How To Disable Time Machine Local Backups (and Relinquish Space in the MobileBackups Folder)

This morning, after importing a bunch of RAW files from my Nikon camera, I was startled (once more) by the lack of responsiveness of my MacBook Pro running OS X Lion.

Since the update, in fact, I'm growing pretty disappointed with Lion. It never roared just like the good ole Snow Leopard. The Lion cub has only shyly purred and whined, so far.

One of the things that bothers me most is Spotlight performance. Assuming you noticed it, have you ever wondered what the mdworker process is doing when it jeopardizes your Mac resources? I have: staring impotently at the screen, listening to the spinning rust crackling, powerlessly witnessing how the operating system is waiting to complete who-knows-what.

This morning, I opened Lightroom, started importing some RAW files, and started working on them. Well, trying to work on them while Lion was performing its... "housekeeping".

Frustrated, I expressed my anger on Google+. A friend of mine, Joaquin, pointed out both the cause and a workaround of the new Lion's behaviour.

It turns out that Lion is performing periodic local backups that will be flushed upon your time machine disk when connected. Thinking about versions, aren't you? Anyway, that's also why the new /.MobileBackups folder into your OS X hard disk is eating up disk space. Never noticed purple and white snapshot lines in Lion's Time Machine user interface? White ones are local backups, purple ones are "regular"time machine backups on an external disk. Well, local backups are kept for 8 days and they'll be taken only if you've got enough space on your disk. However, if you, like me, manage huge quantities of big files (such as a camera RAW files), this feature can start eating up an enormous amount of space.

If you, like me, feel like turning off this amazing feature you can use the following command:

$ sudo tmutil disablelocal

Should you change your mind about it, you can always turn it on again using:

$ sudo tmutil enablelocal

These are just the kind of options that should be accessible in the user interface.

Hope this helps you.

Multiple Icons of the Same Application in Launchpad

One of the new features introduced by OS X Lion is the Launchpad. The launchpad gives you access to the installed applications in your Mac from a window that is reminiscent of iOS devices. In fact, it superimposes on your current desktop window, with a fancy blur effect, and a list of application icons is presented in a rectangular grid. You can even make folder in it by dragging an icon over one other. It seems an iPhone screen on steroids.

In my humble opinion, it's awful.

Anyway, one day, using a wrong gesture, the Launchpad screen was launched and I noticed that the Skype icon was presented twice. Strange, thought I. I tried to remove one of them, but they could not be deleted. I tried dragging one into the trash. It didn't work. To make the story short, I did not lose time investigating this weird Launchpad behavior: it's the kind of window I prefer not to see at all.

Some weeks after Skype informs me that an update is available: I accept to install it immediately and wait for the installer to finish. Curiosity killed the cat: I opened the Launchpad and guess what? Another brand-new Skype icon had just been added to the long row of Skype icons already present in the Launchpad window.

A quick glance confirmed what I already knew: there was just one Skype application installed in my Mac and no other link to it was present whatsoever that might have gotten Launchpad confused. I completely removed Skype from the system and reinstalled it from scratch. No way.

It was just time to act and stop the uncontrollable icon proliferation. Since every user can customize Launchpad, I thought that a good place to start was the ~/Library folder. I grep-ped every file into it looking for the "Skype" string (the icon title in the Launchpad) and a file caught my attention:

~/Library/Application Support/Dock/FABCDB4F-FBDE-42E4-A14F-80FA7476989C.db

An SQLite 3 database file (as confirmed by the file command)! It looks like the potential offender, doesn't it? I then backed up the file, removed it, logged out and logged in again. I started the Launchpad and bingo! Launchpad had just regenerated the database file and now only one Skype icon was shown in the Launchpad window.

As I said, I'm not going to use again. But at least I can rest assured that icons are gone away. Hope this can help you guys if you run into similar troubles with Launchpad.

