Big Screen, Small Screen; What’s the Best Screen Size?

I’m sitting here in front of my 27″ iMac, purchased in June, and just back from repairs. I had a problem with a burning smell coming from the computer, and the repair technician changed the logic board, because he spotted a bit of scotch tape, used to hold down a small wire, touching the processor. He thinks that the tape, or its glue, was burning when the processor got hot.

I was without the iMac for a week; in the interim, I was using my 13″ MacBook Air. There’s quite a difference between the two. The resolution of the iMac is 2560 x 1440, and the Air displays at 1440 x 900. That means the iMac is nearly 3 times the display size of the Air.

I’ve been using a 27″ monitor since the end of last year, when I bought an Apple Cinema Display to use with my previous Mac, a Mac mini. So the size of the monitor is familiar. Switching to the MacBook Air for all of my work was a bit cramped at first. (I do use the MacBook Air regularly, but only for certain tasks.) There are times when I have two or three windows visible on the iMac, and to view the same content on the MacBook Air, I had to switch applications a lot.

But something happened during this past week. My desk was more spacious (I use this great Rain Design laptop stand to raise the Air), and there was no huge luminous panel in front of my eyes all day. So when I got the iMac back and put it on my desk, it was a bit of a shock. I’m suddenly rethinking whether I really want to have such a big screen in front of me. The first thing I did was move it about a foot back from where I used to have it; that makes it seem a bit smaller. (Perhaps I can move it even further…) But the more minimal installation of the MacBook Air, even with a wired keyboard and Magic Trackpad, just seemed a lot more comfortable.

It’s nice to have a big screen; there are many things that are easier to do. My basic layout is to have a Safari window on the left and Mail on the right, each taking up half the screen. That gives me big web pages, and a spacious Mail display. (For other apps, I use different desktops, and arrange them in similar ways.) Right now, I’m typing in , and it only takes up about 1/3 of the screen in width, leaving plenty of room for me to switch to Safari if I need to check a web page.

But it’s also nice to have a small, minimal computer. Not that I’d want my main Mac to be the 13″ MacBook Air; it’s too small for me to work on comfortably, in part because my eyes aren’t great. There was a time when my main Mac was a 14″ iBook on a stand, and I worked fairly well on it. But over the years, I’ve gotten increasingly large displays, and I realize that while there are advantages, the size of the screen is imposing. (And big screens give off a lot of heat. This isn’t a problem all year round, but in the summer it is.)

What sort of compromise could I find? I think the 21.5″ iMac might be too small – my wife has one that size, and it seems tight – and Apple no longer makes their 24″ Cinema Display. I had one on loan from Apple for a while last year, and seeing the quality of that display prompted me to buy the 27″ when it was released. If I didn’t have this new iMac (I know, I could sell it…), I might be tempted to look for a used 24″ display and go back to using a Mac mini. (Or buy a non-Apple display, though I don’t know which vendor makes displays as good as Apple. My experiences in the past haven’t been that great.) A 15″ laptop might be a good size, but I think using a laptop as my main computer is a bit limited. (And it’s as expensive as the iMac, if not even more.)

It’s a tough call. It’s nice to have a big screen, but it takes up too much space. I’m going to think seriously about downsizing. It’s time to look for more comfort instead of more size.

iTunes, Full-Screen View and AppleScript Applets

One of the marquee features in OS X Lion is full-screen view. Using this, your menubar withdraws from the screen, and your window takes up a tad more space. I don’t use this much on my 27″ iMac – may main computer – with the exception of for iTunes. Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a big music fan, and have a huge iTunes library. (Currently about 75,000 tracks.) With iTunes in full-screen view, I can eke out a bit more space to view my music.

I’m also an obsessive tagger. Whenever I add music to my iTunes library, either by ripping CDs or by adding downloads, I ensure that the tags fit my personal tagging scheme. To do this, I use a number of AppleScripts from the Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes web site.

Doug Adams recently updated a script I use often, Remove n Characters from Front or Back, turning it into a nifty applet which is far more useful than previous incarnations. Unfortunately, when using iTunes in full-screen mode, applets simply don’t work well. Since they spawn their own windows, they can’t display over the iTunes window, and bounce to another space. This is a shame; when I want to use such applets, I need to take iTunes out of full-screen mode.

