Today Netflix, Inc, the nation's most popular online DVD rental service, announced the first Netflix ready device in a series of more to come. The Netflix Player by Roku, as they're calling it, is availabel immediately and will provide over 10,000 movies to Netflix subscribers instantly to their TVs.

This is clearly a product that is aimed at the AppleTV which allows users to rent and download movies from its popular iTunes Store. The immediate clear difference between the two products is the large number of offerings (10,000 with Netflix, and less than 1000 movies from iTunes) and the cost of the two devices. Roku is offering their device for $99 whereas the AppleTV starts at $229. Naturally, I would be the first to agree with anyone that says you are getting a lot more from the AppleTV than you would be from the Roku device, such as home networking capabilities, network music and photo sharing, as well as the Apple name, support, and design. However, I'm thrilled to see this product as it is really the first of its kind to offer a low-cost option for online streams of movies and TV without the need for any kind of individual physical medium such as DVDs or Blu-Ray discs.

Another notable difference is that the Roku device claims the content is "near" DVD-quality, compared to that of Apple's soon-to-be-released HD versions of their movies.

I've been telling folks and friends that I think we have seen the end of physical format wars and that the future is online downloadable content. For you will no longer have to rebuild your entire collection with the latest high-quality tape/disc. This announcement from Netlfix was the next step we needed to push our home entertainment choices into the next century more quickly.

The Leopard upgrade to OS X changed a few things with the local web server configuration. Namely, it comes standard with Apache2 now which means that VirtualHosts are done differently as well now. After attempting to add my own custom VirtualHosts to what I thought was the right conf file, I gave up and found a better solution.

Patrick Gibson provides a great little shell script that I simply run with the name of the VirtualHost that I want to create and it automatically makes all the appropriate changes to the VirtualHosts conf file as well as the "hosts" file. More information here:

http://patrickgibson.com/utilities/virtualhost/

In an effort to bring iPhone developers together to share ideas and collaborate with each other, I have created a new Google Group, iPhone Developers.

I have been learning this technology lately. As a newbie to both OS X development, iPhone development, Objective-C, and the Cocoa framework, I wanted a central place to gather help from those in this brand new community. Seeing as Google Groups is pretty much the best place to host a message board as it only requires a Google account, I have started this group here.

Please invite those you think may be interested in joining. Would love to see Mac and iPhone developers alike join this group.

iPhone Developers Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/iphone-developers

Apple made many changes with the release of XCode 3 and Interface Builder 3 with the OS X Leopard operating system for the Mac. The workflow for these toolsets is very good as to be expected. With the release of these latest versions they aimed to provide an even more strict bound toolset to the ideals of the MVC paradigm.

In previous versions of Interface Builder, whilst creating your views for your application, you could quickly create a subclass of an existing object, say NSObject, by clicking the "Classes" tab and Control-clicking a class to subclass it into your own custom class. Apple realized this was probably not the best form as it allowed you to basically be creating part of the model within the wrong part of the IDE. The model should be created within XCode itself where all the other classes are developed. In Interface Builder 3, you can no longer subclass. You need to go back to XCode and create your class there, then when you go into Interface Builder, drag a generic Object/ObjectController and drop it in your nib. From there, inside the Inspector under Name, start typing the name of the custom class you created in XCode and push return after it has auto-completed. This will in turn apply the parent class to your custom class.

My friend Rick sent me this funny ad that he received in his email:

He pointed out the last line of the ad.

It is now over 24 hours since I have purchased my Time Capsule, and now that I have all three of my Macs backing up to it, I am much more of a happy camper. Each computer is doing their appropriate backups at the time they are supposed to on cue.

What I wanted to focus on here is the usability of a Time Capsule with Windows. In a word, simple. The drive is easily available under it's appropriate share name and the same for the share folder under that drive. You see all the files that Time Machine is using to backup the files and what not. From the root level, you can create a new folder or multiple folders in case you wanted to start backing stuff up from your Windows box as well.

One word of warning though, DO NOT open any of the Time Machine backup folders in Windows [side note, they appear as folders in Windows, but on the Mac they are actually the drive image system that Time Machine cleverly uses to store stuff], it will cause issues. For some reason, they are very picky and do not like to be touched. If you do, you may suffer the consequences and receive an error like this:

This high level error doesn't tell you much about why it cannot mount the volume. When I first came across this, I tried numerous things like rebooting my computer and the like. I tried deleting the backup that was there for my system and it wouldn't let me because the "banks" folder was in use. Turns out, this was one of the folders that I had opened on my Windows box.

I went over to my Windows machine, and didn't notice any applications or Explorer using the folder, so I wasn't sure what to do. Then I rebooted the Time Capsule hoping it would remove anything that was "connected" to it and I was then able to delete the backup and re-start my desktop process.

If you read anything in this post read this: DO NOT TOUCH YOUR BACKUP FOLDERS FROM TIME MACHINE WITHIN WINDOWS!

A lot has happened since I posted my first entry of opening my Time Capsule. I would like to report on what all has gone with it since then. After I got everything setup with the network, I wanted to start using Time Machine with it. My first thought was wondering if I could transfer my pre-existing Time Machine data that I have been backing up since Leopard came out, onto the new drive. After a quick Google search, I did not really find anything useful.

In the Time Machine preferences, I went ahead and clicked "Change Disk..." to change it to use Time Capsule from this point forth. What this does, is it makes does that all too painful initial data dump of everything. I forgot what a chore this is time-wise. Luckily, you can do other things while it quietly chugs away at passing my precious data across the network. Something to note about this initial dump...DO NOT INTERRUPT IT! I found this out by accident. I was changing a few network settings in the Time Capsule airport stuff, and clicked "Apply"--all of the sudden I received a message saying that a network drive had been unplugged. Yep, the router started as well as the entire Time Capsule. Therefore, the initial dump stopped.

