Claiming to “re-invent the textbook,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president for Worldwide Marketing, portrayed Apple as a crusader for educational innovation, and announced a new product range that, according to one of the talking-head teachers roped in to shill for iBooks textbooks, would “change my students’ lives for the better.”

This was intended to be, clearly, a spectacular advance, a leap forward in educational technology that would disrupt, innovate, surprise, delight; certainly, for me, a technology commentator, and a teacher since 1991, this should have been a revolutionary innovation. But it didn’t, and it wasn’t.

A company such as Apple should, surely, have the potential not simply to embellish and enhance the textbook as it exists in its current paradigm; they should have it in them, especially if they are to have the hubris to claim that they are “reinventing” the textbook, to introduce something utterly radical, something that turns the current understanding of the textbook utterly on its head.

Instead, Apple’s presentation should have been fronted by Rod Serling. I was watching the thing on a fast, powerful, modern laptop computer — an Apple MacBook Pro with a quad-core Intel processor, accessing fast Internet over a wireless connection, and downloading the new product as it was announced onto an Apple iPad — a tablet computer! — at the same time. And yet, and yet… what was being shown off, what was touted as a reinvention of the textbook, belonged back in the mid 1990s.

An iBooks textbook, we were promised, would be interactive. Interactivity in content has been a fundamental aspect of computer-aided delivery for as long as we’ve had CD-ROMs — I updated my Mac IIsi to a IIvx back in 1995 because I really wanted the CD-ROM drive, and immediately started playing with multimedia titles that were starting to appear. And what made these titles attractive was the fact that they could build on simple static text, offering, as it was known then, a multimedia experience — video, animation, audio.

This was, as I say, seventeen years ago — around the time some of the target audience of the iBooks textbooks were born. In those seventeen years, computer-mediated instructional materials (“textbook” is such an old-fashioned word) should, surely, have moved on. But what I find on my iPad today, in 2012 (for, at least, as long as iBooks 2 is usable; my experience so far is that it’s as unstable as a hippo on rollerskates) is an experience that, other than being on my ever-so-modern tablet computer, is, essentially, the same as that offered by multimedia CD-ROMs back in the early 90s.

It is true that iBooks textbooks offer a level of engagement that paper books are unable to match, and there is definitely evidence to suggest that novelty in presentation, especially when that novelty involves computers, will, at least temporarily, reduce affective barriers to learning. I know — I did some of the research as a graduate student, again back in the mid 1990s. But those years also saw an incipient movement to take the possibilities offered by computers to personalise and individualise the learning experience offered by technology and exploit the platforms available even fifteen years ago.

At a language-teaching conference in Japan in, I believe, 1999 or 2000, I listened to a presentation on adaptive language testing, a system that tested, observed student performance, and then selected the next instruction-testing sequence based on that performance. While this was, at that point, a somewhat rudimentary application of the principles involved, it at least showed that computers were able to make decisions on what to do next based on what had preceded that decision. iBooks 2 offers no such flexibility, as far as I can tell so far.

Partly this is due to the fact that iBooks textbooks are a product of iBooks Author, itself essentially the love child of of iWork’s Pages and Keynote. Absent, so far, are any programming tools, even simple ones, that can allow any form of data-storing scripting, which is a shame, since programs such as FileMaker Pro, SuperCard, even HyperCard (of sainted memory) allow solutions to be created that allow a degree of decision-based scripting. Had Apple incorporated such elements into iBooks Author, a whole new level of interactivity and personalised learning could have been generated: “Steve, I see you’re spending a lot of time on simple harmonic motion, but you’re not doing very well on the end-of-topic quiz. Would you like some extra help with this topic?” But while the student can interact with the content, the content remains unable to interact with the student, and this seems to be an opportunity badly missed; I can only hope that scripting will feature strongly in a future version of iBooks Author.

As it stands, iBooks textbooks offers very little that hasn’t been on offer for nearly twenty years. Far from reinventing the textbook, Apple have simply taken an existing concept and applied it to a new medium, with, it appears, relatively little in the way of points of difference due to the particular nature of the iPad platform. And so, instead of static text and static images on a page, we are now presented with static text and some moving images on a page. This is a small step forward in terms of paper textbooks, but, in terms of the state of the art with regard to multimedia presentation, it is, absent scripting, possibly even a retrograde step.