Switching To Linux - Tale Of A Former Mac User Who Is Also A Musician

Switching to Linux is easy for most of us. You just have to download and burn a Linux distribution and boot your computer with it. If the Linux distribution you have chosen is a modern one, then you can finish installing it on your machine in 6 steps or less.

However, if you rely on your computer for a living, then you need to do some preparations prior to making the switch. Kim Cascone, an experienced and gifted musician and composer had been using an Apple PowerBook to compose music. When his PowerBook G4 exhibited signs of age, he did a quick fact check and found that he could save as much as $3000 (which includes the machine and the software costs) if he switched to Linux.
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How To Connect The Magic Mouse Automatically (Sort Of...)

The last few days I've been using my brand new Apple Magic Mouse. I admit it's a pretty good piece of hardware although I doubt it's an adequate choice if you're a MacBook user as I am: the Magic Mouse, or at least its official gestures, fall (very) short when compared with the integrated MacBook trackpad. Anyway, I wanted a mouse and here it is.

Installing is really easy: depending on your OS X configuration you might even be automatically asked to configure your brand new mouse. If you're not, as in my case, just use the Bluetooth/Setup Bluetooth Device... and the pairing and the first configuration will be really quick.

Beware that if your Magic Mouse disconnects from your computer (because it goes into sleep mode or simply because you move your laptop and the mouse goes out of range) it will not reconnect again... unless you click it. Yes. This behaviour seemed really strange to me at first. I was expecting the mouse to automatically pair again, at least when moved. But it won't and you'll need to click.

Makes sense. If you're mouse is sleeping, it won't wake up when moved or when you slide your finger over it. Maybe Apple might improve this behaviour in the future: are we seeing accelerometers everywhere, aren't we? 

An @ Symbol in OS X File Permissions and the Problems That Came

Today I was deploying some software updates in our Solaris 10 servers and, since such updates are distributed in files archived with the GNU tar utility (not shipped by default in Solaris 10), I had to convert them before moving them to our servers. I'm quite accustomed to such a procedure: that's why (amongst other more important reasons) I always have an OpenSolaris virtual machine running in my other desktops (thanks to VirtualBox).

Today, notwithstanding the fact the I had a gut feeling that I was not doing the correct thing, I decided to open a Mac OS X terminal and do the job from there. GNU tar and pax are there, aren't they? There should not be any problem, thought I.

Well, I should have paid attention to that gut feeling of mine: to spare the required OpenSolaris boot, I lost much more than what I had planned. I learned something new but... what was it worth? A bunch of non portable behaviours of Mac OS X? Just the confirmation I needed, once again (I realize I'm a stubborn fellow): if you can, do not rely on a Mac to do your UNIX-ish tasks. Chances are you're going to waste more than you believed.

This is what happened.

Making a pax File for a Solaris Host

This was meant to be a quick task. I copied the archive from a Solaris NFS mount where, some days ago, I had stored the file. I ran gunzip to decompress the file, ran tar to unpack the files, ran pax to store the resulting directory in a pax file and used rsync to quickly transfer the resulting archive back to the target Solaris machine:

$ gunzip [file.tar.gz]

$ tar xf [file.tar]

$ pax -w -f ./[file.pax] [dir]

$ rsync -vz --inline [file.pax] [myserver]

I then connected to the target server and used pax to explode the transferred archive. Since one of the things I feared was Mac OS X messing around with file permissions, I quickly checked the results on the Solaris side and everything looked fine. Well, sort of...

The next thing I usually do with such bundles is checking the differences between the running version and the soon-to-be-deployed one to be sure I won't miss any customization I made in the instance to be patched. It usually is another easy job since very few XML files are usually involved. Great was my surprise when diff began to write out hundreds of differences between one version and another.

Doh! It seemed as though somewhere in between somebody had decided to duplicate each file following a naming pattern; if the expected file was named x, I was seeing two files in Solaris: x and ._x. Where did these file came out from?

