Applepeels

Apple Between the Lines

It has been nearly two months since I scanned the headlines on Apple websites. It has been even longer since I wrote my last article on Apple at ReadWrite.  I have been busy getting two books out the door.

I am not surprised that there is little to draw me beyond the typical Apple headlines. I got the feeling that Apple and I were heading in different directions as I was finishing up my books.  I am one of those people who still work with desktop computers, build websites, manipulate photos and graphics.  I suspect in Apple's world that I am something of a dinosaur.  I judge platforms by the applications that they bring to me and the productivity that I find from using those tools.  I do not own an iPhone or an iPad.

Still I am not here to argue that Apple is going to disappear, is poorly managed, or has crummy products.  By most financial measurements Apple of 2013 is a great success. Unfortunately, all that success has not made it to my desktop. I am here to report that I see little reason to keep Apple on my immediate radar.  I am actually down to two applications that only run on a Mac.  I still cling to Pixelmator as a favorite graphics tool and I have a couple of websites where I use Rapidweaver, but that is it.  The rest of my Mac experience is gone.  I got tired of waiting for new versions of the iWork suite.  iPhoto managled one too many photo libraries and why anyone would put up with iCloud and its services is beyond me.  I use Postbox on Windows for my mail.

I did give Apple a fair chance at keeping my loyalty.  I bought a new MacMini in January and with the OX 10.8.3 update it has become a stable and reliable partner.  It is not nearly as fast as my similarly powered Lenovo desktop running Windows 8 but speed is not really the issue.  The real issue is that there is no software that draws me over to the Mac platform and I am not that happy with the Mountain Lion interface which should scare folks since Windows 8 is my main other platform.

I thought iAuthor might be something that would be important to me, but when I found out that it would only work with an iPad attached, I gave up on the Mac as my publishing platform.  Amazon has a very capable piece of software that emulates a Kindle which I can use to view my work before I publish.  There are some subtantial advantages to being on the Kindle platform so it did not take much to kill the idea of moving my books over to the iPad.   While I am not a huge fan of Word, it seems to be the best tool with the most specific instructions for creating books to be published on the Kindle platform.  I actually tried my older version of Word running on the Mac but it just made for some additional work.

Then there is the whole cloud issue. DropBox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive all work very well and do what I need.  I have still not met anyone who loves iCloud.  I know Apple keeps making some incremental changes to Photostreaming to make it palatable, but I have been burned too many times by Apple's ever changing online photo storage strategies.  I do not care about iCloud anymore.

This August will mark thirty-one years since I first came to the Apple platform.  I got excited about it because I could do things with that first Apple II+ and subsequent Macs that I could not easily do with other computers. That has changed and I did fight the change.   Over the years I campaigned for a better and more reliable iPhoto and even a small tower that would more closely meet the needs of those of us who still believe that creating quality content requires more than an iPad or iPhone.  I even sort of grew to like Pages before I decided it had become just another abandoned Apple software product.

Even if Apple does come up with a tower, I likely will not be looking at it because I do not see a new version of Microsoft Office coming to the Mac in the near future.  I have more hope that I will figure out how to use Google Docs to publish my books than I do that Microsoft is going to bring an upgraded version of Office to the Mac. It is not that I love Google more than Apple but they do update their core products regularly.  Beyond the Office issue, Apple has become an expensive platform.  If you want to argue with me on that consider first that I have purchased three I5 computers in the last six months, one Lenovo Ultra Book, one Lenovo tower, and one MacMini so I know what comes with each system. I am not really intrigued by ever thinner iMacs.  I would rather have  a more reliable one instead of the one in my equipment closet that died an early death.

As I watch Apple executing its huge bond deal in order to buy stock back to keep its stockholders happy, I have to wonder what it would have cost to get some upgraded iWork apps out the door and make OS X better not just glitzier.  Some professional Mac users would have paid for those new Apple products. That the MacMini on my desktop is more a curiosity than my workhorse is a little sad.  After all, over thirty years is a long time to live on a particular platform, but when all the signals to move on are there, it is hard to ignore them.

Years ago Apple gave me the tools to do some really neat things.  Today the deep integration of Google's mapping software and its seamless integration with Google's cloud services for maps and photos let me create a rather unique travel guide.  The mapping done on my Android phone would not have been as easy on the iPhone.  Certainly the mapping tools in Lightroom sealed the deal for me.  My decision to run Lighroom on my Lenovo tower came down to pure economics.  The $599 MacMini came with a 500 GB hard drive and the $479 Lenovo came with a 1 TB hard drive and had more room for photos. Its storage is also more easily upgradeable than the MacMini's.

I will continue to keep an eye on Apple, but it will be more to fulfill my curiosity than to plan any further purchases. I have no doubts that there are plenty of folks out there sitting on the edge of their chairs just waiting for the next Apple product.  I hope whatever it is goes well for Apple and for them.

If you are curious about my new travel guide, A Week at the Beach-The 2013 Emerald Isle Travel Guide, I have created a Kindle promotion with two free days, May 1 & 2, to download the book  Amazon has free reader software that lets you read a Kindle book on anything including the iPad, iPhone, and Mac. In fact with the Amazon sofware you can easily have the book on all your devices.  You will find the details about the free promo and software at this page.

If you are curious about me, try my about me page on my main Crystal Coast Life site.

Part 2: A Mac Instead Of Windows 8 -Software

This is the second part of a two part series about how Windows users contemplating the shift to Windows 8 might find the world of Apple if they choose to buy a Macintosh instead of upgrade to Windows 8.  The first part was on hardware.  This piece covers software, the “Cloud,” and a few other considerations.

While there are more cross platform applications out there than there were a few years ago, the ones you need, might not work the way you expect on a Mac.  I am a big fan of SnagIt from Techsmith. It works well on both Macs and Windows. Yet there is one issue.  While Snagit on Windows works with my favorite cross-platform mail application, PostBox, it will only work with Apple’s Mail app on Mac OS X.  I am not a fan of Apple's Mail program. This kind of thing is one of those gotchas that can make moving to a new platform irritating so you need to check apps that are important to you.

If you come over to Apple and end up using Apple’s iPhoto to manage your photos, you might find some options gone for political reasons.  Sharing is built in iPhoto for Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter but not for Picasa web albums. Apple does not like Google so you have to buy a third party plug-in or use a browser to get you photos uploaded.  iPhoto also creates a proprietary library of your photos instead of just pointers to JPEGs.  You could just switch to Picasa on the Mac, but then there is no way to get your photos into Apple's iCloud without doing some scripting or owning an iOS device. 

One of the things you need to accept when moving to Apple is that Apple wants you to do things a certain way and deviating from the chosen path usually causes some sort of pain. That is even the case in software.

If Microsoft Office is your standard office suite, you likely know there is a new version out for Windows Computers. I just subscribed to Office 365 for $99 per year.  The last version for the Macintosh was released in 2011. While the files are supposed to move back and forth without problems, my experience is that there are always a few little things that do not work or there is an extra space here or there. 

However, there is some good news on the Office front for the Mac.  The latest update from Microsoft resulted in a dramatic speed increase in loading the Office apps on my new Mac Mini.  That is good since no one is really sure when there will be a new Office for the Mac.  The rumor that Microsoft might bring Office to Linux seems more promising than the statement that no new Office is planned for the Mac.

The one other thing that I have noticed is that after using Office 365 a lot and moving back to Office on the Mac, I am having trouble finding things. I am a casual Office user so it might just reflect that, but it is enough of a problem that I now use Teamviewer to control my PC from the Mac so I can use Office 365 instead of Office 2011 on the Mac.

