PlasmaBlog

Highly-anticipated video game Grand Theft Auto (GTA) IV has received a string of near-perfect reviews ahead of its worldwide release on Tuesday. The game is expected to break records for the fastest-selling game of all time and many shops are opening their doors at midnight for gamers. But I suspect many of those people won’t remember the first GTA…

Behold. The first Grand Theft Auto.

Just a quick shameless plug for the latest of my wallpapers to be added to PlasmaDesign.co.uk. ‘Turbulence’ is available to all visitors in widescreen and regular 4:3 ratio resolutions up to 2560×1600 pixels. The original version of this photo was a shot of the water fountain outside the Grand Hyatt in downtown San Francisco at night. The final version has been subjected to a considerable number of adjustments using Photoshop CS3.

Get it here.

You may have come here looking for an answer to the question above. If so, sorry. I wish I knew. How can a company as large and well respected as Adobe justify releasing a software updater that uses 100% of CPU resources from the minute it launches until the moment it quits? Indeed, that question can be added to other Adobe-related gripes, like why Illustrator takes forever to load even on a quad core Mac Pro? Or why my Version Cue database slows Bridge to a crawl if there are more than 100 projects? Or why using Dreamweaver CS3 on a Mac is akin to wading through treacle. For the love of God, Adobe. If you are going to charge thousands of dollars for your software, spend some of that revenue on ironing out it’s countless bugs because one day there might be a viable alternative. And if that happens you can kiss goodbye to my cash.

Typography.com published a great comparison between the newly designed currencies of the UK and US. Both were designed using very different approaches…

“Above, the new face of British currency, announced by the Royal Mint. The striking new designs, selected from an open competition that attracted four thousand entries, are the work of a 26-year old graphic designer named Matthew Dent. They are Mr. Dent’s first foray into currency design.

Below, the new five dollar bill, introduced last month by the United States Department of the Treasury. The new design, which features a big purple Helvetica five, is the work of a 147-year-old government agency called the United States Bureau of Engraving and Printing. It employs 2,500 people, and has an annual budget of $525,000,000.”

Yet more proof that ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’.

I have been using a MacBook Air as my sole laptop for a month or so now. In general I feel very positive about my experience with it. However, there is one issue that seems to be plaguing myself and other MacBook Air owners. When taxing the CPU for extended periods, the MacBook Air shuts down one of it’s cores to prevent overheating. The easiest way to reproduce the problem is to watch a few YouTube videos. After approximately 15 minutes the Mac OS X Activity Monitor clearly shows only one core running. Within a few minutes of the CPU load being lightened, the dormant core springs back to life.

While running on only one CPU core, the MacBook Air is barely usable. The UI becomes jittery and the onscreen trackpad pointer jumps around.

While trying to find a solution to the problem I came across this forum post. The author suggests an application called ‘Coolbook‘ which purports to underclock the laptops CPU by lowering the voltage supplied to the processor and by more agressively throttling the speed of the CPU. My initial reaction was one of extreme skepticism. Alarm bells were ringing. While I consider myself a geek I have never dabbled with overclocking of CPU’s and have never even heard of underclocking. But after reading five pages of positive responses I decided to take the plunge and install ‘Coolbook’.

Firstly, let’s describe the applications UI as abysmal. There is no getting away from it. Maybe it would make more sense to someone with experience in underclocking but the whole point in a GUI is to assist the uninitiated in achieving their goals without having to resort to technical manuals. Needless to say I had to resort to the manual which is thankfully quite good.

After tinkering with the various parameters and following the advice of others on the forum I settled on the following settings…

When power adaptor is plugged in…

600HMz = 0.9V
800MHz = 0.9V
1200MHz = 0.9V
1400Mhz = 0.9V
1600Mhz = 0.95V

When the MacBook is running on battery…

600MHz = 0.9V
800Mhz = 0.9V
1200Mhz = 0.9V

This lowers the voltage supplied to the CPU by 0.2V. Also of note is the removal of the 1400MHz and 1600MHz setting when running on batteries. This has had the following results…

Before Coolbook

Approx CPU temperature under light load 52C
Approx CPU temperature under heavy load 75C
Fan speed under light load 2500rpm
Fan speed under heavy load 6500rpm
Battery life under light load - 3.35

After Coolbook

Approx CPU temperature under light load 43C
Approx CPU temperature under heavy load 62C
Fan speed under light load 2500rpm
Fan speed under heavy load 4250rpm
Battery life under light load - 4.25

Since installing Coolbook, my MacBook Air has suffered no core shutdowns, it has run significantly cooler to the touch, it is quieter (as a result of the lower fan speeds) and it lasts almost an hour longer than usual when running on battery power. As of yet I have found no downsides and I have not experienced any instability.

There is some debate about the possibilities of damaging the CPU by underclocking it. My research leads me to believe that such damage is unlikely and that using too low a voltage will simply result in OS instability. However, I am not advising anyone else rushes into underclocking their MacBook Air. All I offer is my experience with ‘Coolbook‘ for those who might be interested I will update this post should my experience change over the coming weeks.

Have you time for a good read? Then try the new Wired article on ‘How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong‘.

