Visions of a future filled with the sweet touch of Apple OS

Yesterday's rumor from Gizmodo created a flood of visions on Apple's future plans in some obscure creative corner of my brain, based on thoughts that have been growing in me for quite some time now.

Why are Apple releasing a new operating system, Snow Leopard, that is merely an optimized and touched up version of Leopard? Because they need some kind of meat to feed us Mac-o-maniacs while more revolutionary innovation is taking place in some of the more secluded areas of Apple's R'n'D department. What innovation? The all-new Apple OS, of course.

What is Apple OS, then? These ideas spring to mind:

• A merge of Mac OS X and iPhone OS into a joint platform.
• An OS that enables current AppStore apps to be run on all Apple devices, ranging from iPhone/iPod Touch to laptops and stationary computers. Apps already developed for iPhone/iPod Touch will be runnable without changes on devices with larger screens. All that is needed to achieve this is to repackage and embed the iPhone Simulator from XCode into the ordinary OS functionality.
• Most current Apps will with minor adjustments be able to make use of larger screen sizes. My guess is that the iPhone OS components can be refactored in such a way that many times the only adjustment that is necessary will be to change a switch in the source code, that states that this app can be run in larger screen sizes.
• Applications that today are written for Mac OS X, will be able to be distributed through the AppStore. It will still be possible, though, to write and distribute applications just like today, outside the AppStore. The advantage to releasing applications through the AppStore, will be that they are "validated" by Apple, so that you can be certain that it doesn't constitute malware, etc.
• The implication of a merge between the multitouch based iPhone OS and the mouse/keyboard based Mac OS X is that all future devices from Apple will be full-screen multi touch. The touch pad will disappear, and so will probably the keyboard in the future equivalent of today's laptops. All we are left with are tablets of a number of different sizes (2.8, 3.5 – current iPhone, 6, 10, 13, 15 and 17 inches?), a range of iMac's with multi touch screens (20, 24 inches?) and a new generation of super thin multi touch LED-displays (20, 24, 30, 40 inches?) to be used with future versions of the Mac Mini/Mac Pro-series.
• One day, the mouse will be gone. But only if the ergonomy of using touch screens is found to be at least as good as using a mouse.
• Typical multi touch features, such as gestures, with a new range of two-hand gestures will be used throughout the future Apple OS. Even apps tailored for the smallest screen sizes will be able to use these gestures, but it will not be recommended.
• The new Apple OS will sport a full size, touch based on-screen keyboard for devices with a large enough screen, but external physical keyboards still be around and popular in offices and homes, but not on the road.
• Another generation away is pressure sensitive touch and haptic feedback, maybe this is when physical keyboards will start getting more and more uncommon?

I guess that's all my visions for today. This is all, of course, very speculative but a general feeling is that this kind of "merge all into one" is very Apple-ish. For one, it creates a very clean offering of a versatile range of hardware that all make use of the same development API's. And the idea of being able to apply the success of the AppStore concept to all Apple's hardware platforms seems like it potentially can be very lucrative. I mean, profit has always been held high at Apple, and I kind of buy that. They want to build great products and generate a good profit so that they can keep building great products.

In summary, I can't wait to get hold of a 10-13 inch tablet, as a complement to my iPhone and MacBook Pro...

Some reflections 17 months later...

First of all, I'm still very, very happy about being able to use my Mac every day. I've been keeping Leopard updated, so that is still running smooth as ever. Windows XP, on the other hand, has started to lag in the way characteristic for a Windows installation, despite the fact that basically all I do in Windows is use Outlook and Office. Apparently that is enough to degrade performance. I will definitely upgrade to Windows 7 when it arrives this fall. More on this in subsequent posts.

Some tips for those of you who are about to install a Mac to dual boot OS X/Windows using VMWare Fusion:

1. One mistake I made when partitioning the disk, was to allocate way too much space for the NTFS partition (80 Gb out of 250), which has led to my Mac OS X partition being just about full, while the NTFS partition is only filled about 25%.
   
