Jony Ive on the iPad:

I don’t have to change myself to fit the product; it fits me… There’s no right or wrong way of holding it…

Steve Jobs, on the iPhone 4, following some complaints about the signal strength dropping when people hold the sides of the device:

Just avoiding holding it in that way…

Don’t get me wrong, I’m really interested in the iPhone 4 and I think it looks like a great device.

I just couldn’t help noticing the irony in the disparity between those two statements.

The iAds feature in Apple’s iOS 4 has caused its fair share of controversy, and Apple’s privacy policy has just been updated to reflect the changes that iAds bring to the platform.

Notably, it is possible to opt out of iAds ‘cookies’, which means that the ads you see might be less relevant, but you are able to opt out from targeted advertising, which some people may be uncomfortable with (especially considering this functionality is built in across the OS and, presumably, the analytical data Apple gather from iAds would be shared across different apps).

Apple and its partners use cookies and other technologies in mobile advertising services to control the number of times you see a given ad, deliver ads that relate to your interests, and measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns. If you do not want to receive ads with this level of relevance on your mobile device, you can opt out by accessing the following link on your device: http://oo.apple.com. If you opt out, you will continue to receive the same number of mobile ads, but they may be less relevant because they will not be based on your interests. You may still see ads related to the content on a web page or in an application or based on other non-personal information. This opt-out applies only to Apple advertising services and does not affect interest-based advertising from other advertising networks.

I would encourage anyone upgrading to iOS 4 or purchasing a new iOS device to consider opting out of the iAd cookies, if they feel more comfortable knowing that the advertising is ‘dumb’ and not being targeted directly at them.

As the quote from the privacy policy says, all you have to do to opt out is visit http://oo.apple.com on each iOS 4 device where you want to opt out.

Cookie image is &#8216C is for Cookie’ by amagill on Flickr. Licensed under CC-BY.

UPDATE: the scrolling fix doesn’t now work, as of 2010-11-08. This appears to be a server-side change and unfortunately I am not aware of a solution. 🙁

I put together a short screencast on how to access Gmail’s new iPad interface on your Mac. If you’re a fan of Gmail’s web interface on the iPad and would like to use it on your desktop computer too, this is a cool trick.

The user agent you need to enter into Fluid is:

Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10

» Read the rest of this post…

I don’t have a single default browser that I use. I use both Firefox and Safari as my primary browsers (and I throw SRWare Iron into the mix sometimes too).

Of course, my primary OS, Mac OS X, requires me to pick one browser that is used by default when I click on a link in another application. The browser that I want to use for any given link will differ, however. I might have one of the two browsers open right now and want to use the one that is open rather than opening a new application, or it might be a potentially untrusted link, where I’ll want to use Firefox (with my restrictive NoScript configuration) rather than Safari.

Enter Choose Wisely. It is a small application which you set up with the browsers you might want to use. You then set Choose Wisely itself as your default browser. Whenever you click a link, it will pop open.

You simply click the browser you’d like to use on this occasion and the link will open as normal in your chosen browser. It is a really light, simple solution to this problem that takes no more than a second extra of your time.

Initial Setup

When you initially launch the application, there will be no browsers in the window. Go to your Applications folder in the Finder and just drag and drop the browsers you would like in the list onto the window.

You will also want to set Choose Wisely as your default browser. To do this, open Safari. In Safari > Preferences, go to the General divider and select Choose Wisely under Default web browser.

Conclusion

As I said, it is a wonderfully simple solution if, like me, you want to use different browsers for different tasks and on different occasions. Some will find it an annoying extra step — and if you’re happy with just the one browser, it won’t be any use to you at all.

But if you do like to pick and choose browsers on a per-link basis, this is a great solution. You can download it from this page (scroll down to the Download section).

This month marks three years since I purchased my white MacBook, my first Mac computer. Other than the AppleCare coverage stopping (good job they just replaced my battery, yay!), this represents quite a milestone in my technological life.

So I ask myself — objectively, why has the Mac become my primary desktop platform?

• Mac OS X is a Unix operating system. This has a number of advantages, but it mainly means rock-solid reliability (in theory at least) and a decent way to interact with the machine via the command line.
• It is elegant and put together with passion and care. Some bits of software, especially third-party driver and hardware support software for other platforms, aren’t. They are hacked together at the last minute and at low budget, just to work. Almost everything that ships with the Mac and a lot of third-party stuff for it is just done in this fundamentally different way of building stuff you would be proud to show off.
• It ‘just works’. Often dismissed as hyperbole, this marketing phrase more often than not is true on the Mac. There are notable exceptions and a few annoying things that you don’t get with generic PC hardware as well, but most of the time, you plug something in, or switch something on for the first time and it just does what it is supposed to.
• Generally speaking, you get what you pay for. Apple don’t make cheap computers. But neither do I think they make overpriced ones. You pay a premium price for an Apple computer, but you get a fair return for that price in terms of the quality of the product. Again, it comes back to the point about passion — Apple will not ship something that they are not entirely happy with, so what you get is something that meets their high standards.

Having said all that, I am still very interested in using everything and anything. While the Mac may be where my primary focus is on the desktop for now and the forseeable future, I am still very much interested in what is going on in the Linux desktop and Windows worlds and you can be sure I’ll continue playing with all sorts of technology in the future.

Here’s to the next three years of Mac — and perhaps beyond!