Beyond Office, even some Mac users are questioning how much attention Apple is paying to their own software. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote (Apple's iWork suite of productivity apps)  have not seen a major update in their desktop versions since 2009. Jason Grady writing for ZDNet had the following comment.

“Instead Apple proceeds with its release and abandon strategy. Release iWork into the market with great fanfare and starve it until it eventually dies. What makes matters worse is that Apple will not comment on its iWork roadmap. Not even a 'we're working on it.' Nothing.”

Apple has even dropped iDVD which makes sense inside the Apple world since Apple is moving away from DVDs. However, many of us still use DVDs.  Tidbits which has been publishing information about the Mac on the web and using Macs in their workflow for 22 years recently said of Apple, “Apple software — from iOS 6 to Pages 4.3 — has been falling down. Great hardware, increasingly sloppy software.”

If the “Cloud" is important to you, you should be aware that Apple has struggled with its vision for the Cloud. Apple has changed its Cloud strategy multiple times with the result that many no longer trust Apple's with their data.  Also Apple’s current iCloud implementation is very different than other vendors' Clouds. It takes some getting used to and it is hard to escape since it is built into the OS.

I still find there are some very good apps on the Mac. I use RapidWeaver for web development and Pixelmator for graphics. Sometimes I will write with Nisus Writer Express. It depends on my mood.  As for utilities, Fetch is still my favorite FTP client.

Apple’s apps and a few other applications like PIxelmator have the ability to save to iCloud if the software vendor has chosen to market their software through Apple's app store.  However, even those other non-Apple apps which can save to Apple's iCloud save to someplace invisible in Apple's iCloud.  You can find a hidden folder on your Mac which shows you what is there but it takes some digging. You cannot see those files when you log into iCloud with a browser like you can the iWork files.  It is a weird concept. Of course the apps know that the files are there but if you want to open the file with another app, you are out of luck.  Apple just figures that there are things you don't need to know or do. It is one of the things you need to accept if you plan to go to a Mac.

The good news for Cloud lovers is that you can easily use DropBox, Google Drive, or even Microsoft's SkyDrive on a Mac without any problems. There are also other choices which work well.

Beyond software, you need to consider setup. In spite of the Mac's reputation for ease of use. Setup on a new Mac can sometimes be not so easy as I found out. I have brought up a lot of Macs over the years and my most recent one was not any fun.
 
There is no doubt that Apple has an App store with far more software than Microsoft, but there is a downside to the app store.  Apple's OS strategy also revolves around that same App Store and my experience is that it is a work in progress.  In setting up two new Windows 8 machines and my new Mac Mini, I found the Windows 8 machines required much less of my attention.  If you opt for a Mac and have even a decent Internet connection prepare for some long downloads. I have TimeWarner cable and a 4.8 GB OS backup download took eight hours.  Most updates you can have automatically applied but I still have to manually apply all the ones from Microsoft for Office on the Mac. 
 
You will find support and repair are not as accessible to Mac owners.
 
Using a Macintosh is great until something goes wrong and you will quickly find that people who really know Macs are harder to find than knowledgeable Windows people.  If you live outside a major metro area, be prepared to drive to the nearest Apple store for repair or face to face support. There are far fewer Apple repair centers around than Windows ones.  It used to be the answer to most Mac problems was reinstall the operating system. That is not as easy to do now that install DVDs are gone.  You can make one of your USB thumb drives a backup OS X installer, but my experience has shown that can have some challenges. I had to buy third party software to create one for my Mac Mini.
 
Little things like navigating your computer will be different on the Mac.
 
When you are using a computer, the file system becomes very important. Do not let someone convince you the Mac OS X Mountain Lion is more like Windows 7 than Windows 8.  I have used Macs for 28 years and I find the latest version of OS X Mountain Lion the most confusing yet. It is powerful and has a lot to like, but there is also a lot to learn. It has taken me just as long to get up to speed on it as it did for me to figure out Windows 8.

Apple decided with their previous Lion release that the command "Save As" is not a good thing. Some apps no longer have that command but now in Mountain Lion you can get it back if you hold down the “option” key when you go to the file menu.  Still the new “Duplicate” and “Move” commands can be confusing.  Macs also do not remember the last place you saved something like Windows. You can buy third party software like Default Folder X to fix that, but it is still not quite as easy to find something on a Mac. Navigating around a Mac can be confusing especially when Apple decides to hides important things like the user library.

There are some  very neat things on the Mac like AirDrop and AirPlay which require other Macs or more Apple hardware like AppleTV before you enjoy them.  Windows Media Center works pretty well with existing Windows 7 machines so that is not too different since both platforms want you to stick with one platform.

The last worry is security. I've used both platforms for over 8 years. Since MS introduced their security program, that is the only security program I have used. I have had no virus or worm problems on either platform, you just have to practice safe computing.  At one time this was a huge advantage for the Mac. Now it is not so much.

All this boils down to a move to the Mac will mean lots of changes especially in the way you view your computer vendor.  If you are coming to the Mac, you need to believe Apple knows best or you will never be comfortable. Just like you cannot fight city hall, you likely will not be able to fight Apple.  Is it any different in the Windows world.  I would argue that Apple would not put up with an app like Start8 which brings back the old Windows Start Menu, but maybe I am wrong.  They did relent a little on "Save As."

The Mac platform has some great capabilities, but you will have to work to master them.  The way you do things on a Mac is a little different.  My conclusion is that moving to Windows 8 is the best course for most Windows users. The learning curve on the Mac is substantial for a Windows user. However, I encourage you to weigh what I have presented, talk to Mac users and make your own decision. Everyone's needs are different.  What works for me, might not even fit your desk. :-)

However, for many Windows users it might just be easier to stay the course with Windows and buy a new Windows 8 machine.

The simple addition of the $4.99 Start8 utility can make the Windows 8 experience a lot like the old Windows.  Once you have done that, you can choose to ignore the parts of Windows 8 that don’t fit the way you work. 

I would not let anyone scare me away from Windows 8. I am not having any trouble using it. I have it on two machines.  One has a touch screen and the other has only a mouse.  I am betting Microsoft will listen to customers and make it better like they did with Vista.

Windows 8 is powerful and very fast.  When I boot both my Mac Mini and Lenovo tower, even I if start the Mac Mini first, I usually have several Windows applications launched before the Mac Mini even makes it to the desktop.

On my most recent startup, I turned my Mac Mini on first. By the time the Mac Mini had gotten to the desktop and launched Chrome, I had turned on the Windows 8 machine and launched the following programs on Windows 8.

Chrome

Firefox

SnagIt

Postbox (all my mail was also retrieved)

Picasa

Excel

Word

Lightroom

Trillian

Opera

The Lenovo tower has 8 GBs of RAM. The Mac Mini has 16 GBs of RAM.  Both systems have standard SATA hard drives and I5 processors.

See the first article in the series which talks about hardware for more details and price information.

A Sign That Apple Cares About The Desktop?

We all have different expectations from the companies that have helped define our lives.  My hopes for Apple revolve around the tools that the company created or helped popularize over the years. Many of those innovations let me do things that I could hardly imagine.

With me it started with an Apple II+, AppleWriter II, and an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer.  Then there was the Mac, Pagemaker, and Illutrator, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. While not all of these came from Apple, their initial releases were tied closely to the Macintosh.  Since the announcement of the Mac, the Mac desktop has been an important part of my life. Today I still use the Mac, just not as much. Linux has won a significant piece of my desktop.