   I save all files that I work with in the Mac OS X partition, by sharing my home directory in Mac OS X with XP using the "Shared folders" feature in VMWare Tools. I really like this setup, since I can write my documents in Office 2007 for Windows to ensure full compatibility with my all-PC-colleagues, and at the same time use Spotlight in Leopard for full text search (a lot faster than Desktop Search in XP) and last, but not least, use the lightning fast Preview function to preview Office and PDF documents.
   
   I see two alternative ways out of this:
   
   a) Shrink the NTFS partition to, say, 30 Gb.
   b) Remove the NTFS partition alltogether, and stop using a Boot Camp partition.
   
   I'm leaning towards b), which leads me to my next mistake.
   
   
2. I shouldn't have made a Boot Camp partition. So, why did I do it in the first place? Well, being at a new job and having no previous experience with dual booting a Mac, I really didn't want to take any risks of compatibility issues in the Windows installation. Therefore, I chose to use a Boot Camp partition, so that I could boot the machine straight into Windows, to rule out VMWare compatibility as a cause of eventual problems. After 17 months, I haven't used Boot Camp even once!
   
   In addition, when I had the system set up, I got a problem with the Windows license, since the hardware configuration is different when booting the Boot Camp partition in VMWare Fusion, compared to booting up in Boot Camp. I had to call Microsoft to beg for more chances, since I have an OEM-license of XP, that only allows for a couple of hardware configurations within a rather long time span, or it will lock me out. Since I first installed Windows on one machine, and next week moved it to a new machine, I went through a few hardware configurations.
   
   Note: I'm not sure, but there might be a chance that VMWare Fusion now has been updated to address the issue of changing hardware profiles, so this may not be an issue any more. Hang on, let me google that for you. ;-)
   
   
   
   Maybe the biggest reason for using just a virtual machine without a separate partition, is to be able to suspend Windows during Mac OS X restarts, etc. That way, I'll be able to avoid having to go through the shutdown/startup-procedure in Windows every time I want to reboot OS X.
   
   
3. All these things considered, I'm looking forward to the release of Windows 7, so that I can start migrating to a virtual machine containing that instead of my current Boot Camp partition.
   
   
4. Of course, being the Macomaniac that I am, I'm looking forward even more to the release of Snow Leopard. With Exchange support in OS X Mail, I'll probably be able to quit using Outlook altogether, and have all my mail activity in OS X instead. With an Office 2008 for Mac-license, I'll almost be able to leave Windows altogether. The only things I really need to use Windows for are the VPN-client that I use to connect to my office servers and SourceGear Vault.
   
   If I'm not able to make a colleague check in my documents on their PC :-)

Trouble with WinClone leads to erase and install of Mac OS X

WARNING: The tutorial in this entry will not be covering the entire process. Apparently something distracted me from finishing it (the new machine got installed in the end, though). Sorry about any inconvenience this incompleteness might cause!

After posting on a Swedish Mac forum for a copy of Winclone, a nice moderator handed me a link along with an explanation of why I couldn't reach the Winclone site. It turns out that the Swedish telecom operator Telia (my ISP) is in a feud with Cogent (the ISP that hosts the Winclone site), which has caused Cogent to shut down Telia. Phew!

Ok, I started out with installing Winclone on the old machine, and asked it to make an image of my Windows XP Boot Camp partition. I ended up keeping all the default settings, which apparently should allow me to restore the image on an NTFS partition of any size (large enough to hold the amount of data that is in the image, that is).

Next, I transferred the image file to the new machine (by rebooting the old machine in FireWire mode (hold down "T" during boot) and dragging the file. I then started Winclone on the new machine.

According to the instructions in the "readme.rtf" on the Winclone dmg, I should be able to create a Windows NTFS partition using Winclone, that I then could point out as destination for restoring the Windows XP image to. I tried this on the new machine, choosing a partition size of 100 Gb. After some time, I got an error, that stated something in the lines of not being able to resize the partition to the correct size.

