Not every Mac I buy is a brand spanking new, state of the art, latest and greatest. From time to time I buy used gear as for some tasks that's all that's needed. For example, a Mac that's used for web browsing, email and some MS Office stuff doesn't need oodles of RAM or Intel's fastest processor. A good, used iMac G5 will do those tasks with a minimum of fuss.

In March this year I purchased a used 17-inch iMac G5 with the built in iSight camera. From memory this was the last generation of the G5 iMac line. It's a nice machine that's well built and proven to be reliable.

Last week the screen seemed to suffer from some sort of failure. There was a stripe, about 30mm wide, running down the right side of the display. It wasn't totally black but looked like a faded stripe. The reseller's warranty on used goods was three months and I was a couple of months out of that. I rang them anyway as, if noting else, I knew they'd be able to repair it.

I took the iMac in and after some quick checking concluded that it was probably a screen problem rather than a logic board one. I left he machine there and the reseller told me that they'd call a couple of days later to let me know whether they could fix the fault.

That call came as promised. However, it wasn't a progress report - it was a collection request as they'd replaced the display at no cost to me. Although it was out of warranty, their view was that the iMac didn't fulfil the service level they expected. Wow! A reseller that considers the customer in how they handle warranty claims.

That reseller was New Wave Systems in Burwood, Melbourne. The iMac was the first system I've purchased from them. It won't be the last.

From Ars Technica.

a look at some analysis form NPD on recent computer sales should make Apple's point of view crystal clear. For the month of June, slightly more than 9 out of every 10 dollars spent on a computer over $1,000 went to Apple.

So, while only one in ten computers sold in the USA were Macs, most of the money went Apple's way.

Seems like good business to me.

Boy, was I ever surprised when this appeared on my screen yesterday.

OK, it was just for a port scan but at least I know the software (the latest version of Norton Internet Security Dual Protection For Mac - this was a review copy given to me by Symantec. There's a full review in Australian Macworld's May edition) is doing something.

What's it for?: Copying stuff from your iPhone to your Mac
Score: 3/5
Pros: Easy to use, just works
Cons: No file syncing, wired connections only Mac only
Cost: $19.99USD
Buy from: Ecamm PhoneView

Syncing an iPhone through iTunes works well but there may be times when you need to extract data from your iPhone. For example, if the disk in your Mac dies then the photos or music on your iPhone might be your only backup. Ecamm's PhoneView application lets you connect an iPhone and browse its contents so you can copy data between your Mac and the iPhone without using iTunes

After installing PhoneView it automatically launched and was ready for my iPhone to connect.

After connecting my iPhone by its USB cable I was able to view its contents and copy content to and from its filestore. In addition I was able to read SMS and Notes, with an option to save them to my Mac (this may be important for business users concerned about record keeping), copy music and photos from the iPhone and use the iPhone as a portable disk. iPhone 3GS support arrived in the latest version so you can even copy your videos to your Mac.

Using the iPhone as a portable disk does add to its usefulness but it would be great if Ecamm developed an iPhone app so that copied files could be read on the iPhone. Having shelled out $20 I'd like to be able to read the data I've been able to copy. Given that the iPhone OS supports reading of many different file formats it's a little disappointing to not have a companion app for this purpose. However, the ability to store a backup of key files is very handy.

If only...

The one thing I'd really like to be able to do with PhoneView is create SMS from my Mac and have the iPhone send them. While I'm working, it'd be great to be able to use my Mac that way. But that's a small criticism.

Connection to PhoneView requires connection by USB - no Bluetooth or WiFi allowed. Given that the ability to connect over WiFi for data transfer is supported in a huge array of apps this is a serious omission. For me being able to connect my iPhone wirelessly would add significantly to PhoneView's utility as I could use it while commuting.

Should you buy it>?

PhoneView is a very useful piece of software. The ability to copy data from your iPhone is very handy and the $20USD price tag is reasonable. I picked up PhoneView as part of a recent MacHeist bundle and it's proven to be one of those handy little apps that I'd probably not have purchased on its own. However, I really like this app and find it very useful.

