I downloaded and installed the pre-release of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and, low-and-behold, the scroll wheel actually works on the Macintosh now in Flash applications. It feels like Christmas.

Well....the solution I suggested in an earlier post didn't work out long-term. I happened to be in my local Apple store recently so I decided to ask them what could be done about my iMac's screen condensation problem. They admitted that it was a "known problem" with this particular generation of iMacs and there was no real solution other than to "move it to another location". Great....now Apple is doing my interior decorating. I don't know about you, but this seems an inadequate solution to me. It's certainly not a good example of a vendor standing behind their product. I ended up buying a room dehumidifier and I haven't had a problem since (3 weeks, now). I was not pleased how this problem was handled and I hope it is not typical of the way Apple deals with consumer level issues.

On another note.....I got a new 17" unibody MacBook Pro a few weeks ago. Great machine. Maybe I'll just stick to the Apple mobile line.

About 3 months ago, I purchased a new 24" iMac. I love this computer. Not only is it quite capable from a technical perspective, its design is aesthetically appealing as well. I was disappointed, however, to learn that because of the way it's designed, some of these systems have an unusual flaw. I noticed not long after purchasing the system that the lower right hand quadrant of the display was fogging up. It was like I was looking through a dirty window at the images behind it. This area of condensation would come and go at seemingly random times. After doing a bit of research, I discovered that the iMac's display features a piece of glass that is mounted (by magnets) over the LCD display. This is not an airtight seal, either. As a result, if the humidity and/or temperature in the location of the iMac changes (and, mark you, these need not be dramatic changes), some systems will develop condensation on the interior of the glass LCD cover. I'm one of the lucky guys who owns such a system. I found some recommendations on-line on how to resolve this issue. I was reluctant to try these on a brand-spakin' new system at first, but now that the honeymoon is over, I went ahead and tried it today. The glass pane that covers the LCD is actually quite easy to remove and the only tool you need is a piece of packing tape (the clear cellophane style). I took a 5" length of tape and placed it along the left-bottom edge of the display running vertically. You basically leave about 1/2 an inch of the tape hanging over the left side of the iMac taking care not to tape the overhang to the aluminum frame of the system. With a little careful pulling on the top and bottom portions of the tape, the glass panel's magnet fastening system will release and you can run a finger behind the resulting crack along the bottom of the glass and the whole thing just pops off. Once removed, I cleaned the section of glass prone to fogging up with a lens cloth saturated with 50% alcohol and 50% water. Reinstalling the glass is simply a matter of lining up the pegs on the frame of the glass with the holes in the iMac chassy. The magnets literally pull the glass back into the proper position. Since cleaning the spot, the glass has yet to fog back up. I suspect I may need to repeat this operation every now and then, but it beats taking it back to the Apple store for repair or replacement.

Though the solution is pretty simple, it does involve some risk to the user. If you break the glass cover, I suspect you're SOL as far as Apple is concerned. I also was unable to find any official Apple response to the NUMEROUS accounts of this problem I found on the internet, even on their own support site and forums. That's a bit disconcerting to me. When I bought this system, I did so on blind faith that Apple always turned out quality products that did not suffer from such obvious design errors. I'll do a little more homework before buying another Apple product.