Back to the Mac

The original directory had been deleted just after producing the pax file so that the first I did was using pax to unpack the archive in the Mac. As I told you, everything looked fine. Except for an @ character that should not be there:

drwxr-xr-x@ [...snip...]

Maybe you don't know about it but that means that such a file has extended attributes set. Extended attributes are basically metadata: the file system does not interpret them and the ls command uses the @ symbol after the file permissions to inform you that they are there.

Strange Things Are Happening

There's nothing strange about extended attributes: it's very important to be aware of their existence to correctly handle them when, for example, you need to do a backup or move files from one file system to another (unless you don't mind losing them.) Solaris' pax and tar, for example, both support archival of extended attributes even if, by default, they ignore them. Since I know that my original archive had no extended attribute set in any of its file, I just ran a plain pax to build my archive. Maybe OS X pax defaults to a different behaviour so that I checked pax man page.

Doh! Oddly, OS X pax man page makes no mention at all of extended attributes, notwithstanding the fact that, undoubtedly, it was in fact managing some. Which? In OS X, just run xattr -l to find out.

Quarantine

A xattr told me that the com.apple.quarantine extended attribute was set in the culprit and a quick script confirmed that every file in that directory had that attribute set. According to Apple's documentation, that attribute is set by recent versions of OS X to mark the file as a potential threat. Do you remember when finder kindly asks you if you're really sure you want to open a downloaded file? The quarantine extended attribute is the mechanism OS X programs use to store that information.

How did it make it there?

But wait! I downloaded a tar.gz file and stored in an NFS 4 mounted file system for later processing. The question is:

• How did that attribute was stored in the NFS 4 file system where I stored the file?
• How did that attribute make it into every file stored into the pax archive?

As far as it concerns the first question, NFS 4 does support extended attributes. But again, should it be there, I would have known because I checked it directly in the Solaris host and, moreover, the box that acts as a NFS server runs some cron scripts that checks (and fixes to my taste) ACLs and extended attributes in some of the exported NFS file systems. It was very easy to find out that OS X, when storing such a file in a remote NFS share, instead of using NFS 4 extended attributes it stores them in a separate file named with the pattern mentioned above. I then discovered that the shared NFS file system in question is plagued by ._* files. Everywhere.

As far as it concerns the second question, well... I copied once again the file using the finder and performed the same operations I did before. The resulting files all had the quarantine extended attribute set. Who's the culprit, I do not know. I don't even care. The fact is that OS X is performing this operation with tools such as pax and tar without informing the user and, what's even worse, without even mentioning it in such commands' man pages.

Conclusion

The reasoning above explains why, even if Solaris pax (such as NFS) aren't managing any extended attribute, I did end up with duplicated files which were inserted into the pax file produced with Mac OS X. Probably they aren't going to hurt my deployment but surely they should not be there.

For the sake of curiosity, I checked that removing the ._* files in the NFS share made everything go back to normal.

Nevertheless, since I feel there are many OS X dark corners left for me to discover, I won't be making such an error again. Instead of waiting a couple of minutes for a virtual machine to bootstrap, I ended up wasting an entire hour for a (yet another...) bad documented and non-portable idiosyncrasy of an operating system that brings no added value with it.

Letter From Apple: iPhone's Signal Strength Algorithm Is Flawed.

Yesterday Apple published an open letter regarding the problems that are affecting iPhone 4 and the supposed flaw in the antenna design. Just to quote the “interesting” part of it (trimming down iPhone eulogies and Apple’s declarations of love toward its newly born child):

We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising.

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

“Totally wrong”. I wonder what does that mean.

Anyway, Since I own an iPhone I always complained about dropped calls and pretty inaccurate signal strength estimations shown by the phone. Either I had at least 4 bars or I had none. Even at maximum strength, the phone was dropping some calls. Simple cross checks with other phones I own (connected to the same operator) made me suspect that the iPhone was making way too optimistic signal strength estimations.

I’m glad to hear that they finally found the “solution” to this problem although I believe that such a flaw shouldn't have been discovered years after the first iPhone release. Too few of us were complaining? Many of us were blinded by the supposedly Apple’s infallibility? Apple wasn’t listening?