Using the command "diskutil list" in Terminal, I see that, sure enough, a partition has been created, but it is only a few hundred bytes large. *sigh*

I shut down Winclone, and start the Boot Camp assistant instead. The assistant asks me if I want to restore the disk to one partition, and I say "Yes please!" It then starts the restore sequence, but hangs, and after 10-15 minutes, I shut down the Boot Camp assistant.

After some random googling, I decide to restore the entire disk on the new machine, and start over, this time using Boot Camp to create the target partition for the Winclone image. I hope it will work better that way...

1. I take out the Mac OS X Install Disc 1, and reboots from it (press "C" during startup).
   
   
2. I open up the Disk Utility from the Tools menu (I think... "Verktygsprogram" is the menu name in Swedish)
   
   
3. I select the entire disk (not just the volume "Macintosh HD") in the left menu.
   
   
4. I choose "Mac OS Extended (journaled)" as format and "Macintosh HD" as name and press erase.
   
   
5. Before long, the disk is erased, and I go back to installing Leopard on it.
   
   
6. When asked if I want to move information from another computer, I choose this option, and connect the old machine in FireWire-mode.
   
   
7. I select to move all information except the information on the Windows XP volume, that I will move separately using Winclone at a later stage.
   
   
8. When installation is done, I have a Mac OS X user on the new machine that is identical to that on the old machine.
   
   
9. I log into Mac OS X and run the Boot Camp assistant, and create a Windows partition there. It will be in FAT32, but I need NTFS to be able to restore the Winclone image on the partition.
   
   
10. Since I need to convert the partition to NTFS, I continue in the Boot Camp Wizard, by inserting my Windows XP Pro CD and booting to the installation program. I (this time without trouble :-) ) click myself all the way to the step where I have the option to convert the partition to NTFS, which I do. Right after the conversion, when file copying starts, I shut down the machine, to interrupt the installation. I don't want to install XP now, since I will restore it from the Winclone image anyway.
    
    
11. Right after restart I hold down the "option"-key, and choose to boot in Mac OS X.
    
    
12. When logged in, I click on the (...and this is where I got distracted – see disclaimer at the top of this entry)
    

Moving to the new machine using Migration Assistant and Winclone

This has been a long weekend without even touching the computer(s). But now I'm back, ready for the next (and hopefully final) step on the way to be fully installed on the newest MacBook Pro. I have decided to attempt to move the Mac OS X stuff using the Migration Assistant (Flyttassistenten in Swedish) and, once all that has been moved, use WinClone to move the Windows XP partition that I use in Boot Camp and VMWare Fusion.

From a bit of Googling it seems that using WinClone is the preferred way to move the Windows stuff to the new machine. Unfortunately, twocanoes.com is down at the moment, so I just posted on a Swedish Mac forum for an alternative link, since it seems there is no alternative download site for WinClone out there.

I started out by moving the Mac OS X user from the old machine to the new one without any problems whatsoever. Basically I did the following:

1. On the new machine, I created a new administrator account that I logged back in with.
2. When logged in as the temporary account, I removed the account that I already had created with the same login name as on the old machine. This is to make sure that there will be no conflicts that arise from already having an account with the login name that is being moved from the old machine.
3. I started up the Migration Assistant on the new machine.
4. When it asked me to connect the machine to move the user data from, I booted the old machine in "hard-disk mode" (by pressing "T" during startup), and connected it to the new machine using a FireWire cable.
5. In the Migration Wizard, I basically opted to move all information from the old machine to the new machine, and after about 10-15 minutes, everything was moved.
6. I logged out from the temporary account, and logged back in as the just-moved-user. Voilà, everything worked perfectly.

Ok, so now, next step is to move the Windows XP Boot Camp partition, but that I will have to get back to as soon as I have been able to download the WinClone application from somewhere.