This behavior can be confusing. Fortunately, Doug came up with a dialog explaining this to users. His applet detects when iTunes is in full-screen mode, and, if so, shows the following:

This means that users have to either move the applet’s window back to the iTunes space, but it’s actually easier to take iTunes out of full-screen mode. It’s a shame that AppleScript works this way. This will be the case for a number of applets, and is especially unfortunate because AppleScript, in Lion, can access Cocoa frameworks, and create applets that can do much more than previous versions of AppleScript.

Hear Me on the Macworld Podcast

Chris Breen writes: “We’re now in the last stage of the cycle where we have a better idea of what Lion is and isn’t good for. With that in mind, Kirk McElhearn joins me to talk about some of Lion’s annoyances—specifically, where iCal falls down. Later in the discussion we talk generally about Lion’s features and, in a complete change of subject, how Kirk is dealing with ripping and cataloging a massive Grateful Dead release.”

Listen to the Macworld podcast: 36 min.

Europe ’72 Is Here

I finally got my Complete Europe ’72 box set:

I got number 3047:

In my initial listen to parts of the first show (4/7/72, Wembley Empire Pool, London, England), I’m very impressed by the quality of the mix and remastering. The instruments all sound fresh and clear, and the overall sound is very nice. It’s especially interesting to hear Pigpen’s organ a bit more present than in most recordings from this tour, and the vocals are all well balanced.

Fare Thee Well, Steve

Steve Jobs has announced his retirement as CEO of Apple. It’s been quite a ride. Thanks for everything, Steve.

New iMac + Lion + Video = Freeze – Updated

See an expanded version of this article on TidBITS.

I’ve generally been fortunate when upgrading to new versions of OS X, but this time I’ve been hit with a nasty bug, that’s already caused me to lose some work. I have a new 27″ iMac, purchased in early June. This computer worked fine under Snow Leopard, but once I installed Lion, I started seeing random freezes when viewing videos. The videos could be any kind – Flash, H-264 or QuickTime – and the freezes are mean: the entire screen locks up, except for the cursor, and, while sound continues if I have iTunes playing in the background, I can’t do anything else but a hard restart. Sometimes it simply freezes, and other times I get displays like this (this is a screen shot I took of a QuickTime Player window; my iMac froze when I tried to close the window):

When this happens, the following messages are written to kernel.log:

7/23/11 12:02:40.000 PM kernel: ** GPU Debug Info Start **
7/23/11 12:02:40.000 PM kernel: 0x00006740
7/23/11 12:02:40.000 PM kernel: 0x0000008f
7/23/11 12:02:40.000 PM kernel: 0x00000001
7/23/11 12:02:40.000 PM kernel: 0x00000018
7/23/11 12:02:40.000 PM kernel: 0x0000a880
[and so on for a few hundred lines]

There’s a pretty long thread on Apple’s forums of people confirming that they, too, have this problem, and there are other threads discussing it as well. I called AppleCare on Saturday, and the technician was not aware of this problem. I told him I knew he wouldn’t have a solution, but wanted to make sure that the information got to Apple’s support technicians so it would go up the chain.

For now, I avoid watching any kind of video on my iMac. My MacBook Air has no problem, so I use that. But this is a disturbing problem, clearly related to Lion, which will hopefully be fixed in the first Lion update, which is likely to be released this week.

Update: I got a call back from an Apple technician this afternoon, asking for more information, logs, system profiles, etc. So I can confirm that Apple is indeed looking into this. It was relatively easy to reproduce the problem while on the phone with the technician, alas.

Update 2: The Apple technician has had me try a number of things to eliminate various possibilities – removing certain caches, etc. So far, none of them has led to a solution. The Apple forum thread is getting longer…

Update 3: The Apple technician asked me to test my Mac without the third-party RAM I had added. It froze pretty quickly. But while I was at it, I tried removing the original RAM, and was unable to make it freeze, no matter what kind of videos I viewed, even with many at a time. This may therefore be the culprit, even though a number of people on the Apple forum tested their RAM and found no problems with it.

Update 4: I just had a freeze, so it’s not the RAM. Too bad; that would have been an easy solution.

Update 5: I’ve been working with an Apple engineer for the past week, and he had me try everything suggested in this very long therad. He also asked me to do a clean install on a different disk, which I did yesterday. I was unable to reproduce the problem, despite running lots of videos, sleeping often, etc. This doesn’t mean it won’t happen, but I was able to easily reproduce it on my main boot partition.

