Apple
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Any Buyer’s Remorse Yet?
Today Apple unveiled new iMacs, which marks the second refresh to the line since I purchased my 27″ i7 back in January 2010. I dug through the specs, like I’ve done before, to see if there was anything compelling enough to consider upgrading.
The differences between what I have now and the new 27″ i7 are:
- A processor that is .6 GHz faster
- 2MB less L3 Cache
- Upgraded video card with quadruple the RAM (2GB vs. 512MB)
- HD FaceTime camera
- (2) Thunderbolt connections
Last time it was easy scoff at, but I have to admit that this time has me scratching my head a bit. I even went so far as to price the value of my current machine on Gazelle (screenshot) to see how much I’d have to come up with.
$2,730.16 – New 27″ iMac w/ Tax
$1,132.00 – Current 27″ iMac
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$1,598.16 – Difference
With that much of a gap, it just doesn’t seem worth it for the upgrade. The difference alone is enough for a MacBook Pro.
So do I have any buyer’s remorse? Absolutely not. I’ve had this machine for almost a year and a half and if my 2007 MacBook is any indication, I’ll be using this bad boy for many years to come.
No Buyer’s Remorse Here
Apple just came out with their latest iMacs yesterday, so I took a look at their specs to see how much has changed in the last six months. I’m happy to say very little!
If I were to replace my 27″ i7 iMac today, I would get the following:
- A processor that is .13GHz faster.
- Memory that is 266MHz faster.
- An upgraded video card (ATI Radeon HD 5750) with twice as much RAM (1GB).
All-in-all, that’s not a huge bump and certainly one I can live with. This iMac is still the most insanely powerful, gorgeous computer that I’ve ever owned. I often feel unworthy to own such a pristine piece of technology, but there’s no way I’d ever think of giving it up either.
Things That Caught My Eye Today
There are many distractions that entertain me throughout the day. Some from Twitter, others from RSS feeds. The following are the best of the best for a Friday:
- Perking Up: The Coffee Economy Awakes
- iPhone Web Development
- Honoring Apple from 1976 to the Italian introduction of the iPad
- StreetMuseum
- Tina Fey’s greatest comedy moments
I guess I could have called this entry, “Today’s Distractions”. 
The Road Less Traveled — E-mail Archives
I recently upgraded from version 1.0 of the iPhone to the iPhone 3Gs and did so using the “Restore from backup” feature. For the most part everything went fine, but for a couple of security apps that I use, the transition was all but smooth. Without getting too technical, what I learned was that these apps rely on a serial number and when you do a restore, the app generates a new serial number and thus the application no longer works with your account.
After calling tech support, I found that the fastest way to resolve the issue was to locate an e-mail the company had sent me back in 2006 with specific information that would allow them to verify that I was indeed the owner of the account.
That’s when a larger problem reared it’s ugly, ugly head — e-mail archives.
I tend to hang onto things, especially when they are digital because they take no physical space. This is especially true of e-mail. I save every e-mail sent to me and I’ve been doing that from day one. As simple as that may sound, it’s been a long and winding road through a variety of e-mail clients I’ve used over the past 15 years.
As you might imagine, over the past decade and a half and I’ve not always been successful in brining my e-mail archives along with me. I have several “islands” of digital data stored in one program’s format or another. These drives have been pulled from old computers and are sitting in desk drawers, or on shelves somewhere. I could resurface Route 66 with my good intentions of going back to import my e-mail from the old program I was using into the new shiny program that I just had to try.
Right now I’m migrating back to Apple Mail from Postbox and this time I’ve vowed to do things right. I’m taking the extra time to bring my archives with me and it’s a tedious process.
How I Import My Thunderbird (Mac) E-mail Into Apple Mail (mail.app)
- Run the Remove Duplicate Messages Thunderbird Add-on to shrink down the archive and remove duplicate messages, if any.
