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The first task at hand after Friday’s brief intro to Snow Leopard at the local iStore was to shove the DVD into the drive of the MacBook and try out an upgrade.

I didn’t bother backing up any applications or settings. All my data is routinely shoved to the Drobo, so losing the recently installed Leopard OS should anything go awry was of little concern.

With the DVD in the drive, a simple click commenced the upgrade, with a single obligatory entry of the super user password the only other interaction. All in all the upgrade completed in roughly 40 minutes, with a reboot in between. Before the upgrade, the MacBook showed about 188GB of free space available on the hard drive. True to Apple‘s word, the drive indicated more free space once the upgrade procedure had completed: about 209GB.

Startups and shutdowns of the machine are lightning-fast. With Leopard, booting took a bit of time with shutdowns reasonably speedy. With Snow Leopard, there’s a marked improvement. Other than that, there’s nothing to visually provide any clue that there’s a newer incarnation of the OS running. The desktop interface and interaction with elements on screen remains the same. Two changes I noticed almost immediately: take a snapshot of a section of the screen and the item is saved with a name other than the usual Picture 1 – that’s a welcome fix. Also, the slider in the status bar makes zooming in and out in the folder view quick and easy.

A new look to the menus when icons in the dock are clicked, plus the addition of stacks and Expose built into the dock.

It’s 64-bit enabled, but that’s really important only once the actual application one is using requires vast amounts of RAM. Applications need to be compiled for that. In fact, some 64-bit applications will run slower than 32-bit ones…

Exchange support is built in, but requires Exchange 2007 on the server. Useful once corporates take the plunge and upgrade to that…

Additional useful features include automatic determination of location using the SkyHook Wi-Fi positioning service. That automatically adjusts the current time zone and is useful to travelers. Text substitution is enabled in certain applications, such as Mail.app, permitting shortcut codes to be used which are automatically expanded to the intended text when entered in a supporting application. The text substitution feature is found in the System Preferences. QuickTime X is the new QuickTime player that now sports the ability to save content and includes some basic editing features. A right-click on the synchronization icon in the menu bar provides a more detailed overview of recent synchronization sessions.

Next up: ensuring that the most important applications I use are able to run on the new OS. Bento – check. Aperture requires an update, available from Apple. PhotoShop CS4 – check. ChronoSync – check. Fujitsu‘s ScanSnap Manager is the only issue – an intermediate fix has been released, but a complete update to the software will be available only sometime later this year. Because of the issue with ScanSnap, I’m holding off on the upgrade to Snow Leopard on the iMac.

I took a similar approach to the upgrade with the Mac Mini, whose main task is to run Boxee, connected to the large LCD in the TV area. Inserted the disk and let her go.

After about an hour, the system had been upgraded with no apparent loss in functionality.

There’s no question that the upgrade to Snow Leopard is worthwhile. Expectations of a new look and feel will quickly result in disappointment. Speed improvements, minor enhancements to the user interface and experience and a reasonable saving in disk space are the main gains.

Caution should be exercised when critical applications could be affected by the upgrade. By now, more and more information is trickling through with regard to problems and potential solutions. With only the ScanSnap to worry about, the upgrade of the iMac promises to be similarly hassle-free once Fujitsu release an update to their software.

There was a time when my organization of paper documents was supported by a rigid work flow. Times change, unfortunately. So does ones persistence to use a flatbed scanner to scan double-sided documents. It’s a matter of discipline, too. Miss out on one, then two packs of mail collected from the PO box and suddenly the already arduous task of scanning five documents becomes a mountain of work, with more than fifteen or so to complete. Leave it a bit longer…you get the picture.

For a while I stuck to the flatbed rather doggedly, scanning slowly, saving to PDF, then turning the page over and scanning again. Save. Open the first PDF and add in the second page. Save again. Next document. It’s a pain.

My method of saving and storing the documents consisted of a rather simple directory named Repository with folders for each year contained within it. Within each specific year’s folder, I created a folder with the name of the company the documents refer to. Each scan receives a number for the month or a more complete date in case of multiple documents per month. As an archive, it works really well, makes document retrieval easy and, best of all, allows me to throw all the paper I no longer need to keep into the recycle bin.

For a while, I used a large HP MFP device, dropped in a bunch of A4‘s and let it scan and email me the PDF‘s. Great from a speed perspective, but certainly no great help with double-sided documents: those had to be separated out, scanned on one side and then the other. Finally all the e-mailed PDF‘s had to be edited by hand for me to save the individual documents as I required them. Again, not ideal.