In terms of the pedagogy, too, advances are lacking. Beginning with Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences back in the 1980s, educational theory has emphasised learning modalities; it is impossible to escape a teacher-training programme in, at the very least, the United States or New Zealand, without having the concept of visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile learners pounded deep into one’s brain; it is equally impossible to survive a lesson observation without some questioning of how much a teacher has addressed all of his students’ learning styles.

Textbooks, of course, by their very nature are limited to the visual modality; that is an inescapable constraint of paper. But this constraint, by and large, remains intact in an iBooks textbook, even though the technology no longer imposes it. The essence of an iBooks textbook is written text — everything else is an adjunct to that written text. Indeed, even though text-to-speech conversion is a global function of iOS 5, enabled through the General pane of the Settings app, there appears to be no easy way to use it in an iBooks textbook — this is as wasted an opportunity as exists in iBooks 2.

Being a physics teacher, I naturally downloaded a sample of McGraw Hill’s physics textbook, and played with the chapters on waves and vibration. This has never been the easiest topic in the world to teach in the classroom; springs, ropes and waveform generators can be rather temperamental, and while on a good day a standing waves can be fun, I’ve yet to see a teacher actually manage a third harmonic in a rope on demand. This is where the potential of iBooks 2 is teased to teachers, but even then not entirely brilliantly implemented, and this is a function of the file-size limitation set by Apple.

iBooks textbooks, we have been told, can be up to 2 GB in size if they are to be distributed through the iBookstore. This is reasonable — Apple is hoping to sell a lot of these books, of course, and so they need to make sure that their datacentres, already serving up iTunes, iCloud, and two App Stores, don’t suddenly start laboring under 15 GB behemoths. (This limitation, though, appears not to apply, for example, to the 2.77 GB of biology currently on offer from Pearson.)

I would like to see every photograph in my physics textbook link to a video of a dynamic experiment. But while videos of projectiles, and animations of graphs of their motion, would be a valuable enhancement to a textbook, their creation will inevitably increase production costs for the book, and slow down the editorial cycle somewhat. I already use YouTube to demonstrate things I can’t readily demonstrate in the classroom, such as the brick-on-a-rope-not-hitting-your-face illustration of conservation of energy, but I spend a lot of time doing quality control on YouTube videos; having a ready-made bundle of content on an iPad would be enormously beneficial. Similarly, trying to draw, on a flat, two-dimensional whiteboard, a diagram of the three-dimensional vectors of Maxwell’s Laws is guaranteed to give headaches — so much easier simply to call up the relevant page on an iPad. But the more content you include in your book, the bigger the file will be, and the longer it will take to download.

And downloading is an issue for many people. As I have written about in “Paying by the Bit: Internet Access in New Zealand” (15 January 2010), outside the United States not everyone, including schools, has access to unlimited Internet connections. If my students were issued iPads next month, for the start of the new school year, they would then need to download their textbooks. Would they do this at home? Given that a typical home Internet connection in New Zealand, assuming it even has broadband (dialup is still quite widespread here), has a data cap of 5–10 GB per month, it’s fair to assume that most of my students will want to download their books at school. Perhaps the school would download one instance of each book, and syncing could happen centrally; this would, of course, require that all students sync their iPads with the school’s computers, of which there are not that many; the headaches are multi-layered. Or my school would have to set up and maintain a Wi-FI network for this purpose; that simply become another associated expense.

This is before the school has even provided the iPads. Given the uproar over plans by Orewa College, a moderately well-off secondary school north of Auckland, to require that all incoming students buy iPads or similar, I very much doubt that my school, in the poorer end of south Auckland, would fare terribly well in requiring that parents purchase. This would then leave the school having to buy the devices themselves, which would be difficult. My school, with its socio-economic decile rating of 2, receives almost no funding from the “voluntary” contributions that other schools raise from parents. As a result, it is dependent almost solely on its operating budget of around $1,000 per student from the Ministry of Education. Given that iPads start at $799 here in New Zealand, a very generous educational bulk-purchase discount from Apple would be required in order to make this an even remotely feasible purchase.

In American schools, too, where budget crunches are hurting badly, I question how many schools will be able to afford this technology. Pinellas County in Florida, where I once taught, is facing a budget crisissuch that teacher layoffs and furloughs are being proposed to try to make the books balance. Last year’s budget allowed for a per-student spend of $7,845; a $499 iPad would represent 6 percent of the entire funding allocation for each of the 103,000 students in the county. But while the per-student budget in Pinellas may seem significantly more generous than a New Zealand school’s funding, remember that out of that money must come teacher salaries, which make up 85 percent of the district’s budget; of the remaining $1,177, a $499 iPad is still a very big ask, and when teachers’ salaries are being considered fair game for budget reduction cuts, a five-million-dollar expenditure on iPads would not sit well.