Even when I gave my desktop over completely to Apple, it was not always been a smooth ride. Products like Claris Emailer and iDVD were dropped.  Some things like iPhoto's integration with the Cloud and web pages have changed for the worse.  Perhaps iWeb was the best indication that Apple never could quite understand that to be successful on the web you need to divorce the device from the data. Google certainly understands that.  I would even argue that Microsoft is better at it than Apple. Then there is an application like Pages which took me a long time to embrace for a few things only to watch Apple decide to ignore it.  I might not agree with Microsoft's direction on Excel, but I doubt they will ever ignore it.

Apple's misunderstanding of the cloud imight someday be looked upon as a major mistake. Still there is no question that Apple remains a money machine.  What I am wondering is can Apple still innovate in a way that really matters.  It is not a new question.  I found this August 18, 2011 article by Brandt Dainow, Why the iAd was a failure, an interesting read.  I especially like this quotation which refers to an earlier article of his.

The thrust of my criticism was that if Apple creates aspirational and innovative new products, but then restricts access to them, it forces others to create competing systems. By refusing hardware manufacturers such as Samsung and Nokia access to the iOS system, Apple forced them into the arms of Google and Microsoft. I argued that, just as the Mac had gone from 30 percent market share at its peak to less than 3 percent today, so would the iPhone go in the mobile market.

While the Mac has gotten up to 10% or so of market share, there are those who are now arguing that it has peaked. 

It turns out that a lot of what Apple has done throughout its history is to create innovations and then to try to wall them off.  There was a time before Windows 7 when many computer users would have loved to have the more secure and capable OS X running on their Dell or HP.  Apple was sure that letting OS X into the wild would destroy the company.  It turned out that Apple's success was not destined to come from OS X anyway.  It was going to come from the iPod, iPhone, and iPad and related services which now make up close to 86% of Apple's revenue.  I always thought that it was funny that I had to buy a third-party add-on for iPhoto just to do something as simple as put my photos in Google's Picasa web albums without resorting to a browser.

In a sense Apple is now trying to use OS X to drag along those of us still creating content with Macs.  It likely will not work.  The web is changing everything and Apple's walled worlds are showing some huge cracks.  Android may be as unstoppable in the mobile market as Windows was in the desktop market.

Android runs on a lot of hardware from different companies.  I like to compare the sharing options that I get when viewing an image on the Mac with what I get when viewing an image in the gallery on my Android phone.  There are twenty choices on my LG Spectrum phone instead of the seven choices in Apple's Preview.  Of course Apple is not the only guilty party in limiting our choices.  When I want to share a photo from my Amazon Cloud Drive using my Kindle Fire, I only get four choices.  That lack of choice has a lot to do with my decision to make a Nexus 7 my main tablet.  I get more choice on a lot of things.

By trying to control everything, Apple limits our choice and opens the door to innovation from others. But if the limitations that Apple forces on us are severe enough, then the market is guaranteed to respond with other choices.  Some of the choices might not be goods ones, but then again some of those choices might be really good ones like the Nexus 7 that I'm using.

While some argue that the only way for a good user experience is to let Apple control everything, my experience has shown that Apple cares little about the user experience except to want to use it to prod me towards their vision of a pure world with only Apple products and services.

It will be interesting to see how well Microsoft's experiment in using their operating system to prod us toward tablets and the Surface Pro will work.  Actually the operating systems of both Microsoft and Apple are not very high on my list these days.  I am moving towards a roll your environment using virtualization. Look for my upcoming article on it at readwrite.

For now I would like just one sign that Apple cares about my user experience.  I will nominate bringing back the "Escape" key in iPhoto as a way to return to the library instead of clicking on the annoying "Photos" button.  I doubt we will see that since the march of Mac OS X towards iOS likely will accelerate instead of slow down. 

In truth, it does not matter.  I have found a new solution, Adobe's Lightroom.  Guess what?  The "Escape key" works like it should there.  A better sign for me to pay attention to is Frank, our great egret from Canada.

Loving My Mac Mini, But Questioning Apple

I took delivery of an I5 Mac Mini on Friday, January 11.  The next night I finally called it quits with my problematic iMac, the iLemon.  I opened my new Mac Mini’s box and began a strange journey.  You can read a summary of my challenges setting up the Mac Mini on readwrite at "Mac Mini Tale of Woe Part Deux."

I actually think the Mac Mini is one of the best designed pieces of Apple hardware that I’ve seen in a while. In one respect that is great.  It is good to know that Apple still knows how to design really good computers.

Unfortunately the process of setting up the Mac Mini and the software on the Mac Mini are not as good as the hardware deserves.  It makes me question the current direction of Apple.  Still I hope that some of the recent management changes will fix these problems.  I would like to see Apple get back to the point where we can say, "Buy a Mac because it just works."

The crux of the matter is that Apple who is trying to convince us to throw away our CDs and DVDs has some bugs to work out in their new world of on-line software downloads.

Once I got my Mac Mini fully updated at the Apple App Store and it was not an automatic process, I wanted to download a copy of the Mac OS Lion 10.8.2 that the Apple App Store had just finished installing on my computer. That turned out to be impossible.  The App Store insisted that the Mountain Lion it had just finished installing on my computer was not compatible and could not be downloaded.

Since the linked readwrite article was written a few days ago, I have continued to bang away at this technical issue.  While I now have a very usable Mac Mini, I still do not have a downloaded copy of the version of Mac OS X 10.8.2 (build number 12C3104) which runs my Mac Mini.

I tried again to get a copy of Mt. Lion with the Mac Mini but I was still unable to download a copy of Mt. Lion.  I then tried downloading a copy using my Mountain Lion external drive hooked to my iMac.  Unfortunately the version that I got was the same version that was already on the external drive, build number 12C60.  It took an amazing ten hours to download on our cable modem.  I can usually download a full Linux ISO image in under ten minutes.

I got the suggestion from a knowledgeable friend at Apple to try forcing a restore to the external drive.  That actually looked pretty promising for a while since it indicated that it was downloading some additional components.  Unfortunately once it was finished it was still the same old build and the external drive still would not boot my Mac Mini.

Since then I have created a “Restore” USB drive and after buying another hard drive and using SuperDuper, I have cloned the hard drive that is the boot drive for the Mac Mini.   I could not use SuperDuper just to clone the system to my old external drive since it formats the whole drive first.  I also believe that the cloned drive has a “Restore” partition. When I get a chance I’ll have a look at it in terminal. I am beyond tired of fooling with it at this point.  You cannot see the “Restore” partition using disktools.  I am also using Time Capsule with the new external drive.  In theory I should be fine.

Of more worry to me now that I have sort of solved the backup booting issue is that I have seen a few software errors and one iPhoto crash already with Mountain Lion.  The most recent problem was a Time Capsule one. I have seen it three or four times while I was writing this article.  Just after I set up the new Mac Mini, I also got an inconsistency warning for the new iPhone library that I created.   The library only had a couple of days of photos.   I made no attempt to bring most of my photos over.

None of these are huge issues individually, but they are things that I hoped to not see on a brand new computer which does not have any software that should cause problems.  The disappointment started the moment the “UPDATE ALL” button did NOT work at the App Store.   I had to go through the updates one after the other making sure that the iPhoto update was done last.

Updating the Mac Mini required my presence while, the two Windows 8 computers that I have brought up recently all magically did the updates by themselves.

Based on this experience I know there are some warts on the App Store.  If you cannot download the software that you just installed on a computer, that is a serious problem. Maybe I’ll never have to deal with it, but my whole career at Apple which spanned nearly twenty years, I carried some sort of recovery disks with me.