- Break up my yearly archives into quarterly archives so that the file sizes aren’t so huge by moving all e-mails within a specified date range (Jan 1 – Mar 31 for example) into their quarterly folder
- Right-click each folder I’ve touched and choose “Compact”
- Find the location of my profile (~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/Mail/Local Folders/) and drag the archive I’m importing to the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner icon on the dock, which imports the archive into mail.app. I do this one archive at a time.
- Launch Apple Mail, find the imported folder and choose “Mailbox \ Rebuild” from the top menu
- Move the imported e-mail to the proper archive folder “On My Mac”.
- Rinse and repeat as needed
Bear in mind, this process is something that has evolved over time. My first several efforts yielded very poor results, but as I tried one method after another, I whittled away at the issues plaguing me until I arrived at a proper solution that works well for me. As I write this, I’m currently working through my 2007 archives, with 2006 being my last archive.
The real question is how I’ll bridge to my other digital islands and import old e-mails from The Bat! and Eudora. Those are of course in Windows and I’m sure will each yield their own special kind of hell as I tear up the road that led me back to these near-forgotten artifacts.
So What Do You Do?
As the last of my 2007 archive is being rebuilt in Apple Mail, I can’t help but wonder what other people do. Am I alone in not wanting to discard past conversations and hang on to these little tidbits? Assuming I’m not alone, how do you handle your archives? Do you use MailSteward, or similar tools?
iPhone Development Is A Whole New Ballgame for Palm OS Developers
In my last article, I wrote about how excited I was to see Palm developers moving over to develop for the iPhone. Specifically, I mentioned how pleased I was to see that Stevens Creek Software will be releasing HandyRandy . Well, it seems that I wasn’t the only one that took notice of Stevens Creek’s work.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball posted a link on his web site to Triplog/1040. For those of you not familiar with Gruber, he’s well known for his expertise regarding the Mac OS user interface. His opinion of TripLog was summed up nicely with “Check out the UI on this upcoming iPhone app from Palm OS developer Stevens Creek Software. This is not a joke. (Via Macworld.)”, but he also posted a photo on his Flickr page which generated a lot of heated discussion in the comments. This was the snowball that started rolling downhill.
Having come from the Palm OS world a little over a year ago, I wasn’t that surprised by the UI of TripLog and the other Stevens Creek applications because they reminded me of my Palm OS days. That being said, once I took a second look, it was clear that TripLog/1040 and Handy Randy don’t measure up to the standards of most Mac Software. Mac users are more accustomed to refined interfaces and elegant solutions to complex problems. That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of applications out there that are rough around the edges, but for the most part Apple has made it easy for apps to look good. That approach to good design has followed to the iPhone, but if you’re not a Mac user some of the nuances may be a bit foreign to you and you might miss them.
Luckily for Steve Pratt, the designer behind TripLog, 37 Signals picked up the thread and used it as an opportunity for positive feedback in their article “Learning from ‘bad’ UI. I have to applaud 37 Signals for not only seeing the opportunity, but for acting on it and steering the conversation from a bash session to an actual discussion. The article also bore fruit with several redesign ideas from Raphael Campardou, Paul Walker and Paolo Passeri.
Will these have any effect on the TripLog app itself? They already have! Stevens Creek has posted a video showing how to use the application and in it I noticed that the UI is much improved. It’s not perfectly polished, but it’s very much improved. Unfortunately, MacWorld’s TripLog Review focused on the current version and thus Stevens Creek is still having to defend their application, which is a shame.
Stevens Creek makes excellent software and I suppose the take away here is that application design for iPhone has raised the bar from the days of Palm OS. Design options were limited in the Palm space so it was easier to focus on the functionality of the app over the look and feel. With the expanded palette of the iPhone developers are going have to focus more on the side of application development that often gets the least attention — the user interface. It definitely plays a key role in an application’s success and Mac users have a poor tolerance for bad UI.
My only hope is that this experience doesn’t scare away Stevens Creek, or any other Palm OS developers from developing for the iPhone. I think there is a world of opportunities for Palm OS developers to leverage their applications and broaden to a whole new market – both for the mobile and desktop space.
If you’re interested in iPhone UI design, here are a couple of other articles I ran across while this story evolved:
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