So, in the end, is it worth it? Will students benefit from iPads with textbooks on them? Will they, indeed, benefit sufficiently to warrant the funds outlays involved? Yes, paper textbooks are expensive, and yes, they involve a buy-in that locks schools into using them for maybe five years. But, in physics, for example, the content being taught is not changing so rapidly that we need to replace our textbooks that often, even if wear and tear make it advisable. We can make do for another year; lock-in is not as terrible as it might seem.

But while iPads make it easy and relatively affordable to update content readily, how often will publishers offer free updates? By the time a publisher has updated a textbook to the extent that it actually exploits iBooks 2 and the iPad fully, will that then be a free update? In the meantime, the hardware costs of iPads is not one-off; once the up-front purchase has been made, there will be service costs. Do schools buy AppleCare? What happens to out-of-warranty repairs, in particular batteries wearing out? Will school insurance cover accidental loss, damage, theft?

Had iBooks 2 and iBooks Author been released back in 1996, when CD-ROMs were still a pretty neat idea, I would be writing a very different article. But today, when Apple are trying to claim that twenty-year-old ideas represent a “reinvention” of the textbook, I am less impressed. Schiller, see me after school. Grade: C-. Really must try harder.

[This article first appeared in TidBITS]

Most recently I’ve had Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Server (a clunkily-named piece of software, to be sure, but then Apple are not know for their elegance in nomenclature), running on a headless Mac mini, a system I wrote about a handful of years ago and which Apple clearly used as inspiration for their min server product.

I’ve been happy with this setup for quite some time. A batch of websites have been dished up from my server, reliably and consistently, for years, including this very blog, as well as New Life: New Zealand, my Moving to New Zealand blog. It was, for the most part, a set-and-forget system, needing only the most occasional of tweaks. But lately I’d noticed that the overall performance of my mini was becoming quite unacceptable. In addition to web- and mail-serving tasks, my mini also did light duties as a home media centre, and also hosted my iPhone, and so I use Screen Sharing to administer the thing, hidden as it is under a coffee table in the family room. Increasingly, this was becoming intolerable.

My lovely wife had recently returned from her annual visit to the US, and had brought home with her for me a new 2TB external hard disc; given that they retail over there for around half the price you can find them here in New Zealand, this was very much appreciated. Although I couldn’t be sure, I strongly suspected that the original internal hard disc of my mini, all 80GB of it, might have started to see the end of its useful life, and so I decided to install an operating system on the new external disc, and run my mini from there.

But which version to run? I had an installer disc for version 10.6, Snow Leopard Server, but I was sorely tempted by version 10.7, Lion Server. I particularly was tempted by the joys of wireless syncing that my iPhone, now running iOS 5, would now experience, and, well, why would I want to re-install an obsolescing system? Reading up on Lion Server gave me pause, though. Reviews such as this one concerned me, other sites had implied that multiple sites wouldn’t be possible, and I also got the impression that mail services would be hobbled.

In the end, I took a deep breath and installed. The software was surprisingly easy to install: once the standard client edition of Mac OS X Lion was up and running — and that was quite effortless, given that I already had made an installer DVD when I installed Lion on my laptop — a quick trip to the Mac App Store and a fifty-dollar spend later, and I had a new server. (Pricing, by the way, finally seems to be a bit clearer than it was before release.)

Server: Lion Server's part-replacement for Server Admin

All I could see, though, that was new for my $49.99 was a new application in the dock, Server. That, it would appear, was that, and it was, as far as I could tell, a rather severely hobbled version of the Server Admin application that used to power earlier editions of Mac OS X Server. Web services, for example, no longer had the flexible options that Snow Leopard Server used to make available; while multiple domains could quite easily be set up, there was a degree of inconvenience in the new simplification — instead of adding, say, domain.com and then configuring www.domain.com within that domain’s settings, each domain had to be set up separately to point to the same folder of web pages. Aliases and redirects can, of course, be set up — Apache still powers the web server, with Server only a graphical front-end — but now they need hand-to-hand combat between user and config files in the Terminal. While this still enables full access to everything you’d want to be able to do in Apache, it’s the very antithesis of Apple’s claim that Lion Server is The Server For Everyone, unless the only option Everyone wants is the choice of turning PHP on or off.