I cannot believe this is saving Apple any money, and I would gladly pay $15 for a DVD with my OS on it.  I think that is how much I paid for the last set that I got from HP.  I actually don’t care if they are the latest and greatest disks as long as they will boot my computer.  I would rather have a set of disks with 90% of the latest software than nothing at all.   Surely downloading the 10% of new components would be more efficient than the ten hour download that I endured.  I’ve been in a lot of hotels where there is no way you could get a long download done.

Anyway I still love my Mac Mini, and I hope Apple will solve this problem sooner rather than later. I don’t mind waiting for 10.8.3 to boot my Firewire External Drive now that I could boot via my USB drive if necessary.  For those following the issue of iDVD (the reason I bought the Mac Mini) disappearing.  I dug out my iLife 11 disks and installed iDVD on the new USB disk.  I got strange warnings about an expired certificate, but I installed it anyway.  I booted up with the USB drive and iDVD works fine which means I expect it will work fine when I can boot from my Firewire 800 drive which has my iDVD projects.  How long iDVD will work is another question, but I should get at least another year out of it once my Firewire Drive gets updated.  When I find an update that breaks iDVD, I just won't apply it to the Firewire drive.  I will start evaluating replacements for iDVD as soon as I get a chance.

My Mac Mini is now front and center on my desk.  You might have a hard time finding it,  but it is driving the center screen (Xubuntu) and the Apple cinema display (OSX) to the right of it.  The Mac Mini now sports 16 GBs of ram, 2 TB of external storage, and a Samsung DVD burner.

Given the challenges that I’ve had with Mountain Lion, I’m now doing most of my work on Xubuntu running on VMware’s Fusion product.  As you can see from my desk, I have all the hardware that I need with an I5 Windows 8 tower to the left of me and an I7 Windows 7 Lenovo laptop to the right of me.  My trusty old G5 is also hooked to the monitor of the Windows 8 tower so I can easily access it if need be.  There also is another Linux box hiding on one of the tables under my Epson all in one ink jet printer.  I can drive the old Pentium III Linux box from the center monitor if I need to, but I hope to donate it soon to an aspiring young programmer.

The Mac Mini didn’t end up being particularly cheap since I had to buy another external drive that I didn’t really need, but hopefully the investment which includes a Samsung DVD drive will be well worth it over time. I added a new LG LCD monitor but it took me a while to figure out that you can use a mini display port to DVI connector in the Thunderbolt port.  Just that adapter from Apple was another $30 dollars.

If you are really, really interested in the gory technical details of Apple’s restore, Dan Frakes has an excellent MacWorld article, Hands on with Mountain Lion’s OS X Recovery and Internet Recovery.  I actually think Dan deserves a medal for writing the article.

I will leave everyone with one question.  We now have four Windows computers in the house and one Mac Mini running Moutain Lion.  My wife’s Windows 7 laptop and my Windows 8 Lenovo Yoga machine both have just 4 GBs of RAM and are I5 powered.  I haven’t even considering upgrading the ram in either one of them because they are both very responsive.  I am sometimes amazed by how much stuff I have open on the Yoga.

When I got the Mac Mini, it also just had 4 GBs of ram.  I found it almost unusable. I am curious if anyone else has noticed that Mountain Lion seems to take a lot of ram compared to either Windows 7 or 8?  I noticed the same thing on my iMac since it had 8 GBs of RAM which is the same that I have in my other Lenovo laptop.  I blammed that on the flaky iMac.  However, the Mac Mini has no excuse and wasn't much fun until it got some serious RAM.

Apple Finally Loses Its Mantra

For years when we were selling Macs at Apple, our mantra was that "Macintoshes just work."  It was an easy thing to say for much of Apple's history.  There were a few times that Apple shipped products that weren't deserving of the Apple label, but by the late nineties Apple definitely had its mojo back.

I have slowly been working towards this conclusion and it is painful one.  There is a lot of stuff on the Mac that no longer just works.  I have tried really hard to like Apple's Mountain Lion operating system.  The weekend before Thanksgiving 2012, I came to the conclusion that Apple is trying to do way too much stuff with the result that Macintosh software is not getting proper attention.

I'll be expanding further on this in later articles, but I will offer up a few examples.  I would love to hear what others think. 

My first issue is Photostream.  I have complained a lot about Photostream being designed by an engineer who only shares a few photos from his phone and who cannot imagine someone taking one thousand pictures a day.  The problem is worse now.

I had Photostream going when I first installed Mountain Lion but I quickly turned it off. I didn't want hundreds of photos daily pushed to my Windows laptop.  This weekend I read that I could chose to share just certain photos with others so I decided to give Photostream another try.

I have to admit making Photostream work was like beating my head against the wall.  Eventually I did a Google search for "photostream keeps turning off" and saw that I was not alone in having Photostream problems.  I finally found this comprehensive set of steps to fix the problem.  I tried them without any luck. Actually I tried the steps multiple times.

I keep getting a message to sign into my iCloud account. I have already done that and I have checked that the email addresses all match.  I'm sure there is a solution, I can't figure it out, and I am to the point of not being sure whether or not I care if Photostream ever works.

The one thing that I know is that I spent more time trying to get Photostream to work that evening than I have spent on uploading thousands of photos to my Picasa web albums accounts which have never given me a single problem.

By the same token, my Drop Box account works perfectly as does my Microsoft Skydrive.  Neither have ever been a problem.

I find it amusing that I can see my Google Drive, Dropbox, and SkyDrive when I click on the finder in Mac OS X Mountain Lion. However, I don't see my iCloud there.  I guess it is supposed to be so seamless that it is invisible.

For years I have complained that Apple's problem is that it tries to tie data to a specific piece of hardware. If you ever used iWeb, you know the difficulties involved in working on a single website from multiple machines.  I still am trying to figure out how to get my music off my original iPod which seems to be married to a Mac that has long ago expired.  I suspect my Photostream problem might be related to having to switch my iMac to an external boot drive since my internal drive died, but I don't know how to fix it.

Photostream is not the only problem.  I got a comment on my recent post, Is Apple a Prisoner of its Design Decisions? regarding my complaint on the disappearance of the email option on the file menu of Preview.  The comment brought to my attention the system wide addition of a "share button."  There is now a little share button on Preview. Unfortunately, it is no longer on the file menu where it has been for a while.

However, the system wide share seems to have been implemented in enough different ways to make one wonder what they were drinking out in Cupertino.

If you go to any of the current iWorks 09 Apps including Pages, you won't find a working share button.  The apps have been rumored to be in line for an update, but I guess getting the small iPad out is more important or at least more profitable.

I was beginning think the intention to be consistent could be there until I looked at "share" in Safari.  Instead of being a little button, "share" is in the file menu where it used to be in Preview.  Then I had the thought that maybe iPhoto would have "share" implemented in the file menu like Safari. It was there years ago.  Of course I was wrong.  The iPhoto share buttom with menu is on the bottom on the far right corner.  I'm pretty sure including "Order Prints" in the share menu is just another way to make money.

I would never expect Apple to have a share to Picasa web albums since Google is their competition and they would rather cut their nose off than make it easier to use another company's products.  That in itself is amazing since that used to be one of the main things that Apple did.  Our system and software engineers were famous for making Apple stuff fit with other products.   I gave up paying for the little extension that made it easy to share photos from iPhoto to Picasa web albums.  It seemed to get turned off with every iPhoto update.

Of course indecision on how to handle "share" and "export" is nothing new, I first wrote about Apple's indecision on the commands in 2005.

Apple is certainly not the only company to play around with the share command.  Google's decision to force the  sharing of photo albums through Google+ if you have a Google+ account is not one of my favorite decisions. However, it was easy to create a work around by have a second "free" Picasa web albums account which isn't tied to a Google+ account.