I scan all letters, invoices and relevant post I receive. Also certificates, medical bills and tax details. The situation became rather untenable: heaps of paper, unsorted cluttering my study. The arrival of the iMac prompted me once again to look at a solution I’d considered a while back but had never committed to: the Fujitsu ScanSnap. Being a convert to the Mac, I investigated the price of both the S300m and the S1500m. The ScanSnap‘s are not cheap – for my requirements, the S300m seemed perfect – I took the plunge and placed an order. The device arrived about two weeks ago and I immediately set it up and tried it out.

Before I continue, I’ll say this: the ScanSnap S300m is probably the most intuitive and trouble-free device I have ever connected to a computer. That’s taking into consideration what it does, namely scan paper of varying sizes, down from letter size to business cards. Load the included software before attaching the small scanner to a free USB port. The included Cardiris software is installed first, then the scanner driver. Plug the S300m in and get ready to scan.

The S300m is a portable, duplex scanner. Powered either by the supplied AC adapter or an additional USB cable, the scanner measures 28cm wide, 8cm high and only 9cm deep. At 1.4kg it’s not something you’d stick in your gadget bag for everyday toting around. Certainly not without the protective carrying case, which is an optional extra and not supplied. Very important: the S300m is specific to the Mac and will not work with Windows. That’s not so much a restriction of the scanner itself, rather the fact that Fujitsu supplies only Mac software – their download site provides updates only and I haven’t yet found a way of downloading a functional Windows driver. That is the only negative, besides the price. Once connected, an icon appears in the dock indicating that the scanner is offline. Open the hood, pull up the paper guides and the SnapScan icon indicates that the scanner is ready for work.

Paper is inserted top down, first page to the back. A simple press of the only button on the S300m starts the scanning process. Part of the magic of how well the Fujitsu ScanSnap works is with the actual device itself. I went through a mountain of A4 pages measuring at least 10cm high. Documents are scanned individually, but the speed of the device is phenomenal. 16 pages per minute in duplex mode.

The user guide indicates that documents should be ten pages or less. In duplex mode, I scanned 75 pages without any trouble at all – all I had to ensure was that the paper was properly fanned and stepped to assist the narrow sheet feeder. In all the paper I scanned, I had three misfeeds, all due to badly scrunched pages. No fault of the scanner at all, which is also perfectly capable of receving skewed input and automatically realigning it without user intervention.

Scanned documents are automatically transferred to the ScanSnap desktop software and prepared in PDF format. From within the dialog, the user has the opportunity to review the scan, enter a file name and save.

Then, it’s on to the next document.

For now, I’m simply saving the scans to the root of the Repository directory, renaming them manually and moving them to the relevant directory. It’s no big job and can be done at any time. The most important task is completed with absolute ease and in record time. That’s the scanning part. I’m busy investigating how I can automate the moving of files automatically by using Hazel, but I’m very happy with the ScanSnap and heartily recommend it to anyone facing the paper mountain dilemma!

There’s a rather annoying bug in Photoshop Elements 6 for the Mac. As you may have noticed in my post on What’s on my iPhone, the animation of the screens is a tad fast. Way too fast, in fact. Problem is, the animation interval in Elements 6 can be changed, but has no effect.

Clicking the field with the mouse is of no use. Instead, one needs to use the tab key to progress to the delay field. Type any value in and watch the animation…there is no change from the 0.2 default.

That means one is stuck with a rather frightening delay value of 0.2. It results in quick animated sequences like this:

Trying to change the delay value and seeing no effect caused me considerable frustration. A search on the Interwebs turned up some additional information:  Adobe‘s TechNote on the issue is rather useless, indicating that the value can be changed but won’t be effective.

Most annoyingly, there is no indication that the bug will be fixed anytime soon.

Of late I’ve been a bit obsessed with getting various operating systems to read various file systems. The main reason for that is that I needed to migrate various systems: first the stuff I had stored on the ext3 file system on the Mandriva-based katana to the new iMac.

I had the Drobo connected to the Linux system using the USB 2.0 interface and used rsync on a daily basis to back up my data.  I wasn’t in the mood to fiddle with ext3 on the Drobo as I wanted to have access to the storage system from other systems that run Windows. The result was that my Drobo was formatted NTFS, resulting in the four 1TB drives being partitioned into one 2TB and  one 800MB partition. Certainly not ideal, but workable. With the arrival of the iMac, I decided to trash that partitioning scheme and opt for a file system that handled thin provisioning in a slightly more intelligent way than NTFS does. The result was a 12 hour exercise during which all data was copied from the Drobo to various external hard drives, a partitioning of the Drobo for a maximum possible provision of 16TB using HFS+ and then a copy back of all the data. Until my DroboShare arrives (the shipment destined for South Africa was tampered with in Amsterdam and all DroboShare units stolen), the Drobo is connected to the iMac through the FireWire 800 port. It’s fast!

