waffle

Hey, remember in 2002 when Gruber and MPT discussed saving being cruft from the early days of computers? (MPT didn’t keep that domain. The Wayback Machine helps out.) It turns out that nine years later, Apple agrees, and Mac OS X Lion is going to have built-in support for a new model of working with documents.

• You still can save, but you don’t need to. The file is saved automatically every now and then, periodically, probably when you quit and probably immediately, if it’s that kind of change in that kind of application.
• Those previous saves are available to you later on. You can compare previous versions and the current version side by side, and drag over parts you like.

When one application does part of this, like famously FileMaker more than twenty years ago, it’s annoying. When all applicable applications does every part of this, it’s going to be nice.

Those new MacBook Pros don’t use Pentalobe screws. Even in the grim meathook future, laptop parts are still user-replaceable, and you can even unhook the battery while fiddling. Huzzah.

With no optical-drive-free MBP this time around either, maybe it’s just plain time to upgrade my current one. I got it just weeks before they added the antiglare screen option back in for the unibody models the first time and I’ve been kicking myself since. So since I’ve been saving for almost two years, I think it’s about time to upgrade from glare to antiglare, from 1440 x 900 to 1920 x 1200, from a 3.06 GHz dual-core Core 2 Duo to a 2.2 GHz quad-core Core i7, from a 256 GB SSD to a 512 GB SSD and why not from 480 Mbps to 10 Gbps. I guess after all those years of wavering, I’m getting a MacBook Pro 17″.

The EU has long struck down on car company partnered repair shops by only allowing them to function as long as the same service is made available to parties outside the “vertical agreement” formed by the car company and the repair shop. In plain English: Volkswagen has to sell their service manuals, software updates and parts to every shop that wants to buy, and it can’t charge exorbitant amounts for them either.

What, then, of Apple’s Pentalobe screws, and their refusal to make them available to non-partners? Isn’t this fundamentally the same raw deal for non-participating shops and customers alike?

Patently Apple:

One of the key attributes or selling points of Apple’s Safe Deposit Box Application or OS X feature is that your digital valuables could be stored “off site” or beyond the home computer to safeguard your digital valuables which could be something like a Will or Living Will, agreements, life insurance policies, home insurance policies, a simple home inventory list or video or perhaps something that’s really valuable to most every iTunes fan: a copy of your iTunes Library.

Patently Apple is speculating, and it’s in Apple’s interest to file plenty patents just for mutually-assured-destruction purposes, but I don’t believe that a feature like this wasn’t destined for Mac OS X in some way at some point. One angle of the feature that Patently Apple puts stock in is basically iTunes Server.

Time Machine was backup. This feature is primary storage and encryption locally (which means that if you backup with Time Machine, rsync or something else, it gets a local backup), optionally coupled with automatic off-site secondary backup. This is great.

The feature I was hoping for lets you place the data on a local but external drive, manages access so that you get the local copy if possible and go through some routing and tunneling otherwise, and has clear guidelines so that applications like iTunes, iPhoto or media centers may stick their databases there and work the same but with some caching, buffering, latency and asynchrony. Optionally, it also backs up everything from that drive into cloud storage as time and purchased capacity allows.

Nothing of what I propose is rocket science; it takes a few more Back To My Mac servers, some new Time Capsule firmware (and probably boosted capacity) and a little determination to make this work. The payoffs for Apple are enormous: saving huge chunks of everyone’s drives are a powerful motivator to buy both their service and OS revision. So yes, I still feel like Mac OS X Lion will actually deliver something that goes farther than the patent, written right around the Snow Leopard launch, details.