I know Apple's focus is on iPhones and iPads, but they have enough money to make Macs work right. We certainly pay enough for our Macs to work nearly perfectly.  Mac software apparently is just not a priority.  Why do we still have Pages, Numbers, and Keynote with non-functional share buttons?  When it comes to user interface, Apple used to be the standard that others hoped to emulate. I think Mountain Lion might have changed that forever.

Folks love to complain about Microsoft apps, but it you use their apps on Windows, you get a pretty consistent interface for sending things to others.  It is hard for me to admit this, but right now things just work on my Lenovo laptop running Windows 7.  Things don't just work on my iMac running Mountain Lion.   The loss of productivity from the bone-headed move to remove "Save As" along with Apple's refusal to be even in the same ball park as other hardware companies on prices just might be enough to get me off the Mac platform.

I'll be interested to see if Microsoft has gone forward or backward on Windows 8.  When I give it a try, it will be on a new machine because I really like having one machine where things just work and I don't plan to mess with my Lenovo.

I'm looking forward to some peace and quiet and perhaps some good weather during the holidays here on the Southern Outer Banks. I definitely won't be wasting any more time trying to use Photostream. Still Apple technology is still very important to me even if some folks have a hard time understanding that.

Is Apple A Prisoner of Its Design Decisions?

My history with the Macintosh goes back to the introduction of the Macintosh.  The Macintosh held such an important place in my life that I have managed to keep some first edition magazines announcing the Mac.

Yet here I am in November 2012 sitting at my October 2010 I5 iMac contemplating buying a new Windows 8 computer to completely shake up my computing paradigm.

I am thinking of jumping ship frankly because I think Apple worships far too much at the altar of design instead of functionality.  I also believe there is no one with any sense left at the rudder when it comes to user interface decisions at Apple.   And for icing on the cake, I don't believe the price Apple charges is justified based on my recent experience with Apple products.

For years I have operated on the theory that the safest computing involves doing my work on mulitple computers.  While I worked at Apple, I often used my company supplied laptop with a desktop that I purchased.  After leaving Apple in 2004, I bought my own Mac laptop and late that year a dual G5 desktop.

During the eight years since leaving Apple, for one reason or the other I have added Windows and Linux to my operating system world.  Early this summer the MacBook I purchased in the summer of 2006 died in spite of a hard drive transplant.  I moved to relying on my Lenovo I7 Windows 7 laptop and my iMac as my main two systems.

Unfortunately I quickly started having troubles with my iMac this summer.  I ran it off an external hard drive for a while and eventually reformatted the internal hard drive and installed Mountain Lion.  While I am not a big Mountain Lion fan, I thought that I was going to be okay until I started having hard drive problems once again the last week of October 2012.

It was only then that I started contemplating changing the internal hard drive in my iMac.  I have replaced lots of drives in Macs over the years including a number in PowerBooks and some in other versions of iMacs. When I bought my Intel iMac, I paid no attention to serviceability since it had a drive with a terrabyte of storage.  Other than the drive on my recent MacBook, I have only replaced drives for additional storage.

With all the cloud storage that I'm using I figured the terrabyte of storage on the iMac would be plenty so I didn't worry about replacing it.  On top of that the iMac was not my first choice machine. I didn't really have another Mac choice.  I would have preferred a tower, but there were no Apple towers in the same price range of the dual G5 that I bought in 2004 so I bought an iMac and hoped for the best.

As I started having problems with my iMac, an Apple system engineer that I know told me that replacing the drive in one of the new iMacs is very difficult.  When I started investigating and found this video of pulling the front bezel and LCD to change the hard drive, I was amazed.  It is a little like learning that you've bought a car and finding out that you have to pull the windshield in order to change the battery.

While Apple pioneered the All-One-Computer, most manufacturers make one now.  However when I investigated recent systems by HP and Sony, I found that you access their hard drives from the back.  The HP system seems to have a particularly easy way of replacing the hard drive.  I have not been able to determine if the new SpectreONE AIO by HP suffers from the same design problem on hard drive servicing as the iMac which it appears to have cloned.

I'm sure that Steve Jobs did not want any panels opening on the back of the iMac, but to be honest, it is pretty stupid to build a computer which requires you to pull the most fragile component in order to service something like a hard drive.  Just because other manufacturers might follow Apple doesn't mean it is the right thing for consumers.

Since I got my iMac, I have been very concerned that it produces a lot of heat. Given that, I was not surprised to find out that there is a sensor on the iMac drive which will shut it down if it gets too hot.  I've never seen that on anything but 1U servers.  It makes me wonder if the design of the iMac is a poor one and that hard drives in the machine will be prone to failure.

I didn't buy my iMac because it was stylish.  I bought it because it was the least expensive way that I could continue to use a Mac with a DVD and a SD slot.  In retrospect, I was too trusting of Apple's engineers and too willing to accept what Apple wanted me to buy.  In fact I ended up buying the huge 27" screen because that was the only way at the time that I could get an I5 processor.

I would have preferred to have purchased an inexpensive Apple tower with a couple of drive bays.  Apple has ignored the market for a product like that and forced us to choose between the MacMini, the iMac, and the very expensive Mac towers.

While the inaccessibility of the hard drive is a major flaw on the iMac, the proximity of the SD slot to the DVD drive is also a major design flaw.  Of course Apple just fixed that by eliminating the DVD drive and moving the SD slot to the back of the computer.  Does anyone seriously believe that having a SD slot behind a 27" monitor is convenient?

Beyond these hardware design issues, I am convinced that Apple has forgotten what made the Mac great.  I have used Macs because they made my computing life easier.  Increasingly I find that not to be the case.  I think Apple's decision to mess with the "Save As" command might go down as one of the dummer decisions in the history of computing.  As a writer, I cannot imagine what they were thinking.  I am still smarting from the more recent versions of iPhoto abandoning the elegant return to the library command of the "Escape" key.  Now I have to hit a button with my mouse.

Perhaps the final proof for me in Apple's quest to make their user interface less useful is the change that they have made to their Preview app when opening a PDF.  If you remember from Mac OS X Lion, you could easily mail a PDF from the menu.  If you have migrated to Mac OS X Mountain Lion, you will find that the option to mail a PDF from the menu has disappeared.  Unfortunately mailing a PDF directly was one of my favorite Apple shortcuts.

Adding to the insult is that one of my favorite apps, Pixelmator, has obviously "downgraded" their app by replacing the "Save As" command. If has gotten to the point that I am afraid to upgrade apps because "Save As" will disappear.

While some including my Canadian friends at McLean's are worried about "skeuomorphism" and Apple, I'm more worried about having the best user interface to get my work done.

I'm not sure if Windows 8 or Linux will be the answer, but I am increasingly convinced that Apple will not be part of the solution.  Certainly my very positive experience with Windows 7 has given me the confidence to give Microsoft a shot at my desktop.

For more on my perspective on Apple, check out my book, The Pomme Company.

If you are looking for perspective on my recent comments on Tim Cook, try my post, Sometimes words get twisted or the post that I did on April 27, 2012, Tim Cook, the right person for Apple's evolution?. The last six months don't give me a lot of confidence in Apple's direction.

 

What would it be like to work at Apple?

If you have ever wondered what it would be like to work at Apple in sales, my book, the Pomme Company, is a good place to start. Actually some current and former Apple employees think my book should be required reading for people hoping to work at Apple. My long history with Apple gives me a rather unique perspective.