There are certainly many variables – the clean install had no third-party sofware installed. But given the number of people posting here, I doubt that there’s any third-party software responsible. (Also, the Apple engineer has seen my crash logs, and hasn’t suggested that any specific software could be responsible.) So I’m a bit flummoxed by this latest development…

Update 6: I was able to get a freeze on my clean install. So that rules out any issues specific to my installation, third-party software, etc.

The story so far: Let me summarize the problem here, and discuss the many solutions proposed on the very, very long Apple forum thread. Viewing videos of any kind cause freezes. This doesn’t happen every time one views a video, and only happens after an iMac has been put to sleep at least once, or, in some cases, multiple times. These videos can be Flash, H-264, or QuickTime formats, and viewing may occur in Safari, Firefox, QuickTime Player, iTunes or any other program.

Doing the usual troubleshooting steps, such as resetting the PRAM or SMC does nothing. Doing a clean installation of Lion, with no third-party software installed, does not solve the problem. Deleting and/or reinstalling Flash has no effect on it. RAM or other hardware has no effect, though it may turn out that this is a hardware problem with video cards. (This seems unlikely, because many people with this problem, including myself, had their iMacs with Snow Leopard, and did not have freezes.) In short, none of the “solutions” offered on the Apple forums resolve the issue, as you can see in the trials I carried out in my various updates above.

For now, all we can do is wait on Apple. I’m willing to give Apple a bye on this for now, but this is starting to become a long time since the discovery of this issue. I can understand the anger of some users, and I’m a bit surprised that Apple didn’t discover this. However, it’s entirely possible that they didn’t have the new iMacs any earlier than users did for testing. (Which is, of course, reprehensible.) While some posters in the Apple forum thread mention similar problems with MacBook Pros, it is not the same problem; iMacs freeze; MacBook Pros seem to have kernel panics, and it seems to be a much more isolated problem.

In any case, I’ll continue updating this post as I get more information.

Update 7: I got some interesting information from someone who knows a lot about graphics cards and drivers. One of the most interesting things he said was that the number of background processes running may have an effect on this issue. This is interesting, because when I tried reproducing it on a clean installation, with no third-party software installed, it took quite some time to induce a freeze. On my normal installation, it’s much easier to reproduce the problem, and I do have a lot of third-party software installed that runs background processes. Nevertheless, this does not offer a solution to the problem, and Apple has still not come forth with anything. This is starting to become a bit long. Sigh.

Update 8: On August 16, Apple released Mac OS X 10.7.1, a small update which claims to “Address an issue that may cause the system to become unresponsive when playing a video in Safari.” It’s not clear whether this resolves the current issue. In my initial tests, I was unable to get my iMac to freeze, though I was seeing some artifacts when starting to play videos using QuickLook. It will take a while to be certain whether or not this resolves the issue. If anyone reading this has applied the update and is still having the problem, please post a comment.

Listen to Me Talk about Apple and the Tour de France on the Sports-Casters Podcast

While I often talk on Mac podcasts, this was a first. I did an interview for the Sports-Casters podcast yesterday, discussing Apple and Lion (at the time of the recording, we didn’t know that Lion would be released today, and being under NDA, I couldn’t say much), as well as the Tour de France, which comes about 5 km from my home today. Check it out to hear me, and two writers from Sports illustrated who talk only about sports.

One Prediction for Apple’s Keynote at the WWDC Today

Predictions abound for Apple’s keynote address at today’s WWDC. They discuss syncing, as in this article by my Macworld colleague Lex Friedman, and streaming, as colleague Chris Breen wrote. But I have a prediction that doesn’t seem to have made the cut.

With iCloud, and new ways of syncing and streaming, I forecast that Apple will split iTunes into two programs: one that will handle media (music, videos, podcasts, etc.), and that will also house the iTunes Store. The second program will manage other information, such as contacts, calendars, and photos, all of which is not stored in the iTunes library. I think that a new syncing system – potentially wireless syncing – will allow Apple to separate these two aspects of iTunes, which often confuse people.

In addition, syncing between Macs that is currently managed by the MobileMe preferences (contacts, keychains, bookmarks, etc.) could be done by this new application, allowing you to choose from a single program what you sync to a Mac or to an iOS device. The two syncing systems were created independently, and it would make a lot of sense to merge them into a single interface.

In the meantime, if you need to learn about managing your media in iTunes, check out my ebook Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ, where I give a full range of explanations and tips for novices and for power users.