From the iMac, I’ve shared the Drobo making it available to all other systems in the house via the wired and wireless network. But, Windows systems cannot mount Mac volumes natively. For a while, I’ve used MacDrive and found that it works exceptionally well. The latest version runs without issue on the 64-bit Windows 7 installation. The only disadvantage I can name is the price: MacDrive 8 costs USD 49.95 for a single system. That’s pricey, but worth it. I’m more at ease with the current Drobo configuration and have more Mac systems requiring access to the storage unit than Windows systems. To sweeten the deal, MediaFour provides two licenses for USD 59.95. That’s good value and suited my requirement for licensing two systems perfectly.

The download is small. The 5MB file installs without fanfare, requiring very little user input. It’s simply a file system driver, after all. Once the installation is complete, the MacDrive icon appears in the task bar. There’s no need to click on that unless one requires to perform special functions. Those include burning a Mac-compatible optical disk or formatting a hard drive for use by Mac OS X.

More advanced settings are available under the MacDrive options link. Once again, these are of no interest to anyone unless a very specific configuration or operation is required. This is really a run and forget utility. Once installed, I immediately saw the shared Drobo in the Windows Explorer from G2S running Windows 7.

All ordinary file operations are seamless and work without a hitch. Though this is an expensive option, it is very stable and requires no additional action to access the HFS+ drives. I was unable to find many alternatives that could perform the same functions at a lower price.

Though it’s built using a variety of UNIX components based on BSD, there is no native support for everyday Linux file systems in Mac OS X. I found that out the hard way, having torn the 320GB boot drive and a 400GB data drive from katana. Those contained ext3 file systems which I assumed I could simply hook up to the iMac and transfer my data.

Of course, I made another backup to an NTFS volume, but there was some stuff I wanted to get hold of on the hard drives. With Windows 7 installed and katana up and running to service the IT requirements of my better half, I hooked up the two drives in an external enclosure to the MacBook…

It’s not the type of message one is intent on seeing. No longer having easy access to a Linux system, I was unsure what to do. Clicking Initialize… at this point would not be a good idea.

I’ve discussed MacFUSE before, particularly with regard to NTFS support in Leopard. That was my first port of call, being a standard component I install on a new Mac.

It didn’t take too long to find an extension for MacFUSE specifically written to support both ext2 and ext3 file systems. Aptly named fuse-ext2, the only requirement is that MacFUSE has already been installed. The plug-in is simply installed and after a recommended reboot the machine is quite capable of reading the attached ext3 hard disk.

I plugged in the hard drive and was rewarded almost immediately with a mounted file system. For my purpose, fuse-ext2 works perfectly. I have no need to write back to the drive, which is something the developer warns about: the drive is mounted by default in read-only mode.

Though it is possible to change this to be read and write, such an operation is not recommended.

Here’s my advice for any file system woes you may have with Leopard: check out MacFUSE and its associated plug-ins first.

I haven’t messed around with the Logitech Harmony Remote control for quite a while.

A new release of the Logitech desktop software that enables configuration of the device prompted me to download and install. I downloaded both the Windows and Mac versions of the software and proceeded to install release 7.6.0.8 on G2S running Windows 7. On Windows, the software runs without an issue, allowing me to log in to my online account and retrieve the settings for the Harmony One. In the past, I’ve not had too much success running the previous version of the software for the Harmony One on the MacBook. Things should be better with the newer version I thought. Right…

7.6.0.8 does not run well on the Mac. At least not on mine – neither the MacBook nor the iMac have any interest in running this rather poor excuse for an application. The most common failure is the rather distressing error message displaying issues about an object that has been moved.

The fact that IIS is mentioned makes the error even more disturbing. Dragging the Logitech Harmony Remote Software icon from the Applications folder to the desktop is one step in the right direction. The application actually launches and presents the login screen. The joy is short-lived: within seconds of clicking the login button, another error message appears.

That’s basically it. There is not much more to do. The suggested tip of looking for the cookies.txt file and deleting it in the working directory of the application turns up very little on my systems. In fact, the named directory Macintosh HD\Application Support\Logitech\browser-logitech does not even exist! Creating the top-level directory in the hope of coaxing the application to write its cookies is of no consequence.

The fault, in my opinion, lies with that wondrous piece of rubbish called Java. Wherever this thing turns up, stuff stops working. Versions of the VM are important, but no one can ever pinpoint what the required version is. Updating to the latest Java version available for Leopard as suggested is also useless. It’s probably Java and/or a permissions issue. For now, I’ll stick with the software as it runs on Windows and trust that Logitech will finally create a version of the desktop software that actually works on the Mac without requiring endless searching for solutions. A native app that relies on the operating system and not on a rubbish virtual machine would be nice.