There is no question that Apple is now a computer electronics powerhouse. Questions have been asked about the labor practices of Chinese companies used by Apple and other electronics companies. However, few people have thought to look stateside at the business culture within Apple.  It is actually not a very pretty picture.

That Apple has risen to the top is unquestionable.  Whether Apple will stay in its current position is more of an open question especially to those of us who have lived inside the world of Cupertino.

Creating great products is one thing.  Building a sustainable business culture that can continue to turn out great products is another thing.  Just ask Sony how difficult that is.

I would argue there are plenty of signs that the Apple of today is not the Apple of a few years ago.  I continue to be frustrated by Apple's user interface changes.  I thoroughly dislike the "Save as" changes implemented in Mountain Lion.  The dumbing down of iPhoto is a depressing subject for me.  While I am not an iPhone user, I can understand the frustration of paying a premium price for something, and then finding out that you don't have a wonderful experience with an app like maps on the iPhone.

In October of 2012, I purchased an I5 iMac.  I watched as it suffered through "Slow Snow Leopard" problem and then as I finally had to move all the data from the drive and format it.  It was the first time in 28 years of using Macs that I have had to move my data and reformat a drive.  I've had to reinstall system software plenty of times, but I have never had an Apple operating system destroy my drive.

There is no question in my mind that Windows 7 is more consistent and reliable than Apple's current operating system.  I use Mountain Lion on my iMac and Windows 7 on my Lenovo laptop on a daily basis.  Windows 7 just runs better.  If I could get Fetch, Coda, and RapidWeaver on Windows, I would likely abandon the Mac platform in spite of my long history with Apple products dating backing thirty years to 1982.

As I state in my book, Apple likely no longer has sophisticated users on their radar.  They are now more interested in casual consumer users.  Demanding users who expect a consistent user interface which enhances their productivity are on the back burner at Apple.  I challenge anyone to use an old version of iPhoto and tell me that the current version works as well.

Just the fact that you can no longer hit the escape key to move back to the full library is a huge disadvantage. As ugly as the Picasa user interface is, it works far better than iPhoto.

Then there is Apple's multiple attempts to figure out the cloud.  Certainly if you want to selectively share photos from your computer, Apple's cloud solution is not even on the radar when it comes to the best ways to do it.  Picasa web albums, Dropbox, and even Microsoft's Skydrive with Portfolio work far better than iCloud.

That Apple's popularity is at its peak when the quality of some of its products is suspect is a function of our society.  People want to be cool and Apple's products have the image of cool.  Certainly the Apple iPhone redefined the world of the smart-phone.

Clearly though if maps are important to you as they are to me, an Apple iPhone is no longer the best choice.

However, the question that remains unanswered is whether or not the unsustainable Apple business culture is at the root of these Apple products which have lost their luster.

At the end of my book I mention that my next computer product might be Microsoft's new Surface product.  An interesting side note to this is that one of the Surface engineers used to work as a student rep for us at Va. Tech.  I think my team paid for his airfare to California while he was an intern at Apple.

He got offered a job at Apple and another one at Microsoft.  He took the job at Microsoft because he was unimpressed with the culture inside of Apple.  I know from talking to him that he still believes that he made the right decision.

I'm going to watch with interest to see if the Surface product might be the one that brings Microsoft back into the game. 

At the same time, I have pretty well given up hope for a new MacMini from Apple.

Will Apple Ever Figure Out the Cloud?

Five years ago I wrote an article in which I said the following.

"Certainly if I considered the .Mac experience to be the best measure of Apple's web understanding, I would have to give Apple a failing grade.  There is no way around it, .Mac is not worth what many of us pay for it."

It is hard to believe that five years later Apple could decide to make its new iCloud service free, and iCloud might even be less useful than .Mac or MobileMe.

When I read the Register's article, "Sacrifice Another Goat, iCloud is Apple's biggest failure...," I could only nod my head in aggreement.

"Apple's cloud services continue to be more than a blemish on the company's reputation. They are a serious black hole."

I am not really surprised that Apple hasn't figured out the cloud because Apple has never understood that to really be a web player you have to free the data from the device.

All you have to is look at the way iWeb was built.  It tried its best to tie the website to a particular Mac.  Using iWeb to build a website on multiple Macs required jumping through hoops and moving huge files around by thumbdrives.

The shame of Apple's failures in the cloud is that when it came to many things about the web, Apple was a leader.  There was no easier way to put photos on the web than the original iPhoto.

Unfortunately that is no longer the case.  Adding photos to your Picasa web albums, Google drive, Dropbox or your Microsoft Skydrive is much easier than fooling around with your photostream.    If you take a hundred photos and want to put some of the best of them on the web, it is easy to do with any of the products besides Apple's iCloud.

Interestingly ever since I bought my original Droid in 2010, all the photos that I have chosen to be on the web have been automatically been synced to my phone, the web, and any computer that I choose.  In fact even with a couple of Gmail accounts to my name, things have worked perfectly with my contacts and mail.  I haven't had a glitch in over two years.  I can use Gmail as a web client or with Apple mail, Postbox, or Thunderbird.  It doesn't matter.

With Google's services I have access to my contacts, email, and photos from Windows, Linux, Lion, and all my older Macs.

With iCloud, my older Macs are completely shut out from iCloud unless I use Safari.  Interestingly my former MobileMe accounts work fine in Postbox and Thunderbird on Windows 7.  More importantly all the photos that I put on Picasa web albums and Flickr are still there instead of mysteriously appearing unannounced in my most recent iPhoto library and disappearing from the web.

I believe that unless Apple can figure out the cloud, the great products may not matter.  With the frustrations that I have had with Apple's software, I am less inclined to try the company's new hardware.

Recent tests that show the Nexus 7 tablet besting the iPad just confirm my recent unfortunate experience with Apple hardware which has a long tradition of being the best.  Since 2004, I have purchased five Windows laptops and two Mac laptops.  All of my Windows laptops except one which someone sat on are still running.  Neither of my Mac laptops are functional.  It is a small sample, but it has to influence my personal decision on hardware purchases especially since the two Mac laptops cost almost as much as the five Windows laptops.

The iMac that I purchased in October 2010 has also been problematic.  I am now running it off an external drive with Lion after having serious problems with slow Snow Leopard.  We have three Windows 7 laptops that have been models of software stability and reliability.  I don't say that to slam Apple but to convey my personal experience which has shaken my faith in Apple hardware and software.

When you add Apple lack's of understanding of the web, poor implementation of iCloud, and software problems, it makes you wonder if Apple is on the right track.

I remain hopeful, but seriously how many years is it going to take Apple to figure out the web?

Fortunately Apple's issues tend to fade in importance when I get out on the water in my kayak or have a blue water morning in our skiff, but those are advantages of life by the river in the summer.  It works better for me than living in a metropolitan area where an Apple Store is always tempting you.

One of my regular walks on the Point beyond the yellow houses on Emerald Isle is a whole lot better than trying to make iCloud do what I want it to.

By the way this is the 400th post that I have written for Applepeels.  Only a handful of them are still online, but the book is coming this summer.  If you have ever wondered what it was like to spend nearly twenty years at Apple, you will be able to read my story soon.

 

 

The Mysteries of Apple, MobileMe, & iCloud

Sometimes the journey with Apple is full of unexpected twists and turns.  I can say that both as a former Apple employee and as an Apple user who purchased his first system in August of 1982.

How this story twists back around to MobileMe & iCloud won't be apparent at first, but sometimes living in the world of Apple isn't very simple if you are trying to live with systems that aren't brand new.

I have been resisting moving to Mac OSX Lion. I wanted to stay with an older (faster) version of iPhoto that appeared to be tied to Snow Leopard.