I don’t know. After the next software update, although signal won’t improve, at least the iPhone won’t be lying to us any longer.

Apple Steve Jobs - Thoughts on Adobe Flash

In recent months, Apple has come out strongly against Adobe's Flash platform by affirming that there won't be any support for Flash on Apple's mobile products (iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad).
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Run Google Android on an Apple iPhone

Do you own an Apple iPhone? If yes, have you wished you could run a Linux flavour on your iPhone perhaps via dual booting ? Then your wish is answered. "Linux on the iPhone" blog team has successfully installed Google Android (which runs a Linux kernel) on Apple iPhone.

Watch the following video and gauge for yourselves how well Google Android performs on an Apple iPhone.
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GlobalSAN iSCSI initiator for Mac OS/X v. 4 has been released

As I told you in another blog post, I'm using GlobalSAN iSCSI initiator for Mac OS/X to remotely connect to my time machine disk, which happens to be a ZFS volume managed by a Solaris host. Studio Network Solutions has just released GlobalSAN version 4: alongside some UI enhancements, this new version of the GlobalSAN software takes advantage of Snow Leopard characteristics. A screenshot of the new GlobalSAN UI is the following:

A word of warning: if you're using an older version of GlobalSAN (such as version 3), in order to successfully install this new version you've got to completely remove the older software by using the uninstaller which comes with the older package. If you no longer have it, please download it once more, uninstall it and then install the new version.

Is Safari leaking memory?

I was working at some Java EE application with my MacBook while I realized that I was running out of memory. Strange, isn't it? I was just running the following:

• NetBeans 6.8.
• Mail
• iChat
• Safari

Not so much for a MacBook equipped with a 4GB of RAM to experience a memory shortage. When I opened the Activity Monitor I was shocked to discover that my MacBook experience was jeopardized by the Safari web browser.

Since then, I'm monitoring Safari resource consumption. I've also been searching for information about Safari leaks and it seems that since a long time there are "outstanding" memory leaks which, apparently, haven't been corrected so far.

After using Safari some time that's what I see:

Although I'm reasonably happy with Safari speed, almost one gigabyte is simply too much for some newspaper reading and a maximum of a couple of tabs open. I'm seriously thinking about switching to Google Chrome.

Apple Mac OS X' "Safe Sleep"

Safe sleep is no new kid on the block: at least as far as it concerns major operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux or even Sun Microsystems' Solaris: never heard about Windows' hibernation or Solaris suspend and resume? I bet you have.

Apple has christened this functionality as "Safe Sleep" in its flagship OS, Mac OS/X. What's most "astonishing" about "Safe Sleep" is that you're not going to find any reference to it in your Finder menu or even in your System Preferences panes. You'll only find references to a "generic" sleep function.

Safe Sleep

During safe sleep the system will persist to disk all of the machine state (such as RAM's) so that it could be restored in the case all of the power is lost, for example during battery replacement. Under normal conditions, you'll hardly notice a resume from disk since the laptop battery power will maintain data on RAM even when the battery power has run real low. That's why during battery calibration Apple suggests to let the laptop sleep at least 5 hours. The next time you calibrate your battery, you should notice a slightly different boot screen when your laptop wakes up and reads its state from disk.

How to force a safe sleep?

Despite other implementations of a similar technology, Mac OS/X does not provide a way to force a system hibernation simply because every time your computer goes to sleep, it will persist its state to disk. This way you can let your battery discharge without worrying about your data. You could remove it, too. Next boot, it would simply read state from disk and restore it.

That's counterintuitive for who's accustomed to other OS where such a process should be explicitly triggered by the user. When using an Apple laptop, simply don't worry. You'll quickly get used to never, or very rarely, shutting down your system.