I thought, not a big deal, I will just restart it once it is back up. So I did. And it seemed to connect until about 20 minutes later, I checked the progress and it was only 25KB along!!! What?!!?! I had seen this problem once before when attempting to backup my MacBook over the network when I first tried out Time Machine. With that, I recalled that if I dumped the initial drive image that had been created on the Time Machine drive, and started it back up, it would start again without a hitch. I did this, and sure enough it began backing up again. However, this time did not go as smoothly either as I did not learn from my last lesson and accidentally restarted my router again! This time during my G5 desktop backup and my MacBook.

I started from scratch on the drive and this time just started my MacBook. I will let my G5 start when it is ready at 11:30pm tonight.

Airport

As for the Airport part of the Time Capsule, I like it much better than my previous Buffalo Turbo G AirStation router (namely due to the native OS X interface known as the Airport Utility). I am familiar with this utility as I have owned an Airport Express for many years as a wireless audio distributor. But now that I have replaced my network with a real Airport Extreme (which I have wanted for a while now) I get to reap the benefits of what I hope to be a great router. Don't get me wrong, the Buffalo is great and I highly recommend that brand to anyone in the market. I have tried every consumer brand out there and nothing worked as great, and had as many useful features, with a great web interface, as this Buffalo router.

Anyway, it has a very easy to use interface as you can see from some of the images below:

It supports a lot of the standard stuff like port mapping. But because it is the Airport Extreme, you can also hook up a printer to make it a network printer, or another drive (USB) to add more storage that is network accessible. However, what you cannot do is add a second drive and add to your existing TIme Machine storage. You can only select one drive that Time Machine will work with.

Other than that, the device seems well built. We will see how it performs over the long haul and as I start using it on an everyday basis. I will try to keep you all updated on it.

For the most part, I have been pretty satisfied with Time Machine over the past few months since I have been using it. I have only been backing up my desktop system as it was the only one tethered to my MyBook drive. I hated the idea of having to plug my and my wife's MacBook in everytime we needed to backup (takes the setup and forget fun out of it). When I heard about the Time Capsule from the announcement a little while ago, I was very excited and knew I would be the proud owner of one when it came out.

Well Time Capsule came out a few days ago and arrived in our local Apple Stores today. I rushed out this morning and picked up the massive Terabyte networked drive + Airport Extreme (which is what the Time Capsule is if you didn't know). I hooked it up, with the only hitch being that I had to restart my cable modem. After that it worked flawlessly and I was able to start backing up to it immediately.

Here are some photos of the device in all of its glory: http://gallery.mac.com/kyle.d.hayes#100163

As for the PC compatibility, I will let you know when I try it out. But supposedly the think looks like a standard network drive. In addition, since it is an Airport Extreme, it does have a usb port that I can hook a hub up to if I wanted.

While reading through the release notes for Windows XP SP3, I was surprised to see a heading labeled "Apple computers." Curious, I read further to see what it said:

Apple computers

This issue affects the Windows XP Home Edition and the Windows XP Professional operating systems.

If you attempt to install this release candidate on an Intel-based Apple computer (Mac Pro, Mac Mini, MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, or iMac) that is running Windows XP SP2, installation may fail with the error "Out of disk space."

To avoid this, manually create a necessary registry key as follows: To create the registry key

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following registry subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup
3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and click String Value.
4. In the text box under the Name column, type BootDir and press ENTER.
5. Right-click the name BootDir, and then click Modify.
6. In the Edit String Value dialog box, type the drive letter for your system drive, and then click OK. For example, if your system drive is C:, type C:\.
7. Close Registry Editor.

After you have created this registry key (or if you created this key when you installed a previous version of this Service Pack), you can proceed with the installation.

While this may not be terribly interesting to most people, I like it because it shows that enough people are using Windows on their Macs for Microsoft to test and debug it's operating system on them (not to mention beta testers as well probably pushing for this). Of course, we all know the real reason why Microsoft would have Macs lying around the offices.

For those of us who participated in the MacHeist software bundle last year and saved a ton of money on a bundle of really incredible software applications, I am happy to tell you that it is here again and the bundle is just as good.

The ten great applications that are on the list this year are: 1password $29.95 CoverSutra $22.00 Cha-Ching $40.00 iStopMotion $49.00 Awaken $12.95 TaskPaper $18.95 AppZapper $12.95 CSSEdit $29.95 Snapz Pro X $69.00 Pixelmator $59.00

As you can see those are valued at $343.75!! You can purchased the bundle for only $49. Also, 25% of your purchase will be donated to the charity of your choice (from their list). Just like last year, the last three applications won't be available in the bundles unless the program reaches a certain amount of purchases. However, last year that was not an issue and we received all the software as promised.

Once you purchase the bundle the serial numbers are immediately generated for your enjoyment. Now, go buy that bundle so I can get my CSSEdit!!!! :-)

GO TO MACHEIST.COM NOW

Apparently I am creating a somewhat series of posts about Leopard. I suppose I could just put them all together and create one giant super post, but that is not as fun as posting as I find them, plus this is great for categorizing.

Have you ever wanted to watch a price of a product on Amazon to see if it goes down and snatch it up when it does? Well, there are some subscription services that do just that for you and send you an email update. Or, without giving out your email address to yet another web service, why not just web clip the product name and price and drop it in Dashboard?

Take a look at this screenshot: http://myskitch.com/kylehayes/amazon_pricewatch-20071026-231631/

Btw, I didn't used to be a real avid user of Dashboard--very light user actually, but with Web Clip, I know that I will be using it a lot more often!