That worked well until recently when I figured out that I was suffering from "slow Snow Leopard." 

I restart my iMac only after we have been away traveling so this problem crept up on me.  After a recent trip back to the coast, I was appalled that it took my 2010 I5 iMac over twelve minutes to boot and open Mail, Firefox, Chrome, iPhoto, and Snagit.

Over the years, I have seen my share of strange Apple problems, but this one was one of the more challenging ones.

When I worked for Apple from 1984 until July 2004, hardware and software problems never were much of a challenge. There was always a brilliant system engineer hiding somewhere.  The closest Apple Store to our home on the Crystal Coast is over three hours away so a visit with a genius was not a real option.

My first response to the problem was to try to reinstall Snow Leopard.  Unfortunately when I started the installation, my iMac would hang while the system was trying to boot from the original Snow Leopard DVD.

As this was all happening, the death knell was ringing for MobileMe.  Earlier in June, I managed to get a friend who was running Lion to bring their laptop to lunch so I could at least start the migration so my email would keep working.  Neither of us was very confident that the process had worked.

Also while this was happening I finished my ebook, "A Week at the Beach, An Emerald Isle Travel Guide."  I wrote the book with Nisus Writer Express, but I did the final publishing edits and formatting with MS Word for Windows.  When I published my book for the Kindle, I knew that people could read it on the iPad, Macs, and Windows machines using free Kindle reader software.  I planned to do an iPad version, but I was thrown for a loop when I found that I had to have Lion in order to use iBooks Author.

With that in mind I decided to take advantage of one of the Mac's great strengths, I took a Firewire 800 external hard drive and used Disktools so that it could be a boot disk for my Intel iMac.  I took advantage of some instructions that I found on the web so in the process of downloading Lion from the App Store, I created a flash drive OSX Lion installer.

Lion installed easily and I decided to start clean and manually install all my apps. That sort of worked.  I purchased an upgrade to iPhoto just after I got my iMac so I installed it.  The Mac running Lion wouldn't launch it but when I went to the App Store, it would not sell me an upgrade.  I ended up throwing away iPhoto and spending another $14.99 on iPhoto.  All of my other apps, Pixelmator, Rapidweaver, Snagit, Coda, MS Office, Fetch, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote installed fine.  Interestingly iMovie and iDVD did not have the same problem as iPhoto. 

I personally find Lion a little confusing since there are so many different ways to do things, but I will probably get over that. Since my Lion install was finished on June 29, one of the first things I wanted to do was check to see if my earlier migration to iCloud had worked.

For some reason iCloud didn't like my Apple ID so I ended up having to create another one. I also ended up creating one of the most complex passwords that I have ever used just to keep iCloud happy.  Fortunately my mail had moved with no problem. I had already logged into MobileMe with my old MobileMe id and downloaded all my photos, websites, and files just to be certain.

My first surprise was that my MobileMe photos showed up in iPhoto on Lion sometime the next day.  With that somewhat interesting victory, I decided to work on a more challenging issue, the family email addresses that have been in MobileMe and .Mac for many years. I could find no discussion about this anywhere so I decided to experiment with a spare email account that I had in MobileMe.

By this time MobileMe had died, and we were in July. When I checked the MobileMe family accounts including my spare one using my trusty Dual G5, I saw that they were no longer working.  I found one of the last emails suggesting that I migrate my email and clicked on it.  When Firefox launched the link, I got a message that the version of Firefox on my old Mac wasn't supported.

Next I changed the default browser to Safari and tried the link again.  I got to the iCloud screen and it wanted me to log in.  I tried my old MobileMe password and it worked.  I got in and migrated my mail.

With that success under my belt, I headed downstairs to my wife's I5 HP laptop which runs Windows 7.  She uses Thunderbird for mail because she likes their icon with the bird on it.  I found one of the warning emails and clicked on it.  Her Firefox took me to iCloud and the log in screen.  I tried her email password, and it was rejected.  Having nothing to lose, I tried my master MobileMe password and voilà it worked.  I easily migrated her email.

With the smell of success blanketing me, I decided to try to fix one of her major complaints in migrating to Windows.  The one thing she really misses about the Mac is her address book.  Nothing that I have been able to find on Windows has made her happy.  I had placed a vcard export file from her old Mac on her Windows computer when I was experimenting. I tried importing it into the iCloud Address Book app, and it worked flawlessly.  Of course it is a couple of years out of date, but that isn't too hard to fix with her small number of contacts.

Just to check things, I went back and looked at her Thunderbird client and confirmed that her MobileMe email address was not working. However, she had no trouble accessing it using Chrome.  When I checked my iMac running Lion, both my MobileMe email accounts were working. I called it quits for the night.

The next morning when I sat down at my Windows 7 laptop running Postbox for email, I was surprised to see my MobileMe email address functioning once again.  I checked my wife's Thunderbird email client and her MobileMe and my spare MobileMe address were both working again.

After that I checked my Dual G5 Mac running OS X version 10.5.8.  Neither MobileMe account was working in Mail.  However, I could get to the MobileMe mail using Safari on the Dual G5.

So the net is that it you have an older Mac, you will be stuck with Safari browser access to your MobileMe email.  If you have a Windows box running Windows 7, MobileMe mail will work in Thunderbird and Postbox.  Based on playing around with the iCloud Control panel for Windows I suspect it will also work in Outlook.

So what do I think about Lion and iCloud? I'm not sure why iCloud was designed the way that it is.  It certainly does not fit my needs.  However, with some tweaks, I could be pretty happy with it.  My biggest complaint is the lack of control over Photostream.  Sometimes I take a thousand pictures in a day.  The last thing I want is for all of them streamed to all of my devices.

What I want is to pick the photos that I want streamed. When you take a lot of photos, the plan is always to pick the ones that you want saved or shared.

It is pretty easy to do a work around.  I will likely continue to import and do some of the first round of editing of my photos using my I7 Windows laptop and Picasa.  I will then export the ones that I like to either my Google Drive or Dropbox.  Picasa does a nice export with dated folders.  When I come upstairs to the iMac in my office, I will just import the daily export folder from Picasa. 

Turning on Photostream would just give me a lot of duplicates.  Often I export back tuned photos from the Mac to my Google drive.  Those are often uploaded to an album on Picasa Web Albums.  Picasa Web Albums are automatically synced to my Android phone.

There is too much mystery and lack of control in iCloud for my taste.  I can't see anyone wanting every picture they take in every place unless they only take a handful of pictures.  Fortunately Google Drive, DropBox, and Microsoft's Sky Drive all work well with the Mac.

In another strange quirk, iCloud wanted me to create another MobileMe address.  I tried to use one of my current ones but it told me they were unavailable.  It is probably somehow related to my new AppleID.  However, my new AppleID has my old MobileMe address associated with it.  One more email address isn't going to upset me.  I already have way over ten email addresses.

However as slick as this appears to work, Google's tools are much more powerful and easier to control.  I have two Gmail ids, and it works really well for me.  One little trick that I learned with Google is that if you have a Gmail address and haven't signed up for G+, you can still directly publish to Picasa Web Albums which is what I would rather do than go through G+ sharing.

After resolving all the MobileMe migration issues,  I got some time to work on trying to fix my slow Snow Leopard.  I found an article suggesting that I disable Spotlight.  I also removed the Sophus anti-virus app that I was using since I am no longer using that as my primary boot drive.

I ran some tests before I made the changes.  The test was to boot up from being turned off, launch Mail, iPhoto, Firefox, Chrome, and Snagit.  Without the changes, my I5 iMac running 10.6.8 took twelve minutes and thirty-five seconds to boot.  The iMac is a 2.8 GHz I5 with 8GBs of RAM.