Score: 3.5/5
Pros: Great graphics, excellent gameplay
Cons: Not enough levels
Cost: $5.99USD
Buy from: Apple App Store

Id Software's Doom probably sold more PCs than any reseller. In it's time, the early 1990s, it needed some pretty grunty hardware to keep up with the fast-moving bad guys and what ever they were throwing or firing at you. Doom spawned its own ecosystem of add-on levels and eventually was superseded by Quake and a host of other first-person shooters. Doom Resurrection is a re-birth of Doom, specifically made of the iPhone and iPod touch. It's not a straight porting of the original game - these are entirely new levels although the premise of the story is the same.

I won't rehash the storyline of Doom as it's adequately covered over at Wikipedia and lots of fan sites as well as Id Software's own site.

Storyline

You're the last surviving marine on a remote research facility on Mars. You start the game unarmed (although that's not the case for too long) and have to negotiate your way through the facility, killing all manner of demons, zombies and other nasties along the way.

In other words, shoot anything that moves, don't get killed and save the world!

Gameplay

Given that the iPhone lacks a keyboard, Doom Resurrection puts you on rails. This means that you don't have any control over your own movement during the game. This takes a little getting used to. One of the features of Id Software's First Person Shooters, or FPS, is that you can freely walk around the game space and explore. The goal in the original game was to find secret passages and other secrets hidden behind walls. There are secrets in Doom Resurrection but they're not well hidden. The trick is to seem them and shoot them to open them before you go past them. You can't stop your onward movement to the destination at each level.

Accompanying you on much of the journey is a small flying droid called Sam. Sam gathers data from the few remaining data terminals so that you can send the data to base an avert the seemingly inevitable teleportation of demons from hell to earth. Same only appears when she's integral to the story. Otherwise she's not floating about, cluttering up the limited screen space.

As there's no way to control your own movement, the left corner of the screen is set as a dodge control. When one of the demons throws a fire ball at you, the dodge control will let you duck out of the way, letting the fireball harmlessly sail by. The trick is to time your dodge correctly so that you don't go too early and get hit. When possessed soldiers are firing their guns at you the dodge control lets you hide behind conveniently placed crates or pillars so you can stay out of harms way until there's a break in the shooting and you can retaliate.

Weapons

One of the great things about the original Doom was the array of different weapons you could discover. The most basic weapon is a machine-gun. This weapon's magazine holds 60 rounds but you somehow have an infinite supply of refills. While that sounds silly it has the advantage of not leaving ammo lying around the screen all the time.

There's also a pair of shotguns you find as your walk through the research facility. The single barrel unit packs enough punch to kill most humanoid bad guys with a single shot to the head. You can hold eight shots at a time with that weapon.

The double-barrel shotgun can kill many of the larger mutants that come your way with a single blast providing you wait for the mutant to get nice and close. But beware - reloads take a second or so and that's enough time to get badly hurt if you don't make the kill on your first shot.

There's a plasma rifle as well. Its magazine holds 40 rounds and can kill most things with about half as many shots as the machine-gun. However, the plasma ammo is best saved for when you get your hands on the BFG.

The BFG, or Big XXX Gun, fires forty rounds of plasma in one fell swoop and will kill several bad guys at a time. However, it takes a while to fully prime so you'll need to time its use carefully.

Controls

The on-screen controls are easy to use. Each corner of the screen is designated for a specific function. The top-left corner lets you toggle between weapons, the top-right reloads your weapon. The bottom-left is for dodging incoming enemy fire and the bottom-right is for shooting. There's also a small pause button on the top of the screen should you need a break while playing.

Each weapon has a different set of crosshairs for aiming. You direct the crosshairs by tilting the iPhone as the aiming mechanism uses the device's accelerometers. My only complaint was that it's tricky to aim correctly unless you're sitting still - something that's difficult if you're playing on a train.

