My new Mac

Well I did it: I’ve bought a 13″ MacBook. Its size and portability won me over. So far, it’s been pretty smooth: I had no problems setting up my mail accounts in Mail, and it connected to my home wireless network effortlessly. On the other hand, I had to search the web to find out what the Mac equivalents of the Home and End keys were.

This is a big deal for me. The last time I switched computer platforms was in 1985, from a Commodore 64 to an IBM PC XT clone. I’ve used Windows since version 3.0 in 1990, and not surprisingly, I’ve built up a huge set of habits that I’m probably not even aware of. (For example, did you know you can double-click the icon in the upper-left-hand corner of a window to close it?)

The next step for me is to get acquainted with a whole new set of programs. For now, I’ve decided to use iWork ’09 for my office suite, which can import and export Microsoft Office files. For those tricky files that iWork can’t handle, I’ll install Windows Vista and Office 2007 in another partition, and then run them inside Parallels Desktop.

For photos, iPhoto would be fine, except I’ve built up years of metadata inside Adobe Photoshop Elements on Windows, which iPhoto can’t read. So I’m getting Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, which can import Photoshop Elements metadata and runs on both Windows and Mac. Lightroom isn’t cheap, but luckily I’ve accumulated enough reward points to pay for it.

By the way, I’m still looking for a (cheap) image editor for the Mac, as well as blogging software, so I appreciate any suggestions.

There is one Mac app I look forward to using: Delicious Library (no relation to the social bookmarking site Delicious). It lets you catalog your book and media collection, but instead of typing in all the data by hand, it uses the camera in your Mac as a barcode reader, and then automatically retrieves that data over the net. I’ve known about this app for years, and I look forward to actually being able to use it.

Eventually, I’ll get around to doing what I said I’d do on my new Mac: create iPhone apps.

Comparing MacBooks

[Photo of 13" MacBook] I am seriously considering getting a Mac, because I want to do something that Macs can do and PCs can’t: write iPhone apps. I’ve narrowed the possibilities down to two models: the 13″ MacBook or the 15″ MacBook Pro. The 15″ is 22% heavier (4.5 vs 5.5 lbs) but it also has 27% more pixels (1280×800 vs 1440×900). So it really comes down which I value more: portability or screen real estate.

To make a really informed opinion, I need to go to an Apple Store and play around with them myself, but meanwhile, does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Palm pulls one off

Palm PreToday Palm announced its new smartphone, the Pre, and just as importantly, its long-awaited new software platform, WebOS. Reading the Engadget live blog on the announcement and watching videos on Gizmodo, I am quite impressed by what I saw. Not only is the hardware slick, the software is too. Wall Street liked it as well: on a day when the Dow Jones fell 0.31%, Palm’s stock shot up 35%.

And in a master stroke, native apps for WebOS are written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, the same technologies used to create web sites. This dramatically lowers the barrier to entry, and makes it much more likely that developers will create webOS apps, something Palm desparately needs.

Alas, I have already switched from Palm to the iPhone, and at this point I don’t think I’ll be going back. But the smartphone market is still growing, and I’m rooting for Palm to make a comeback, if only to give the iPhone some much needed competition. Will it be enough? I’m not sure, but I am sure that if Palm hadn’t done everything it showed today, it would have been doomed.

Chinese ‘classical poem’ was brothel ad

A respected research institute wanted Chinese classical texts to adorn its journal, something beautiful and elegant, to illustrate a special report on China. Instead, it got a racy flyer extolling the lusty details of stripping housewives in a brothel.

Thanks to Alex for this link.

Raise the gas tax NOW

Now that oil has fallen to half of what it was in the summer, we should the gas tax should be raised now, while gas is still cheap. The federal gas tax was last raised in 1993, and California’s state gas tax was last raised in 1994. In California, we would need to raise gas taxes by 18 cents per gallon just to keep up with inflation. It should probably be hiked a lot more. And with a higher tax, the price at the pump would not swing around so much; gas prices in Europe showed much less volatility than here.

I’m not the only one advocating this:

So that’s what that song is

The British band LushLast night, an old song that I first heard in high school suddenly popped into my head. I didn’t know the name or any of the words, but I could distinctly hear in my mind the haunting melody and the clear singing but the indistinct lyrics. I also knew it was by the ’90s British band Lush.

So I went on a little quest: how could I figure out what that song was? Two iPhone apps sounded like they could help.

One of them is Shazam: hold up your phone to a recording of a song, and Shazam will figure out the song. It works well at weddings (American Boy by Estelle featuring Kanye West), bookstores (Midnight Sun by Ivy) and even while boarding airplanes (Taking You Home by Don Henley). But it doesn’t work if you don’t have a recording, so it wasn’t going to help in this case.

Another iPhone app, Midomi, is supposed to detect songs that are played on the radio or even hummed. But I’ve found that it doesn’t work as well as Shazam for recorded music, and when I tried humming the Lush song, it didn’t display any songs by Lush in its results.

So I tried something else: I went to Amazon and searched for Lush. Eventually I navigated to the Amazon MP3 store, where I could press one button and hear 30-second previews of virtually all of Lush’s songs. Finally, at #23, I heard it: For Love. And also thanks to the web, I finally figured out what the heck they were singing.