Handling your laptop while sleeping

When your laptop is sleeping, most of the hardware components will be completely off. That's the case of the hard disk: if you're laptop is equipped with a good old rotating hard drives, as soon as the computer state has been persisted, the disks will be switched off. The only evidence about this is the white led in front of your laptop: it will switch from a solid on state to a blinking state when the drives have been switched off.

Until complete disk shutdown, handle your laptop with care.

Once the laptop is sleeping, you can safely handle it as if it had been completely shut down. The real difference between a sleeping and a shut down laptop is RAM electrical state. As far as it concerns mechanical parts, there will be no difference at all. Hence:

No need to worry about hard disk heads landing on the platters. Put your sleeping laptop into your bag and safely transport it.

No need to emphasize the obvious, but I noticed a bit of misinformation about how safe sleep works and about the dos and don'ts. Indeed, safe sleep is the best way to forget about quit all applications and shut down. Reboots won't ever be faster.

Calibrating a MacBook battery

Li-ion batteries aren't exotic power sources these days: possibly, indeed, they're the most common type of battery used in consumer electronics. a Li-ion batteyr is powering your laptop (and a number of other devices) right now.

Li-ion batteries have considerably less memory effect than their predecessors and probably that's the reason why many of us don't worry that much about properly maintaining their batteries. In fact, Li-ion batteries performance degradation can be so slow that it is imperceptible for the user on a day-by-day basis, although this continuous process will typically reduce a Li-ion battery capacity by an approximate 20% per year. An consequence of this effect is a lack of accuracy on the battery charge meter some batteries provide, such as those that equip Apple notebooks.

Taking care of your battery

Ironically, Li-ion batteries do not require so big an effort to be used properly so that they can deliver their best performance to you. To say it plain: don't let electrons stagnate inside your battery and let them flow, instead. In fact, prolonged high charge periods reduce your battery life. High temperatures damage it as well. Therefore you should not be running your devices with the charger constantly plugged in, although it's a common practice for laptop users.

Ideally, you should let your battery discharge for time to time: that's why many laptop producers publish guidelines about battery usage patterns and calibration procedures. As stated, Li-ion batteries are subject to a process of reduction of their full charge capacity and, because of this process, your battery charge meter might start to lose accuracy: for example, it might display less than 100% when the battery if fully charged.

To reduce your battery wear and tear and to improve the accuracy of your battery charge meter, you should follow the instructions of your equipment to periodically calibrate the batteries of your appliances. In the case of a MacBook, as well as for most of its laptops, Apple has published calibrations instructions.

Calibrating your MacBook battery

These are the steps outlined by Apple to calibrate a MacBook Li-ion battery:

• Plug in the power adapter and fully charge your PowerBook's battery until the light ring or LED on the power adapter plug changes to green and the onscreen meter in the menu bar indicates that the battery is fully charged.
• Allow the battery to rest in the fully charged state for at least two hours. You may use your computer during this time as long as the adapter is plugged in.
• Disconnect the power adapter while the computer still on and start running the computer off battery power. You may use your computer during this time. When your battery gets low, the low battery warning dialog appears on the screen.
• At this point, save your work. Continue to use your computer; when the battery gets very low, the computer will automatically go to sleep.
• Turn off the computer or allow it to sleep for five hours or more.
• Connect the power adapter and leave it connected until the battery is fully charged again.

That's it. Remember to calibrate your battery from time to time depending on your usage pattern. If you use your laptop plugged in most of the time, calibrate it at least once a month.

What happens when my laptop "automatically goes to sleep"?

This may sound scaring to some of us but there's nothing to worry about. Almost every Apple laptop nowadays implement a "safe sleep" mode which if functionally very similar to Windows hibernation of Solaris' suspend and resume. Your work won't be lost because your machine state has been persisted to disk when your computer went into sleep mode. Even if your battery depletes completely (even if you replace it!), you won't lose any data and your laptop, when woken up, will restore its state from disk.