With Spotlight disabled and the anti-virus program gone, it booted and loaded the programs in six minutes and twenty-five seconds.

I then tried booting into Lion using the external Firewire 800 drive. The apps were the same but I cannot guarantee the iPhoto library was exactly the same, but it was close.  The time for Lion to boot and load the applications was four minutes and eight seconds.

Just to prove that I had correctly perceived that Windows 7 was faster, I ran a similar test on my I7 Lenovo laptop with 8GBs of RAM.  The mail application was Postbox and the photo app was Picasa.  Of course Firefox, Chrome, and Snagit were all the same.

The time for the Windows computer to boot and load the apps was three minutes and ten seconds.  Actually the time is even more impressive when you consider my Windows laptop automatically loads Ginger, Spotify and Skype.

We are less than thirty days from Mountain Lion so I can hope that the new operating system will be a pleasant surprise. It needs to be simpler in my opinion, but I doubt Apple wants my opinion.  I miss some things in iPhoto also, but I have given up on those.

I'm just happy to have my iMac booting at a reasonable speed even if I couldn't find anything in Apple's support forums to help me.  I am also pleased that my wife has her cherished address book back and that all those old email addresses haven't been put out to pasture yet.

I am going to look forward to comparing Mountain Lion to Windows 8.

I am pleased that Apple has extended the deadline for migrating mail.  It would be nice to see some documentation instead of having to figure it out on the fly, but you don't become an Apple user and expect to know all the secrets of the mother ship.  That's just not the way it works.

If you have been reading Applepeels for a few years and appreciate the efforts I have made in shining some light inside of the Cupertino spaceship, there is finally a way to say thanks besides donating.  Just buy my new ebook, "A Week at the Beach, An Emerald Isle Travel Guide."  The cost is only $4.99 and it includes some great pictures and recipes. Eighty-seven pages of information for $4.99 is a deal especially since it includes our family hush puppy recipe.

If you are a Mac lover, you can buy the Kindle version now, and as soon as I am finished with the iPad version, you can buy it and feel great that the iPad version looks better and has more pictures (and all the captions are in the right place).  I will be doing a post comparing writing for the Kindle with writing for the iPad.

If you are a Windows lover, you can take some satisfaction from the fact that even though I wrote the book with Nisus Writer Express on the Mac, I had to switch to Word for Windows for the final formatting.  Kindle publishing is not exactly user friendly but it does like Word especially Word for Windows.  I also ended up doing my promo pieces for color print on Word for Windows though the images were done with Pixelmator on a Mac.

Speaking of books, the book about my career at Apple is back on track.  I hope have it published sometime in August in Kindle format first.

With that I can say that I have survived one more set of storms in my computer life. Making it through this just fits with the lessons that I learned from my mom.  The first six months of life by the river in 2012 have been much better than last year.  I say that in spite of us being brushed by a tornado.

We are fully into our season of beach weather and ripe homegrown tomatoes.  If the fish would start biting, life would be pretty good.

I am almost as thankful that traffic on the beach is still light as I am that my iMac seems to be healed.

Tim Cook, the right person for Apple's evolution?

New products have been the heart and soul of Apple for most of its history.  The recent comments by Forrester Research chief executive George Colony have received a lot of discussion. 

It is easy to jump on the bandwagon that Apple will decline without that next great thing and the vision of Steve Jobs.

I would disagree with Colony's analysis for a number of reasons.  My first thought is that it is impossible for any company, even an Apple, to turn out hit after hit. Setting the expectation that this is the only way Apple can be a great company is to consign Apple to a future which won't be very bright.

The Apple of today is really the result of three straight home-runs by Steve Jobs, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.  The Apple of tomorrow does not have to be defined by products that break the mold every time.

There is no guarantee that even if Steve left Apple with that next great thing that it will be another product hit.  Despite what has come to be popular wisdom, even Steve had some less than successful products.  You might want to remember back to Steve's wonderfully designed PowerMac G4 Cube for just one example.

Tim Cook might be the person who finally turns Apple into an adult company.  It doesn't have to be a company that declines like Sony has.

I have already heard some thoughts from Tim which indicate that he might be right for this moment in Apple's history.  His comments on the convergence of tablets and laptops are on the money.  I just hope he is strong enough to keep Apple from making its OS X operating system look too much like iOS for the wrong reasons.

Apple has a tremendous amount of momentum, and there is plenty that can be done to grow Apple's business.  Despite what the technology press and analysts would have us believe, computers besides tablets are not dead.  There are plenty of people who will be using laptops and desktops for years to come.

Just as Microsoft is envious of Apple's share of the smart phone and tablet markets, Apple should be eyeing the huge numbers of computers that still ship with Windows around the world.  As the world of technology matures, finding new markets with that next great product might be beyond any company's ability.

However, getting beyond a 10% market share in the world of computers could be within the grasp of a Tim Cook led Apple.  One of the weaknesses that I saw in the leadership of Steve when I was at Apple was the ease with which a market or a product could be sentenced to a slow death as resources were drawn to that next great thing.

My experience with Tim Cook showed me someone who is willing to tinker with things until he gets them right.  It happens to be one of the things that I have admired about Microsoft.  That patient ability to keep working on product until it meets customer needs is what has kept Microsoft alive and still making money.

So what would I like to see Apple do to begin its journey to sustainable growth?

Obviously Apple has to keep churning out new iPhones and iPads, but Apple needs to resist the temptation to load them up with features that distract from their core functionality.  You can make something better without feature creep.  That is part of Steve that Apple needs to keep in the minds of its product designers.

At the same time, Apple needs to focus substantial resources towards making OS X the absolute best operating system for computers on the planet.  At one time it was.  It no longer is the best.  There are things that Windows 7 does better, and I find Windows 7 is more reliable.  Apple should not make OS X look like iOS just for the sake of doing it.  If there are good reasons fine, but don't mess more things up like we have already seen in recent updates to iPhoto.

Apple should not depend on Microsoft screwing up with Windows 8.

Next Apple absolutely must focus on style with reliability.  I should not be sitting here saying that my last three Mac laptops are dead while my last three Windows laptops are still running.  There is no reason why Apple cannot deliver its absolute drop dead gorgeous products and have them be ones that have spectacular reliability.  You can build a company on reliability and customer satisfaction.  You can lose a company if your products don't stand the test of time.

I really don't care if there is another laptop a little thinner than mine if my laptop lasts five years instead of two.

Next, the world of desktop computers is a wasteland.  The iMac and the Mac Mini have not revolutionized it.  They also haven't taken Apple very far into the world of two digit market share. 

There is a product somewhere between the iMac and the Mac Mini with a feature or two from the Mac Pro that could own the desktop world.  While it might not break completely new ground, it could be a home run for Apple.

Things will have to gradually change at Apple under Tim Cook's leadership for all this to happen, but I think it is very possible that Apple has not yet seen its peak.  Maybe the stock won't be as high, but the company could find a spot in the list of companies who have survived the loss of their visionary leader.

It would be good for all of us consumers of technology if Apple could not only survive but thrive.  I really couldn't care less if Apple comes out with a television, but I would be really ecstatic if Apple re-invented the desktop computer and delivered it with the world's greatest operating system.

There are lot of challengs out there for Apple. Android and Amazon will be fierce competitors, but Apple already has a lot going for it and should not face the decline that so many expect.

With that I am back to enjoying spring as it continues to unfold here along the stunning waters of North Carolina's coast.  With warming weather I plan to be back out in my kayak and anchored on the oyster rocks once again.