As I write this, I'm wondering if using the word "software" is even appropriate for the product I'm about to describe. I'm thinking that "ripoff" or "vaporware" or "scam" might be more appropriate descriptions of PocketMac for iPhone by Information Appliance Associates. I should have known that something wasn't right when I could not locate an evaluation copy to download. The publisher does not offer one. What they do offer is a 90-day money back guarantee. From experience, I know this is the software industry euphemism for "we know this product is crap and that you'll never buy it if you try it for free". Desperate for a solution to sync my iCal with my Lotus Notes mail store, however, I rolled the dice and purchased a copy. Doh! Snake eyes. The install worked as you would expect a commercial product to work. That's about the nicest thing I can say about PocketMac. After installation, it was all down hill. The first time I launched the application, I got an error message indicating that an unhandled exception occurred and the application quit. I figured "no big deal"...I'll just reboot and it should work. Several attempted tweaks and reboots later, I was no further along than my first attempt to load the app. I then attempted to call technical support for assistance. Low and behold, there is not a single telephone number published on the PocketMac web site (save for the sales number - what a shock - that is answered by a machine which will unceremoniously hang up on you after a few attempts to opt-out for an operator). I soon discovered that technical support is provided only through web-mail unless you want to pay $59 a pop for phone support incidents (bear in mind that the product itself costs only $30 and the little fact that I should not have to pay for support for a product that doesn't work to begin with). I submitted a description of my problem. Two hours later, I sent a ping since I hadn't gotten a reply yet. Two more hours, another ping. And another two hours, another ping. After waiting all day for a reply, it was finally time to pack up and head home from the office. A couple of hours after I got home, I logged in to the tech support site and, eureka! An answer. It was a short and sweet response with a file attachment. I placed the file where I was instructed to place it and PocketMac finally loaded without an error message. Now I had a nice, pretty little window with some attractive icons in it. Woo hoo! I attempted to run my first sync with PocketMac. I dialogue box popped open asking me for my Notes server connection information. I tried several permutations of the connection string all to no avail. I received "path does not exist" error messages each time I tried to run the sync. Again I thought to myself, "no big deal....I'll just look at the manual where they are bound to have an example of the connection syntax they're looking for". But...what's this? No manual? No documentation of any type? That's right. Nowhere in the product download, nor on the PocketMac site, will you find the first tiny scrap of user documentation. It's as though you're supposed to know how to use this crap by osmosis.

This morning, I realized that if I've had this much difficulty just trying to get the software to run, let alone perform fairly complex data synchronization, that I would very likely not be happy with this product in the long run. I submitted a request for a refund in accordance with their money-back guarantee. I have yet to get a response from them. I don't anticipate a problem getting a refund based on the many complaints about this product I've seen posted elsewhere, but I suspect it will be a while before I see that thirty bucks again.

If you're looking for a reliable data synchronization tool for your Mac system, I suggest you avoid PocketMac like you would an Amway salesman. If, however, you are looking for a hemorrhoid wrapped in a .dmg file, go ahead and lay down your money and take PocketMac for a spin.

I've been using Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac since its release sometime around the date of the MacWorld convention. This software epitomizes everything bad about applications that are released before they're ready for prime-time. For the first couple of days, it seemed as though it was working just fine. Then, I started trying to open documents attached to email messages. Two out of every three attempts to do so would lock up my entire Mac system (particularly when the attached document was an Excel file) forcing me to use the power button to reboot the system. I've been using a MacBook Pro for approximately 8 months now and MS Office is the ONLY application that has ever caused my system to behave in this manner and, believe me, I've downloaded and tested ALOT of shareware and open source software for the Mac. It truly bothers me that a company like Microsoft can release and actually demand money for an application that is clearly substandard.

I just installed SP1 for Office 2008 and I'm hoping the application will stabilize a bit. I'm not holding my breath, though. I suppose anything Mac will be treated like a red-headed step child by Microsoft so I should have expected no more than what I received.

I've been using a Mac PowerBook now for about 6 months. I love most things about it. The one thing that consistently frustrates me, however, is the ability to integrate stand-alone Macs into Windows networks. And, as one might expect, Microsoft and Apple point the finger at one another saying the other is to blame. I've had various levels of success getting my Mac to talk to a Windows Active Directory. Printing works great, domain login works great, resource enumeration works great (most of the time), but that's where it turns ugly. Accessing Windows file shares is essentially a hit or miss proposition. If you've got administrative access to the network and you're able to map an administrative share to a server (C$ on a remote resource, for example) this will generally work well. But....how many of your users have administrative access? The answer to that should be a VERY low number. Accessing conventional Windows shares is problematic. I can generally map the share, view volume contents, and even open files to which I have access. The problem comes when you try to save or copy files to the share. I've seen at least a half dozen strange and inconsistent error messages that all end with the same result.....a 0KB file "ghost" on the share. I've literally spent about 12 hours in total researching and attempting to employ various fixes to the problem with mixed results. Today, I downloaded a product from Thursby software called "DAVE". It has promise. It immediately fixed some of the major problems I was having with file transfers and saving to shares, but it seems to have broken some networking functionality that was working. I'm going to continue to evaluate this product and I'll let you know how it goes.

I heard several weeks ago (during MacWorld, I believe) that VMWare would be releasing a version of VMWare Fusion that would allow you to run virtual Mac OS X server images. I think they even demonstrated an early version that was actually running OS X server at their booth at MacWorld. I haven't seen or heard a word about it since, not even on the VMWare site. Has this idea been abandoned? I'm anxious to evaluate the Mac server platform and this solution would allow me to do so without spending a small fortune on equipment. If you know anything about this, please leave me a comment.