Mac OS X as an iSCSI initiator: Time Machine on ZFS

As I described in previous posts, I setup an iSCSI target with Solaris COMSTAR backed by a ZFS volume. I want to use this volume as a disk for Mac OS X Time Machine. This way, I'll get the best of the two technologies: a pretty looking and easy to manage Time Machine for backing up my MacBook backed by an enterprise-level, redundant and scalable ZFS volume published as an iSCSI target over my private LAN.

No more consumer disks on a table, no more poor hardware-implemented file system sharing protocol. No more worries to lose a disk. Just Solaris, ZFS, COMSTAR and a LAN.

Mac OS X as an iSCSI initiator

Although it's a subject most spoken of, Apple hasn't released yet the necessary components for Mac OS X to be an iSCSI initiator. Fortunately there exists a solid and free solution by Studio Network Solutions: globalSAN iSCSI Initiator for OS X. Just download it, install it, restart your OS X and a new panel will appear in your System Settings:

Connecting to a target

Connecting to a target is really easy: just use the globalSAN iSCSI GUI to add the target:

The target name is obviously retrieved from your target configuration.

Using the disk

If you read the previous post, you'll know that this target is backed by a ZFS volume which must be formatted before being used. With the Disk Utility you can format the new disk:

Using the disk with the Time Machine

To use the new disk with the Time Machine you just follow the usual procedure:

Conclusion

That's it. Using a ZFS volume as a disk for Mac OS X Time Machine is just a few clicks away. Next time you plan to buy a new external hard disk, just wait and take into account that a robust enterprise-level solution is available with not much more than the necessary budget to purchase a couple of consumer disks.

Using ZFS with Apple's Time Machine

The many of us who got accustomed to the ZFS wonders won't willingly trade ZFS for another file system, ever. But even though many ZFS users are running Solaris on their machines, including laptops, as I am, there are cases in which running another OS is desirable: that's when I seek the best option to integrate the other systems I'm running with Solaris and ZFS.

In the simplest case using some file system protocol such as NSF or CIFS is sufficient (and desirable): that's how I share the ZFS file systems where I archive my photos, my video, my music and so on. Sharing such file systems with another UNIX, Windows or Mac OS/X (just to cite some), it's just some commands away.

In other occasions accessing a file system is not sufficient: that's the case with Apple's Time Machine, which is expecting a whole disk for its own sake connected locally.

Fortunately, integrating ZFS and Time Machine is pretty easy if you're running a COMSTAR-enabled Solaris. Although setting up COMSTAR is a very well documented topic by the Solaris and OpenSolaris documentation, I'll give you a walk through the necessary steps to get the job done and having your time machine making its backup on a ZFS volume. You'll end up with the benefits of both world: a multidimensional time machine which will take advantage of ZFS snapshotting and cloning capabilities.

The steps I'll detail in the following posts are:

• Setting up Solaris COMSTAR and configuring an iSCSI target port for a ZFS volume.
• Setting up Mac OS/X as an iSCSI initiator and configuring Time Machine. 

With such a solution, you will need no USB/FireWire/anything-else drive hanging around. You won't need to rely on consumer drives which implement some kind of file system sharing protocol which, as explained earlier, won't fit into the time machine use case.

Just a network connection and a box to install Solaris, ZFS and COMSTAR, and you'll provide a scalable, enterprise-level, easy to maintain solution for your storage needs.

iPhone on a Solaris Host

I'm a moderately happy owner of an iPhone and, as I'm usually running Solaris on my systems, I've struggled to find a working solution to connect my handset to an iTunes instance. One of the major drawbacks of the iPhone is that you really need iTunes: whether you want to upgrade it, back it up, or simply transfer the contents you purchased on the Apple stores, you need iTunes to get the job done.

