MacPinoy

The Worldwide Developers Conference is slated for June 9th 10am Pacific Time. That’s about 12 midnight Manila time. I have never stayed up for any of Steve Jobs’ keynote address, but I may make this one an exception.

The one thing that has me very curious about this WWDC is the iPhone. There is a big possibility that the 3G iPhone will be announced this WWDC. But that’s not what interests me. What interests me is whether or not there will be an announcement of the immediate availability of an iPhone that legitimately works in the Philippines.

There are a few things riding on this official announcement. For one, I am hoping that Apple opens up the iTunes to the Filipinos. Currently, Philippine-based credit cards are not accepted in the iTunes store. If iTunes is not opened to Filipinos, how then can we get the official apps for the official iPhone?

I picked up a conversation at the Flickr Aperture group that pointed to a problem between Time Machine in 10.5.2 and Aperture.

When Leopard was first released, there were issues backing up or restoring libraries while Aperture was running, so Apple recommended excluding it manually.

10.5.2 fixed the bug, but had its own problem that if Time Machine backed up while Aperture was running, it would correctly skip the library, but would then back up the ENTIRE thing next time, regardless of what had changed.

10.5.3 fixes both bugs: Time Machine knows not to back up your library while Aperture is running, and knows how to incrementally back up your library when Aperture is not running.

And this got me thinking: maybe it is high time to do a disaster recovery of my Macbook Pro using my Time Machine backup. Since I have been using Aperture more and more these days, I don’t want to wake up one morning to find out that my hard disk has crashed and I lost all my images.

Gizmodo claims that the second generation, 3G-enabled iPhone will be launched on June 9. Though their headline proudly declares that it is “confirmed,” the confirmation does not come officially from Apple but, as Gizmodo’s article says, from “someone very, very close to the 3G iPhone.”

Now this would be a perfect time to also announce the availability of the iPhone in the Philippines.

Here’s my first tip. Get at least 2GB memory.

At first, my Macbook Pro only had 1GB memory. And man was Aperture slow! It was crawling when I would use the Loupe or when I was making sharpening adjustments. During lunch time I drove over to Power Mac in Greenbelt 3 and purchased two 1GB memory modules at P4,500 each.

Now, with 2GB memory, Aperture is much spiffier!

I have been an Adobe Lightroom user for over a year now. When Aperture came out, it was unappealing to me because of the $400 price tag. Plus, when I tried the demo, it was so slow that I totally lost interest. But now $200 seems quite reasonable, plus I have read in many reviews that Aperture now is blazing fast. And Ars Technica gave a positive review. One of my concerns, however, is on Aperture’s lack of presets.

So I’ll give it another try, and document my experiences here.

From Globe’s own website:

Globe, SingTel, Bharti Airtel and Optus today announced that they have signed an agreement with Apple to bring the iPhone to the Philippines, Singapore, India, and Australia later this year.

And Yuga asks: Does this mean that they will open up iTunes in the Philippines? Me: I don’t think so. I look at iPhone as an iPod Touch with phone capabilities, and just because I can buy iPods in the Philippines doesn’t mean that I can buy music from iTunes.

I have IDs in Yahoo and Gmail, and Adium, for me, is the one chat client to rule them all. And I look forward to the day that I can also chat with my Facebook buddies.

Adium blog revealed that its next release will support Facebook chat.

Taken from Winn, who further laments that it doesn’t work!

And it runs on a Mac!

From the Open Office site:

With Version 3.0, OpenOffice.org is now able to run on Mac OS X without the need for X11. Thus, OpenOffice.org behaves like any other Aqua application. The cool thing is, while the market leading office suite vendor dropped VBA support and the Solver feature, OpenOffice.org recently introduced limited VBA support and includes a powerful Solver component. In addition, OpenOffice.org integrates well with the Mac OS X accessibility APIs, and thus offers better accessibility support than many other Mac OS X applications. Finally, people like OpenOffice.org 3.0 for Mac OS X because of its very good stability and performance. Reportedly, some Mac users have switched to OpenOffice.org just because of its extremely good stability.

Want to give it a try? Then download it now. Just remember, it is still in beta so expect some bugs and crashes.

As expected, Psystar’s Open Computer is not functioning as seamlessly as an original Apple computer. Macworld reports on several anomalies:

The system asked if I wanted to use the external drive as a Time Machine backup drive, and I clicked Yes. And though the icon of the drive changed to reflect its new status as Time Machine volume, the backup would immediately fail each time it attempted to run.

The Psystar site features a page with lots of available software update downloads, including one for fixing Time Machine errors. Psystar turns off the Mac OS’s automatic System Update feature, so you need to download and install updates manually. One might think that the company would send you a machine that’s as up-to-date as possible, but that’s not the case. I called Psystar tech support and learned that the company will offer a download in the next couple weeks that will enable Psystar users to take advantage of Apple’s Software Update utility.

Macworld Lab uses Migration Assistant to transfer our Speedmark user files and folders to our test system from a clean system booted into FireWire Target Disk Mode, and that process worked just fine with the Open Computer. We found, however, that we were unable to boot the Open Computer into FireWire Target disk mode. The tech support person didn’t think that Psystar offered that feature. Other startup options, like SafeBoot, zapping of PRAM, and startup drive selection via the Option key are also not available.

I tried cloning the internal drive to an external FireWire drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. It cloned successfully, but I was unable to boot from it, even though a message said the volume would be bootable. It sounds like a couple of folks in the Psystar forums were able to find a way to do it, but they weren’t giving out specific instructions. We’ll continue to look into that.

I guess it’s good that the Software Update is disabled. I would strongly suggest to Psystar not to enable it, unless they are comfortable that Apple won’t issue an update that would render your Open Computer inoperable.

And the problems mentioned in Macworld’s report may just be the tip of the iceberg. What features are also unavailable? Well, I guess you get what you pay for. Will this harm Apple’s brand? I don’t think so. At best, it shows how much effort goes into ensuring that the operating system works well with the hardware.