I received my brand new Macbook Pro from Apple less than three months ago. I was apprehensive about spending that much on a single machine that I didn’t know how to troubleshoot, upgrade, or really even take apart. I was a PC guy used to building my computers from barebones kits, but I figured it was worth it because the Apple hardware was so reliable.
Well… nothing’s perfect, I suppose.
This past weekend I experienced my first “kernel panic”. Nothing extraordinary was going on. There weren’t even that many applications open. Only Firefox, Twitterific, and Preview.
I restarted and opened up panic.log to try to see what was going on. It referenced an exception error with the touchpad. Uh-oh.
Crossing my fingers, I continued working hoping that it was a fluke and all was well in the world of Macbook. I was not so lucky. Over the next few days the kernel panics plagued my productivity. I tried isolating the issue, but it seemed to occur irregularly without rhyme or reason. Exception errors associated with the touchpad, IO bus, AT graphics, USB, and ATA to name a few. The inconsistency of errors and the fact that there were all over the map led me to conclude that I had a faulty logic board. Damn.
Finally I scheduled some time at the Genius Bar so that I could convince Apple to replace my logic board. It only took about 15 minutes of my time explaining the exception errors and going over my own attempts to isolate the issue before my friendly Genius agreed with me that it needed a new logic board. It’s now being diagnosed and repaired by Apple Support. I’ll see it again in 5-7 days.
It seems Jeremy Keith’s Macbook Pro and mine may have been separated at production. His laptop is also in the care of Apple support at the moment and his woes started almost the same day my own did.
I sincerely hope that both of our laptops come back in tip-top shape and that this is the last of our issues.
Update: Only hours after posting this entry I went to check my P.O. box and my laptop was there. Amazing. Everything seems to be working fine and no data was lost. I’m utterly impressed with the Apple support at this point. It was less than 48 hours ago that I took it to the Genius Bar!
Let’s get one thing straight: the ability to run AJAX style apps from a browser does not constitute a smartphone. Plus, Steve Jobs may have just redefined & reinvigorated the ‘Web 2.0′ buzzword just when we were moving past it.
Let’s hope that there will be an SDK very soon… or at the very least, eventually.
Looks like the rumors were true: Safari 3 beta is available for Windows. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in market share, not to mention the developer headaches.
The ability to drag tabs to their own window is a neat feature that brings that Mac ‘flavor’ to the Windows environment. I can’t think of a single other Windows application that has this intuitive functionality. In fact, too many applications don’t even support re-ordering the tabs at all!
Interestingly the Safari installation includes the fonts Lucida Grande and Lucida Grande Bold in \Program Files\Safari\Safari.resources\. My first thought was that this was for side-by-side comparisons between websites in Safari on OSX and Safari on Windows, but then why did Apple only include those two fonts? And why not put them in the main Windows font directory? Doing so would enhance their prevalence among designers and probably even fuel more Safari downloads as blogs/tech zines/personal websites started evangelizing with “Get Safari” buttons in an effort to homogenize the typographic web. Instead, I realized that the inclusion of these two fonts was probably solely for the Safari file menu labels and such. I confirmed this by moving two different fonts into the Safari.resources folder and renaming them as the installed fonts (after backing up the originals, of course!). This changed the font that Safari used to convey that Mac ‘flavor’ I mentioned before.
I will test tomorrow, but I wonder if websites rendered in Safari using Lucida Grande will even have access to the font? I doubt it, unless I installed it as a system font on my machine. Why would their rendering engine have a special use-case scenario for a single font instead of relying on the system paths?
Update: I was mistaken about whether Safari would actually use Lucida Grande when it rendered web pages. I set up a test case here: http://lab.atxryan.com/safari_windows_font_test.html where you can see how it renders in different browsers. If both headlines are in Courier, then your browser does not have access to Lucida Grande. I find it extremely odd that programming convention seemed to be thrown out the window (pun intended) by setting up this special use-case.
My new Macbook Pro arrived this morning! Thing is though, I’m not a Mac person. I’m not even yet a convert. I work on a PC at work, have a linux desktop at home, and a linux server for remote-everything.
I need tips. Tricks. Application suggestions. Resources.
What’s your favorite text-editor? Dashboard widgets? AppleScripts?
What makes working on a Mac more efficient and productive for you?
Thanks to all for your advice!