I'm running several virtualized OS on my Solaris guests with Sun xVM VirtualBox, and never managed to make it work because of some limitations of the Solaris USB driver implementation. A couple of days ago, Sun announced the release of xVM VirtualBox 3.1.2 and in the changelog I read the following:

• Solaris hosts: several USB fixes (including support for Apple iPhone)
  

I quickly updated my VirtualBox instance, quickly live-upgraded my Solaris Express Nevada build 116 to Nevada build 129 (during the installation, VirtualBox informed me that it needed recent Nevada builds for the USB kernel module to work properly), plugged the iPhone in an USB slot of a Sun Ultra 24 and it worked!

Apple Discontinues Mac OS/X ZFS Project

One of the reasons I really love Solaris 10 (and OpenSolaris) is ZFS. I'm also running Solaris at home because of ZFS. I'd also thought about buying an Apple machine some day or the other but was waiting about ZFS being integrated into Mac OS/X. Well, it seems that the game is over:

Apple has posted a note on its ZFS project web page informing the users that the project is being discontinued. Apparently, there's a ZFS MacOS refugee camp (in their own words) on Google Groups.

I'm really sorry about that. ZFS is a great technology and it would have fitted very well on Mac OS/X, although it's (mainly) a consumer oriented Operating System. I was wondering about a ZFS-enabled Time Machine (sort of OpenSolaris Time Slider). Real cool, but it'll never be: rumors suggest that it was a political, rather than technical choice.

Nonetheless I think Mac lovers have lost the opportunity of running ZFS as their file system. As far as it concerns myself, a real argument about switching (at least the laptop) has just faded away and I think I'll keep on sticking with Sun Desktops and with some compatible laptop here at home.

The iPhone as a gaming platform: the App. Store business model is the killer factor

I've been reading many articles about iPhone capabilities as a gaming platform: the last one I read, Wall Street Journal's Apple to Sony, Nintendo: Game Over man!, was quite clear.

Curiosity is a powerful driver and in a matter of minutes I found myself digging into the App. Store to choose a game to drive a quick test with. I chose Need For Speed Undercover. The quality of the game seems impressive to me. Rendering, music, responsiveness of the iPhone (it's a game whose user interface uses the built-in accelerometer): despite the size of the display, it seems like I'm running it with a last generation game console. No doubt. At the end of this articles Here are some NFSU screenshots, if you're wondering about its quality.

But the great news for me as an user, as Wall Street Journal pointed out, is not the fact that I'm handling a mobile device which, incidentally, is a great gaming platform too. This is just a technological accomplishment I could expect any other producer to achieve. The news is that I, who never owned a gaming console nor am planning to, bought a game. Let aside the initial investment to buy, for example, an XBox. Console games are traditionally priced at much higher a level than I paid for NFSU, yesterday. Moreover, you have to go and buy it. Even if you downloaded it, you should still need to burn it. Apple's App. Store model is the winner and killer here. Yesterday night I was laying in my bed with my iPhone, wondering whether I would keep on reading a book with Stanza. I thought about the WSJ article, I opened the App. Store, chose a game, clicked on it and... started to play! Right ahead, just after waiting just a couple of minute for the download to complete. I did not moved from there and was charged less than 4 Euros.

Game addicts may well say that the gaming experience is not nearly as equal as it is when using another platform. I have to agree, but that's out of topic. What strikes me most is the iPhone gaming experience as an end user, from the initial purchase. Easy, comfortable, handy, cheap! The App. Store, moreover, is a growing library of applications here at hand: sometimes, what's most difficult is not buying but choosing.

Why I manually manage my iPhone's music

The problem

I own a pretty large music library which is hosted on a dedicated ZFS file system. Access to UNIX clients is provided via NFS and access to Windows clients is provided via CIFS. So far, so good. The problem is that the library is huge, very huge: not only the number of files is high, but some files themselves are huge. Whenever I buy a new CD, I rip it and encode it with a lossless codec in order to store the sufficient information in the case I need to burn another copy of the CD. On the Solaris Operating System, I'm using FLAC to encode such files. Alongside these lossless-encoded files, I use to encode another copy of the files in an easier to handle format, more suitable to use with portable devices. In this case, I use to re-encode FLAC files with an MP3 encoder.