The newest MacBook Pro arrived...

...at the office yesterday. I brought it home and took it for a test spin. It sure will be nice to get the 250 Gb disk instead of the 160 Gb one that is in the temporary machine I've been using up until now, especially since I will "lose" 100 Gb to the Windows partition.

I opened up the new machine and boosted the memory with the Kingston chips that were delivered with the temporary machine, so now it has 4 Gb, which should be more than enough for the dual boot.

My main problem (which, incidentally, is a premiere illustration of the Swedish phrase "typiskt i-landsproblem", that translates to approximately "typical industrialized country problem", meaning that it wouldn't qualify as a problem in any part of the world where there are real problems, such as war, poverty, etc. Rather - even calling it a problem is a symptom of the type of narrow-mindedness that comes from unchallenging life circumstances. Ok, let's not slip too far into politics and linguistics...) now, is to decide which way to go:

a) use the Migration Assistant to migrate the information from the temporary machine to the new one. Advantages to this include that it's faster (hopefully) and that I will get all settings migrated. Disadvantages is that I will not have full control of the process, but that's just typical control freak behaviour... Another big disadvantage is that I feel that there is a risk that Windows XP will not be as easy to migrate as the OS X stuff. On the other hand, it will be a great way to learn from experience. :-)

b) I use this blog to manually set up the new machine, step by step. The advantage of this is that it gives full control, but the main disadvantage is that it is boring to do it all over again.

From the bias I detect when reading what I wrote above, I conclude that I will probably go for a), unless my support guy Anders scares me away from it, by pointing out that it is risky. One option is to go for a) but have Anders do it, but that sort of feels like resigning from power of my own situation (like I said, I'm a control freak...)

VMWare and Spaces in Leopard

Today is my second day at the new job, and so far, very good. No Maclashes so far :-)

Got the office printer set up under Mac OS X in about 2 minutes, only by using the IP-number and looking at the printer, so that I could choose the correct driver. In Windows I'll probably opt to go for installing with the driver disc, so there I will get all the extras. I found a Macintosh-disc as well, so I might fix it there as well.

Yesterday I sought a little for the best way to do as much of my work from within Mac OS X, and before long found a way that I like a lot.

Ever since my days in university, when we used mostly Sun SparcStations under UNIX, I have been very fond of virtual desktops, to increase desktop space. Since the university days, I have not been able to find a virtual desktop setting that I actually ended up using - until now!

When I found that I could assign VMWare fusion to always run in Window 2 of Mac OS X Leopards virtual desktop implementation "Spaces", I at the same time found a very nice way to run Windows full screen. Now I only hit Ctrl + -> and I'm in Windowsland, and Ctrl + <- and I'm back home. This suits me very well, because it means a minimum of confusion, since I'm used to working in Windows and the layout with Start menu, task bar, etc. Actually I also made the Mighty Mouse show me all four spaces when I squeeze it, thus enabling me to context switch between Mac and Windows without touching the keyboard.

For those of you who have a boss that doesn't want you to do the Mac thing, this "Windows in space 2-setup with mouse squeeze access" might just be the perfect "Ooops, boss is coming"-button setup. ;-)

As far as choosing full screen mode over Unity, I like the Unity mode too, but it feels like it's there more for show-off than for being really, really useful. Maybe with the exception of drag-n-drop of files, that obviously gets very simple in Unity mode. And if you are an all-Mac person that suddenly has had to start running Windows as well, it might be nice to stay in the home environment.

Last day at my old job (almost)

Tomorrow, Friday, is my last day at the old job. Since a lot of people are missing tomorrow, we gathered for goodbye cake today instead.


After eight years at the same company, this was quite a sentimental moment. But also a happy one: I got a GPS navigator, thank's a lot! And thank's to all my colleagues for a great time and a great job.

Finally, thanks to Biglakes and Loredemogänget.