sjs

Love it or hate it – even though it’s not even out yet – the iPhone has spawned at least 2 good jokes.

• The other iPhone lawsuit [geekculture.com]

• A comment on slashdot:

  “I’m waiting for the iPhone-shuffle, no display, just a button to call a random person on your contacts list.”

Cover Flow now comes in a full-screen flavour. It’s pretty sweet, but unfortunately the remote controls iTunes exactly the same so you need a mouse to flick through the covers.

That made me wonder if Front Row used this full-screen Cover Flow view for albums now, but it doesn’t. I hope Apple gets on this and adds it to Front Row and the Apple TV. I’m sure it’s already on their list.

I would love to be able to flick through my albums with the remote right now, but I’m not going to install one of those 3rd-party remote config tools. Guess I have to wait for Apple to do it.

I think this has to be one of the big reasons why people who love their Mac, love their Mac (or other Apple product). I usually just have cheap PC speakers plugged into my Mac mini, but I didn’t bring any with me to Munich and the internal Mac mini speaker isn’t very loud, so I’m using headphones to watch movies. My Mac remembers the volume setting when the headphones ore plugged in, and when they’re not, so I don’t accidentally blow my ears. It’s like my iPod pausing when the headphones are unplugged. It’s excruciating attention to the smallest, (seemingly) most unimportant detail. I love it, and I’m hooked.

Nothing personal, but the backtick/tilde is located where the rest of the left shift key should be, and the return key is double-height, forcing the backslash/bar to the right of the dash/underscore (that’d be the apostrophe/double quote for pretty much everyone else who types qwerty). Note that I’m talking about using a German keyboard with an English layout. The German layout is flat out impossible for coding.

I’ve realized that OS X really does obey Fitt’s law in all 4 corners now. Apple menu in the top left, Spotlight top right, and the bottom 2 are always accessible for drag n drop, unless the dock is hidden. I rarely ever use it because I usually have pretty good chunks of the desktop showing, but it is useful.

Apple released the OS X 10.4.6 update which fixed a really annoying bug for me. Terminal (and iTerm) would fail to open a new window/tab when your shell is zsh. iTerm would just open then immediately close the window, while Terminal would display the message: [Command completed] in a now-useless window.

Rebooting twice to get the fix was reminiscent of Windows, but well worth it.