Keeping organized such a library isn't difficult and the only problem I had so far is expanding storage according to my needs and backing it up: since I'm using ZFS, I'm an happier (and a wiser) man.

The problem with iTunes and such kind of programs is that they don't fit very well in the big library and networked storage scenario. Starting iTunes would take long to complete and, moreover, network would be the bottleneck. I never liked such a waste of resources and this is one of the reasons I never, ever, used a program to keep "organized" my music library.

But, what's the matter with the iPhone? Well, the iPhone is a glorified iPod and we all know that Apple is so kind to not allow us to read or write files on our phone but using iTunes.

iTunes synchronization

The iTunes way is very simple and idiot-proof: the iPhone is kept in sync with your iTunes-managed libraries: music, videos but also contacts, application and so forth. Kept I all of my music in just one laptop, that would (probably) be great but as I told you that's not (fortunately) the case.

The first times I synchronized my iPhone I used to:

• Adding files to my library.
• Synchronizing the iPhone.

Unfortunately, if my laptop cannot access the CIFS shares where the music is, iTunes just sees missing files and your iPhone will be empty after the next synchronization. Not so good.

The following times I thought I'd better copy files locally, first, and then synchronize. Good! Well, no. Because, unless you leave those files there (forever!), you'd hit the same behavior I described earlier. Replicating seldom is a good idea. Replicating such a library, definitely is not.

That's the kind of idiosyncrasy I hate in an end user program. Or it isn't an idiosyncrasy at all and it's me who's a strange user. Anyway, that's why I switched to manually manage my iPhone files. No library synchronization. I just copy files from the CIFS share directly into the iPhone. Just as if it was a plain old phone. No stale files on my laptop to keep iTunes happy.

iPhone user experience: is it ready for a color-blind person?

I own an iPhone since a couple of months and I must admit that, as far as it concerns my user experience as a color-blind person, it is the best mobile device I worked with in a long time. It isn't perfect, though.

If you're wondering what color-blindness is, you can start reading this Wikipedia article. I seldom notice the effect of such an impairment and when I do, I'm usually interacting with a computer.

There exist many forms of color blindness and mine is called protanopia. Protanopia differs from other forms, such as deuteranopia, because we experience an abnormal dimming of light at some wavelength with the result that, for example, red is easily confused with black.

In the case of the iPhone, I must admit that I'm experiencing just one problem: missed calls. There's a fancy icon down there indicating the number of unchecked missed call. When you open the corresponding window, guess what? Missed calls are "highlighted" using the good ol' red fonts while received or dialed calls are black. The background? White, just to make it worse. I tried looking for some other color scheme but there's none. Just the good ol' "iPhone experience" that Apple is providing us.

This rare impairment affects almost 1% of the male population. Not much, indeed. But for us, there are no red characters to catch our attention. They just fade to black, hiding between the others. If you're working with a color-blind person, please follow good sense: don't rely on colors and please, do not use red to catch their eyes. Just rely on the tools your word processor is offering you, such as that yellow marker whose existence you probably wondered about sometimes.

Pushing gmail to your iPhone (without GPush)

As I told you some posts ago I bought GPush and struggled to make it work. At the end I started to be notified about incoming mail, although with some glitches from time to time. Now, very shortly after GPush was released, you don't need it anymore: Google Sync is now pushing mail to your iPhone.

This is really good news because now you can sync your mail, your calendar and your contacts with your iPhone. As I was already using Google Sync for contacts and calendars, setting up GMail push was really easy: just the flip of a switch!

If you haven't set up your Google Sync account on your iPhone, just follow the instructions on the Google Sync web site.

As far as I can tell, mail is pushed to the iPhone almost instantaneously. Nonetheless, there's a thing I'm not really happy about. I miss is a notification popup: no one is ever shown and the counter on the mail icon is the only information you're given when a mail is pushed:

I would expect a mail to be managed just like an SMS or even a phone call: checking periodically sort of defies the purpose of a push notification...