I last bought a MacBook Pro from Apple in November of 2019, in the midst of a bout of travel that was about to come to an end. In point of fact, I haven't used my trusty MacBook Pro much in the last 19 months, since the COVID-19 pandemic started …

Today I read of the passing of Larry Tesler, a computer scientist with a long and storied career, spanning Xerox PARC, Apple, Amazon, Yahoo, and others. He's considered the father of the modeless interaction model (think Cut/Copy/Paste on the Mac). I met Larry in the late 1980s, when …

According to an article on PCWorld, Activision-Blizard has pulled all of their titles from nVidia's GeForce Now. In my days as CTO of Haste (a service that improves network connections for gamers), I had occasion to spend a fair amount of time playing Overwatch as part of our test regime …

There's been a lot of discussion about the 2019 Mac Pro and various assertions that it's over-designed, overpriced, or underpowered. Since I decided to replace my venerable 2013 Mac Pro[1] with a 2019 Mac Pro, I figured I'd write up my experience with the device as a developer. The …

Over Thanksgiving, one of the two drives in my "Big Disk" RAID (it was a mirror of 2 2TB drives that I used to store large things that aren't worth having on the SSD on my Mac Pro). Generally speaking, my response to failures with SMART (especially with cheap spinning …

Over the past couple of weeks, I once again reacquainted myself with the joy of using TimeMachine as a backup system. (Please, use more than one, at least one off-site and one on-site would be a good idea, consider CrashPlan for the offsite version, we've used it for years and …

Matt Gemmell penned a great piece on User Interface design and evolution as it relates to, well, a lot of things. It's definitely worth the time to read Tail Wagging.

I received a question this afternoon from my cousin about the amount of free flash in her MacBook Air and figured that the answer would probably be useful to others as well. Note that none of this is officially from Apple, so it might be wrong, but I have had …

Ah, a new release.... must be time for another slew of articles aimed at getting press and money for the "security" folks out there. For those of us with Macintoshes, here is my take on the whole Macintosh virus situation. Every time a new OS release comes out, a whole …

Many of you have already seen that Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) will be releasing on Friday. I've been running it as my primary OS on my laptop since the WWDC in June and look forward to getting a real install on there. You're probably also aware that PPC …

Due to a problem encountered by a friend recently when trying to deal with a lost admin password on a relative's Macintosh, I had occasion to revisit the topic of resetting Macintosh passwords. This is both an interesting tip, and a cautionary tale for those with important data on their …

With Apple having announced some new machines with really nice price points within the last week, I've been asked by some friends what my suggestions would be for copying the data to a new machine and removing data from the old one. Here, I'll try to put forth my current …

As I write this today, I'm the happy owner of a new MacBook Pro (the "unibody" or "late 2008" version). So, what of it? So far, so great. I'm very happy with the purchase and I'm looking forward to making a happy new Mac user of the designated recipient of …

A good analysis from Charles Miller of the popularity and purposefulness of the PC in the Get A Mac ads. The article recons that the same play is at work with the PC in the ads as was with the coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons.

A little known (but much loved by me) feature of every iPod (except the Shuffle) and the original iPhone was that you could charge the phone using the FireWire port on your computer. Of course, it's been quite a while since you could transfer data over FireWire, but you could …

Normally, I wouldn't post about an Apple security update, because they're relatively common and generally attack most of the issues within a period of time that everyone agrees is a bit too long. However, there was a lot of hubub about Apple's "delay" in getting the security patch out for …

Since the iPhone 2.0 release, more people are considering Mobile Me (the follow on to Dot Mac). For those of us with more than one computer, it's a very easy way to keep your contacts, calendars and other data in sync. However, there are some tricks for some kinds …

Michiel van Meeteren of Made by SOFA "fame" has issued a report entitled Indie Fever that stretches to over 100 pages of mostly text analyzing interviews that he made with a group of independent Apple software developers. I haven't had a chance to read it completely, although I did skim …

Well, Apple made for a lively Thursday this week by announcing the software roadmap (although not the hardware roadmap) for the iPhone. There was a lot to take in, and it took forever to download the SDK (ok, in reality, it took only a few hours, but Apple clearly wasn't …

Thanks to The Unofficial Apple Weblog for a pointer to these Apple ads of the past from the advertisements section of the web site, Attached. There's not a lot of recent stuff in here, but some of the older stuff, such as the every- ad-page-in-newsweek ad are classics.