Then again, with the support site down, who knows what these guys are doing…

It must be old age, but I’ve lost the ability to grab my latest gadget acquisition, strip the packaging off it and start playing with it as soon as possible. Nowadays, gadgets get to sit around, often waiting in their original boxes, safety tape still in place. The iMac was no exception and it’s taken me almost a week to unpack and set up. Not that the setup takes any time, to be honest. It’s a question of opening the box, lifting the smallish box containing the mouse off the top and then hauling out the rather larger 24″ dream machine. Strangely, the keyboard is not in the box but is supplied separately. It’s the longer keyboard, containing a numeric keypad.

No question: this is the most fantastic computer I’ve ever owned and it completes my transition to the Mac platform. At 24″, the available screen real estate is more than adequate. Using Spaces, I have my usual four desktops that I configure to host specific applications. Instead of shoving all my data onto the internal 640GB hard drive, I’ve connected a 1TB Seagate drive via USB and currently have the Drobo attached via the Firewire 800 port. Once I have the DroboShare in-house, the Drobo will move to its rightful place on the network, providing a unified shared disk for all machines.

I selected the 2.93GHz system with 4GB RAM as it provides a decent amount of horsepower for all applications I intend running. Snow Leopard in September will provide access to a 64-bit OS and that should improve response times even further. The iMac is fast: reboots take a few seconds and there is no problem running a number of applications all accessing hardware resources concurrently.

First order of business was to install the latest patches, then add iWork, Aperture, Elements, Canon DPP, and a variety of other software components. Then, the lengthy process of pulling photos and music from the Drobo and adding to Aperture, iPhoto and iTunes. My final task is to migrate mail data from Thunderbird on the Mandriva box to Mail.app.

Once again, the argument can go something like this: Apple kit is certainly expensive, but there’s no denying build quality, aesthetic appeal and the fact that this stuff just works.

At the end of January I purchased a copy of TuneUp to assist me with the arduous task of adding missing album art to music tracks and also cleaning up various MP3 tags. The software works well, though I often find the TuneUp sidebar a bit obtrusive in the way it simply pushed iTunes out of the way when it launches. But the software does what it’s supposed to.

There have been a few updates to the version I initially installed, but last week’s update was the first one to kill TuneUp. After the update had been installed, no access to the application seemed possible. Not even a reinstallation solved the issue of a white sidebar with a constantly-twhirling progress icon.

I attempted a first uninstallation and subsequent reinstallation with little success. Then, I downloaded the latest version and tried again. No go. As a last resort, I once again navigated to the location of the uninstaller (it can be found in the directory /Users/<user name>/Library/Log).

Instead of running it with the default selections for removal, I clicked Select All.

I’m still a bit nervous about all the /usr/local/lib content I selected for removal, but so far I haven’t experienced any issues with Mac OS X and any applications. I rebooted, then launched the TuneUp installer again.

The TuneUp installation is quick and painless. When I launched iTunes, I was pleased to see that the content in the application had been restored. The new version looks slick.

If you’ve had a similar issue with the latest issue of TuneUp on Mac OS X, this fix may help you too.

Getting the Huawei E220 modem to work with Mac OS X is no big deal, even if the stock Huawei dashboard software is not installed. I need to use the E220 with a variety of systems, from Windows and Linux to the MacBook and as such don’t rely on the Huawei connection dashboard unless I’m using Windows. That means the operating system needs to give me some support to get the card to work without too much hassle.

On Leopard, the modem installation is easy though connection management could be a bit more elegant. A click on the phone icon in the menu bar provides rudimentary functionality, but very little feedback regarding data transfer rates and bandwidth consumption.

I stumbled across a rather nice utility to make working with the E220 on Mac OS X a bit more pleasant on my usual trawl through the Interwebs. CheetahWatch won’t make the E220 speedier or provide better performance, but it will provide far better feedback and even warn when certain usage values have been reached. The utility is a free download and really tiny. Once installed, I removed the phone icon from the menu bar. CheetahWatch indicates signal strength and connectivity in a small icon on the menu bar and provides a context icon from which a couple of settings may be selected.

When selecting Connect, the application uses the standard dialler, but shields the user somewhat from the simple interface OS X provides. Access to the usage history is a click away and the Status option provides a simple yet effective indication of current transfer rates and signal strength.

With the exception of the FFFFFFFFFFFF text indicating a non-existent network, CheetahWatch is a must-have for anyone pairing an E220 modem with Mac OS X. Download it from the CheetahWatch site.

I finally got my hands on the new iLife ’09 today. I’m typing one-handed, but am nevertheless excited to check out iPhoto‘s face recognition and geotagging features.

The 1.5GB install also includes a much-needed update to iMovie and an interesting set of lessons in GarageBand.