Criticisms

I really enjoy playing Doom Resurrection. That's why I was really disappointed as there just weren't enough levels. I managed to play all the way through from start to end in a couple of days. Sure, that cut into stuff like eating and work, but I got a lot more gameplay out of the port of Wolfenstein.

Also, the "on rails" approach to movement is a great way to eliminate the use for complex controls that take away from the available screen space but it did take some getting used to.

Should you buy it?

If you enjoy playing FPS and have a few spare bucks then I'd recommend Doom Resurrection. Although I've finished the game, I'm still playing it, using the "Free Play" option to go back to various points in the game.

The new MacBook Pros, released in June, are the first Macs to ship with a SD slot. Although the slot is ostensibly for making it easy to get photos from your camera to iPhoto, it's also a bootable drive. You can install OS X to an SD card (32GB cards sell for around $130AUD). That makes it part of a viable backup and system recovery strategy.

With a pair of 32GB cards most of us could have a bootable disk with a core set of applications (including SuperDuper for rebuilding a broken system) and a backup of key data (maintained with Time Machine).

Back in May 2007, I wrote a feature for Australian Macworld on batteries and power solution. You can read the entire yarn here [22MB PDF].

In that story I recommended that users should regularly cycle your notebook or mobile phone's battery. That means letting it run all the way down and then fully recharging it.

Today, I came past this story over at ZDNet. It seems that Apple has a nifty diagnostic app running on an iPod that can diagnose whether a failed battery's condition has come from neglect or from a defect.

One of the telling things about this particular visit to the Apple Store was something the tech told me. He said that he would replace the battery with a new one because it has be “used correctly.” When I asked him to elaborate on what that meant, he told me that Apple’s notebook batteries last longest when they’re routinely charged and discharged.

Apple's batteries are more sophisticated than a simple collection of single cells. There are "smarts" built into them that retain information like the number of charging cycles and let you check the remaining charge by pressing a small button either on the battery (for older Macbooks and MacBook Pros) or on the unibody for more recent models.

If you're a mere mortal and don't have a fancy iPod gizmo for testing your battery, you can achieve much the same with iStat Pro - a widget created by iSlayer. In addition to all the useful system information it provides it's able to access that interesting battery data.

As it turns out, battery life is very much a "use it or lose it" proposition. In order to get the most out of your battery, both in terms of longevity and capacity make it a habit to run the battery down regularly.

I typically connect my MacBook Pro to the web in two different ways; WiFi and a Huawei E160G 3G modem. One of the things I've found, that is really annoying, is that OS X is really dumb when it comes to dealing with multiple network connections.

What I find is that OS X tries to connect to a WiFi network while the 3G connection is active. The problem is that if the WiFi connection is poor OS X persists in trying to use it even if the 3G connection is better. I've encountered the same thing when I've connected an iMac to one router by Ethernet and another over WiFi (Idid this as part of some router testing). OS X was unable to aggregate the connections.

The cure is easy - turn off WiFi before initiating the 3G connection. But that's not very Apple-like.

For an OS that's generally very traveller-friendly this is a real PITA.

If you're anything like me, your music collection from ripped CDs and iTunes Store purchases has far outstripped your iPhone or iPod's storage capacity. While the iPod Classic delivers a massive 160GB, I suspect that that vast majority of people run with 32GB or less. Although that used to be a massive amount, 32GB is really quite a paltry amount. That means that, somehow, we need to find a way to carry the right music. Here's how I do it.

Step 1: Create a Random Playlist in iTunes
One of iTunes niftier features is the ability to create Smart Playlists. A Smart Playlist is a playlist that's assembled based on a set of criteria that can dynamically update.

As you can see from mine, I've simply set the content to include files smaller that 5MB (I'll need to bump that up to a higher number now that I think of it. 10MB might be better), exclude anything spoken (I have several audio books) or played in the last couple of days and randomly filled with 500 songs.