“It’s hard to see how any of this would have happened had Jobs hewed to the standard touchy-feely philosophies of Silicon Valley. Apple creates must-have products the old-fashioned way: by locking the doors and sweating and bleeding until something emerges perfectly formed. It’s hard to see the Mac OS and the iPhone coming out of the same design-by-committee process that produced Microsoft Vista or Dell’s Pocket DJ music player. Likewise, had Apple opened its iTunes-iPod juggernaut to outside developers, the company would have risked turning its uniquely integrated service into a hodgepodge of independent applications — kind of like the rest of the Internet, come to think of it.”

As the owner of a graphic design agency, I see the negative impact of ‘design by committee’ on a frequent basis. It is rarely pretty.

Apple have just upgraded their Airport Express to 802.11n. The previous model was only 802.11g. Apple claims a 5x speed improvement over the old version although in my experience users are more likely to get about three times the throughput; a nice speed bump nevertheless. The new Airport Express also boasts twice the range and is selling for the same price ($99) as the model it supersedes.

The northern lights must be one of the most beautiful natural phenomenon known to man, yet they are notoriously difficult to capture on film. However, Sigurdur H. Stefnisson seems to have perfected the art. These stunning photos of were all taken in Iceland over the last 20 years.

If you are like me and you feel compelled to tinker under the hood of Mac OS X then you may find the latest Alcor (the genius behind Quicksilver) project interesting. ‘Secrets 1.0′ is a system preference pane that provides GUI access to a multitude of hidden user defaults for both Mac OS X itself, Apple software and third party apps.

Secrets 1.0 is an open source project, compatible with Leopard only. Every time the preference pane is accessed it pulls the entire list of user defaults from http://secrets.textdriven.com/. New entries are being added to the site by its users on a minute by minute basis so the list of changes you can make to your Mac using the ‘Secrets’ preference pane will grow and grow over time.

Once again, another fascinating project by the creator of Quicksilver, and one that is sure to have the developers of more conventional system tweaking apps like Tinkertool, Onyx and Cocktail looking over their shoulders.

Download the software and find out more about Secrets here.

The MacBook Air is the latest in a long line of Apple notebooks to find a home at ‘Chez Randtoul’. Until its arrival I had considered the MacBook Pro to be the gold standard for build quality in a notebook. However, there are a few issues with the MacBook Pro, caused by less-than-perfect design.

1) When closed the screen touches the keys. Over time this leaves permanent marks on the display. Ultimately caused by a lack of clearance between the screen and keyboard, the problem is exasperated by the amount of flex in the lid. Apple has made modifications to the MacBook Pro/Powerbook over the years to try and address the issue (mainly through the addition of rubber pads around the screen bezel). A number of third party solutions have also sprung up, including screen protecting microfiber cloths that are placed on the keyboard before the lid is closed. However, in my mind these are band-aids developed to mask a fundamental design flaw.

2) While the casing for the MacBook Pro is beautifully anodized aluminum, the bevelled edge just below the space bar is painted. Whether this becomes a problem for the user depends heavily on how they type, and where they rest their thumbs. If, like me your thumbs tend to sit on the space bar, over time the painted area can become discolored and eventually wear off altogether, revealing the bare aluminum underneath.

3) Under certain circumstances the backlighting of the keyboard can actually make the keys more difficult to read. Since the death of the Titanium Powerbook, Apple have chosen to match the color of the keys to the notebooks casing, resulting in a light grey keyboard on the Macbook Pros. During daylight this is fine (light grey keys, black characters). During darkness (once the backlighting is activated) again all is well (black keys, white characters). But in a room with a low light the result is white characters on light grey keys. While not too much of a problem for touch typists, the low contrast between the keys and characters tends to negate the supposed benefits of a backlit keyboard.

Back to the MacBook Air. There has of course been much debate about its merits since it’s launch. However, what cannot be denied is it’s exceptional build quality. The curved surfaces of the casing give the notebook an amazing amount of rigidity, especially when the ultra-thin form factor is taking into consideration. Indeed, I have heard many people comment that the MacBook Air feels as though it is carved from a solid slab of aluminum.

Stanley Kubrick once said “Sometimes the truth of a thing is not so much in the think of it, as in the feel of it.“

While the MacBook Air feature set is a lesson in compromise and sacrifice, the ‘feel’ of the Air is of undeniable quality and craftsmanship.

So what about those three design flaws still present in the Air’s big brother, the Macbook Pro?

1) The keys no longer touch the screen. This has been achieved by making three changes. Firstly a rubber bumper now runs around the entire circumference of the screen. Secondly, the use of the MacBooks chiclet style recessed and flat-surface keyboard results in more clearance between the screen and keys. Thirdly, the curves of the lids casing provide much more rigidity, resulting in less screen flex.

2) There are no painted areas. While I haven’t taken a sheet of sandpaper to my new MacBook Air, I have given it a thorough inspection and it appears that all surfaces are anodized aluminum.

3) The keyboard is now black. While this is cosmetically a little jarring for some (although it brings back fond memories of the Titanium Powerbook for me), it provides high contrast between the keys and characters under all lighting conditions. Is this a rare case of Apple choosing function over form? Surely not
After two weeks with my MacBook Air I find it difficult to levy any significant criticism of the units build quality and engineering. It truly is the gold standard of notebook design. Alas poor MacBook Pro. I knew him well.