay! No more distractions. Tonight’s the night: I’m serious this time.

“A cellphone designed by Apple.”

Nothin’.

“An Apple phone…with iPod styling and simplicity.”

Mmm… no.

“Imagine an iPod…only instead of sharing media with your desktop it can share it with the world.”

…

No, I still can’t get excited about it. And I was really, really trying that time, too.

I don’t know why I’m having so much trouble with this. Perhaps my endocrine system can’t produce a certain critical enzyme or something. I think “iPod + Phone” and my immediate response is always the same: I get a crystal-clear mental image of being in a dicey parking lot late at night with a car that won’t start. And I can’t call for help on my iPod Phone, because on my flight home I listened to all six hours and seventeen minutes of Robert Evans reading The Kid Stays In The Picture, which drained the batteries right to the floor.

Look, why is it so important to have a music player and a cellphone in one package, anyway? I’m a lazy, lazy man; if I expended any less energy over the course of a given day, I’d be operating my PowerBook via one of those puffer tubes that quadriplegics use. And yet, when I leave the house for the day and I scoop my phone and my iPod from their charging stations, I’m not the least bit intimidated by the prospect of lugging a whole additional 4.8 ounces of hardware with me. I mean, I carry more weight than that with me in my wallet, in the form of useless receipts and foreign currency.

But I need to keep working on this. Everybody else is really excited about the idea, despite any sort of official announcement from Apple. A survey of news and rumors sites this past week reveals yet another industry analyst who’s recommending Apple stock, based solely on buzz for this nonexistent product. And there’s some mysterious reports floating around from members of focus groups. They were shown a half-dozen product mockups and then quizzed on their reactions. Apparently, the devices looked suspiciously like the illustrations seen in patent filings for a gadget that Apple describes as “hand-held electronic device with multiple touch sensing devices.”