UPDATE 2010-06-30: At the time of writing, the Mac version of Iron is not up-to-date and is probably insecure. I have stopped using it for now. Hopefully it can be kept up-to-date and patched to a schedule close to the normal Chromium releases in the future.

Google has come a long way since its humble beginnings in 1997 and now offer a huge array of online services. One of the criticisms often aimed at the company is centred around privacy. From searches you make on the search engine, to the contents of your email if you are a Gmail user — they have the ability to build up quite a detailed picture of what you do online.

Apparently, the Google Chrome browser itself also does various things which may impact privacy. The browser creates a unique client ID which is sent to Google when you do things such as type terms into the combined address and search bar, for example, and if the browser crashes, the technical information relating to that crash is sent to Google.

If you are someone concerned by the implications of this and maybe don’t trust Google very much, you may want to give SRWare Iron a try.

Iron is a browser based on the open source Chromium project which also powers Google Chrome, but with many of the potentially unwanted features that may impact privacy disabled.

This is a great example of open source code working well — it allows you to enjoy the benefits of the Chrome browser (the speed, interface and unique tab-as-process architectre) while side-stepping things you don’t want.

Personally, I am not enormously bothered by the privacy issues and at the moment I’m pretty happy with a Safari/Firefox combination for my browsers of choice, but if you are looking for Google Chrome, without so much Google, this is worth a try.

You can download the browser from the SRWare website.

UPDATE: The Mac version can be downloaded from this forum post on the SRWare site.

I have released a new update to DfontSplitter for Mac. Here are the release notes for this version:

New Features and Bugfixes

• The Font Suitcase format is now supported. TrueType font data inside a FFIL Font Suitcase can now be extracted with DfontSplitter.

Known Issues

• Converting TTC files on Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) does sometimes run into problems, where the TTC splitting script can’t open the TTC file. The reason for this is currently unclear.
• Moving TTF files that have been extracted from a .dfont over to Windows — please see this workaround.
• Some Font Suitcase files may not contain TTF data that can be extracted.

As always, go across to the DfontSplitter project page to download the new release.

If you’re already using DfontSplitter for Mac, simply go to DfontSplitter > Check for Updates within the application to upgrade to the new release.

Over the last few years I haven’t really found myself liking the names of major new products from Apple. MacBook Air, iPhone 3GS and even the original iPhone name I didn’t like (drop the ‘i’ prefix already!)

And now we have iPad.

The name aside, though, this looks like a cool device. It feels to me to be a scaled-up iPod touch in many ways, but with software and an interface that are really capable of taking full advantage of the extra screen space and form factor. I don’t think the iPad is going to be as revolutionary as the iPhone was for the ‘smartphone’ market and I think it might take a bit of time for it really to find the right market (beyond early adopters); people need to work out how to fit it into their computing workflow. But it will force all the other companies doing tablet computers to rethink their approach.

Will I be getting one? I answered this question on the roundtable episode of The Stealth Mac podcast that I just participated in (podcast download not yet available). I’ll wait and see. I think like many people, I need to work out how it would fit into my workflow and how I’d justify my need for it. I will certainly be interested to hear how well it works for what you can do with it in a real-world setting.

I have a little project at the moment to try and reorganise my desk in my room to actually work a little better for how I use it now. Over the last few years, I have gravitated to using laptops as my primary systems (as I’m sure many other people have also done). This means that the way I organise my workspace needs really to take account of that shift in what I use most of the time.

When I was using my MacBook Pro at the desk, I really wanted to be able to lift it up so the screen was at a greater height, for ergonomic reasons. I also have access to a standalone Apple aluminium keyboard which made acquiring some sort of stand to lift up the machine and then use the standalone keyboard quite an attractive idea.

The Griffin Elevator is actually one of the most popular, go-to products for, well, elevating laptops, especially within the Mac product ecosystem. There are alternative options to the Elevator, some more specifically tailored to the MacBook Pro and the specific model I have, but I ended up going ahead and purchasing the Elevator as my solution to this problem.

I have to say I’m pretty happy with it.

The product is basically two aluminium arms (which incidentally match the MacBook Pro’s aluminium body nicely), a plastic base in which the arms slot and two bits of plastic which slot onto the end of the arms just to provide an extra protection against the machine slipping off the end. The contact surfaces on the arms grip surprisingly well — with the MacBook Pro, there is a little bit of wobble if you try to slide the machine across them, but unless you use a lot of force the machine won’t budge.

It is quite expensive for what it is, but for me it now solves the ergonomic problem by lifting up the screen to my eye height and has the advantage of providing more than adequate room for cooling.

I just downloaded the new Google Chrome for Mac beta. I like to clear out my cookies after each time I quit the browser, so tracking information and so on doesn’t hang around any longer than it needs to.

On Google Chrome for Mac, there is no built-in setting to force all cookies to be session cookies, but you can use this hack to achieve the same thing. After launching Chrome at least once, then quit it and run the following commands in Terminal:

rm "~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Cookies"
ln -s /dev/null "~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Cookies"

The first command deletes the cookies file and the second command creates a symbolic link, so that anything dropped in the cookies file goes to /dev/null (i.e. the cookies gets deleted and not stored once you quit!)

UPDATE 2010-01-29: JeanVal reports in the comments that this process works on Chrome for Linux too. The Cookies file is stored at the path ~/.config/chromium, so just adjust the commands above to fit that path.