Apple, for reasons unknown to me, elected to remove NetInfo Manager from OS X Leopard. I used to use this tool to map computer netbios names to private IP addresses because I work from multiple offices (on different subnets) with VMWare images of Windows 2003 servers used for development. Fortunately, there is a fairly simple workaround that works pretty well and very much like the LMHOSTS method utilized in the Windows environment. There are a couple of tricks to get it to work, however, because you're working with system level files that are hidden by the OS. First, select "Go To Folder..." from the "Go" menu in Finder. Enter "/private" in the dialog box and click "Go". Find the "etc" folder, right-click it and select "Get Info". At the bottom of the Info screen is a small lock icon. Click the lock and enter your password (this assumes that the user ID you're logged in with has administrative privileges on the system). Enter your password when prompted and click "OK". Click the + symbol at the bottom of the Info screen and select your user name from the "User or Group" dialog box. Once you have your name added, make sure that you have Read and Write access to the etc folder. Open the etc folder and repeat these steps for the "hosts" file. Open the hosts file and create an IP mapping to the server you want to resolve. You'll first enter the system's IP address, hit the Tab key, then type the name you want to be resolved. Save the file and you're good to go. I created an Alias to the hosts file and keep it in my Dock for quick access. You can place several entries to the same netbios name in this file and comment them out (using a single "#" sign) or uncomment them as necessary to accommodate different networks. As per usual, be very careful working with hidden system files as you can render your system unbootable if you screw something up.

Almost all of my development work is done in a virtual environment. I run the IDE's on my local Mac but all the servers and development files live on the drives of one or more virtual servers. I've found this to be a very efficient method to write both CF and FLEX applications as I can literally model an entire networking environment on just a couple of virtual machines. I will generally copy the web root from the virtual server to a folder on my Mac's hard drive at least once a week, sometimes more depending on the amount and nature of the work I've done over a given time span. I've got a bit of a propensity to play with the configuration of my virtual servers to extract every last bit of performance (or convenience to me) from them. This can sometimes be a dangerous proposition if you've got an intricate virtual domain built with interdependencies among the various server images. Over the Thanksgiving holidays, I decided I was going to turn one of my virtual "member servers" into a Domain Controller in a test AD I've got set up. This would save me some time and resources as I would no longer have to boot two server images to approximate a functional active directory based network. Unfortunately, it was late and I took some shortcuts that I shouldn't have and I ended up a 39GB image of a dog terd. Wow. Realizing that I'd just blown away about a week and a half worth of development effort on an HR application that I'm working on, I decided to just go to bed and start fresh after a bit of rest. First thing the next morning, I headed up to the office where my Time Machine backup disk lives and about 30 minutes later, I was restored to the point where I was when I left the office on Monday afternoon. Ordinarilly, my backup images would have been too old to pull this off, but since I have used Time Machine religiously since I set up Leopard on the Macbook, I had a copy that was current as of that Monday. Once you have Time Machine set up to run properly, you never have to mess with it again until you need it. It runs in the background, most of the time without you even knowing about it, and backs up all your most valuable assets. Once restored, I booted my virtual server and, after a check disk performed automatically by Windows 2003 Server (I assume this was the result of backing up a server image that was probably running at the time it was backed up), I was back in business. Time Machine saved me from a potentially disasterous situation and, in my opinion, paid for the cost of the Leopard upgrade with a single recovery. If you haven't looked at Time Machine yet, run, don't walk, to your Mac and fire it up!

I installed Apple OS X Leopard on my MacBook Pro the day it was released almost a week and a half ago and, so far, so good. The only casualty I've noticed thus far is my screen saver application (a really cool little app from UselessCreations that takes a screenshot of your desktop, then uses it as the backdrop of a realistic looking fish tank). The app still works, but the desktop screen cap has been replaced by a dull gray background. I may just need to play around a bit with the settings, but so far, it's the only issue I've had with Leopard. Granted, I run my SQL server(s), web server(s) and ColdFusion server(s) within VMWare so I'm not having the CF, MySQL and Apache issues that a lot of other folks have complained about post upgrade. All in all, I'd have to call it a flawless upgrade process. The new OS features are well worth the upgrade costs, too.