Step 2: Use the Recently Added Smart Playllst
When you install iTunes a Smart Playlist for recently added items is created automatically. You can fiddle with that by to ensure that you sync the content you want. For example, by limiting the file size, you can ensure you don't sync videos.

Step 3: Sync your new Playlists
Now, connect your iPod or iPhone and change the sync settings so that the Smart Playlists.

One of the reasons I love this approach is that it lets me rediscover music I'd even forgotten I had. For example, today I listened to The Alleluia Chorus from Handel's Messiah, Whitesnake, Michael Jackson and Eminem.

When Apple launched OS X 10.4 (aka Tiger) one of the heavily pushed features was integration of RSS into Safari. This was extended to add RSS integration into Apple's Mail.app. As I recently upgraded to a shiny new 13" MacBook Pro I've not yet reinstalled all my favourite apps. Partly this was through being too busy but another part of this was to see which I apps I really used and which I could live without.

I've been using NetNewsWire for ages and it's a great app - particularly as it now offers iPhone syncing via a free web service. However, I've never really put Apple's built-in RSS support to the test till now. In my view, the RSS support in Safari and Mail is only barely usable. I suspect that if you only look at 10 or fewer feeds it's OK but even my relatively slim collection of a hundred or so feeds is too many to be effectively managed.

Non-existent OPML Support
Why didn't Apple support migrating feeds into Safari and Mail by OPML? By ignoring the lingua franca of the RSS world they have effectively stopped potential users from migrating to their software from third party applications.

Last night I searched for a way to migrate my RSS feeds into Safari. I had an OPML file that I'd created by using Google Reader's export function. However, I had to visit the Google Fairy to find a way to import this into Safari.

Safari can only import feeds from a HTML file. That means that I needed to find a way to convert the OPML file to HTML. After some searching I found this article. Basically, you need to copy the script on that page into a text editor (I use TextWrangler). Then save it to your desktop as convert.php.

To make life easy, I saved the OPML (actually XML) file from Google Reader to the desktop and renamed it to "subscriptions.xml". I then opened a Terminal (it's in the Applications | Utilities folder on your Mac) and ran the following:

cd Desktop

This line makes the current directory for executing commands the OS X desktop. If you don;t do this you'll need to ener the full file paths for the various files referred to in the next command.

I then ran this:

php convert.php subscriptions.xml > MySubscriptions.html

If all goes well, you should end up with a HTML file that will open in Safari and display a nicely arranged list of all your feeds.

You can then import that file into Safari (File | Import Bookmarks...). I then dragged the imported feeds into a folder called Feeds that's on my Bookmarks Bar.

Broken and Missing Functionality
Once I had all my feeds imported I was mightily annoyed that none of my carefully arranged folders, for logically grouping feeds were retained. There's another half an hour of my life I'll never get back! On the upside, this did get me to clean up dead and unwanted feeds - a task I'd been putting off for some time.

Apple's approach is then to use their bookmark folders for managing feeds. If I open the highest level folder I see all of my feeds. Open a lower level folder and I see the appropriate subset. It'd be nice if I could set that up as a sidebar. However, I can see how many unread items I have.

RSS in Mail.app
I don't know how many people use RSS in Mail.app but I imagine that the number would be small. You'd expect that all those carefully arranged folders could be brought across to Mail nicely. Well, you'd be disappointed. You can bring the feeds across but only one at a time. Which fool thought that would be a good idea?

Pop over to the File | Add RSS Feeds... command and you'll see what I mean.

The Better Way
Clearly, Apple's implementation of RSS leaves a bit to be desired. Perhaps it'll be one of the hundreds of enhancements we'll see in Snow Leopard although I'm not holding my breath given that Safari has only just been updated.

As I mentioned before, NetNewsWire is a great alternative.

However, if you're a Firefox user then there are several plug-ins that work nicely. Wizz RSS Lite isn't too bad and works with Firefox 3.5. High on people's favourite list is Sage although when i looked last night it wasn't FF3.5 ready so I couldn't test it out.