Not that turning PHP on is as helpful as it might be. PHP, for many people, me included, is useful only as long as it’s interacting with a MySQL database or two. The only reason I run PHP on my web server is to enable WordPress, my blogging and CMS platform of choice and one which is utterly dependent upon PHP being able to talk to MySQL. And maybe I’m being a bit too literal, a little rigid in my thinking, here, but I find that MySQL works so very much better when it’s actually installed. Which, oddly, it isn’t under Lion Server. MySQL was part of Mac OS X Server as recently as version 10.6.x, but it has now disappeared, with, typically, no explanation beyond the bare statement that ” Lion Server replaces MySQL with PostgreSQL.” There is speculation that the change is related to Apple’s dislike of GPL licences and Oracle’s acquisition of the product, and certainly it has resulted in plenty of unhappiness among users; at any rate, Apple’s documentation goes on to state that upgrades from Mac OS X Server 10.5.8 — that would be Leopard Server — and later will keep their functioning installations of MySQL, but, of course, this didn’t help me too much, given that I was performing a clean install.

A download of MySQL, which I then had to install, and configure, manually, was the workaround, but it did involve manual manipulation of a number of configuration files — again, not entirely what one might expect from The Server For Everyone, which now appeared to need renaming The Server For Everyone Who Only Wants to Configure PHP In Their Web Server And Not Run MySQL. Much time was spent searching the Web for help, and credit is definitely due to Tasman Hayes and Rob Allen. But I had my web server serving again, so onward.

Lion Server's limited mail options

Next came mail, the other primary job of my server. The Server application was the obvious first place to look for settings, but options were quite limited. How, for example, could I specify the various different domains for which I wanted to provide service? Again, I could, if I felt like it, get my hands dirty tinkering with configuration files, but why should I? This functionality was provided in the Server Admin programme that was part of earlier iterations of Mac OS X Server — and there was my answer. Server Admin, however, was not part of the standard installation of Lion Server, but had to be downloaded separately from the Apple website. Once downloaded, it allowed me to set up mail service for the several domains I host, but, curiously, not webmail, despite that being one of the very few options actually offered by Server. (I eventually realized that, at least as I have my system set up, webmail is an intranet-only feature. Hmmm.)

Mail duly configured, I decided to tackle an issue I’d always struggled with in earlier versions of Mac OS X Server — virtual mail hosting. I host websites for both threelionstech.com and threelionsphoto.com (both seriously under re-construction at time of writing; you’re welcome to visit right now, but you might not be impressed), and also receive email sent to both domains. The problem I’ve had until now has been configuring my mail server so that mail to steve@threelionstech.com and steve@threelionsphoto.com can be picket up and dealt with by two separate IMAP accounts in my mail client. This can, I know, be done — I had it working, briefly, a couple of years ago. But the setting up of this feature is messy and not a little convoluted. My joy was unbounded, then, when I discovered that Server’s “Users” panel enables this feature effortlessly — simply set up a new account and specify the email address you want it to receive mail for, and you’re done. I was, at this point, almost (but not entirely — it still rankles) willing to forgive the hours of gaffing around that I’d had to deal with in setting up MySQL.

So now my server is happy again. If you’re reading this, then it’s still working. Much has changed, some things have been taken away, and the target market for Apple’s server software, especially since the demise of the XServe, is clearly home users. I’ll explore Wikis next — Apple are pushing them quite strongly, but since I run my own business I don’t know how much mileage I’ll get. I’ll tinker with calendar services. I’ll leave the “Next Steps” box (see the screenshot above) alone; it seems a little simplistic and facile. For now, my server is serving again.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My new iPhone 4S | Steve's TechBlog

The iPhone 4S, on the other hand, threatened to be little more than a small-to-medium-sized bucketful of meh. The iPhone 4, its immediate predecessor, was an almost obnoxiously successful device, and so the Apple rumour mill (an actual mill, by the way — when it’s not cranking out rumours, it grinds the flour that goes into the artisanal breads used for the unicorn-burger sandwiches upon which senior Apple executives lunch), obviously, decided that it had to be replaced. And it had to be replaced by an iPhone 5. For reasons that were never even remotely apparent, there was something frankly totemic about the number 5. The new iPhone simply had to be the iPhone 5. What, exactly, the iPhone 5 would be, or do, or look like, was secondary. Features? 5. Appearance? 5. Spec? 5. So long as the new phone had the magic digit in its name, it could be a rotary-dial device with a ten-foot spiral cord coming out of the kitchen wall.

And so, on October 4th, Tim Cook announced the iPhone 4S. It would have any number of very, very impressive features. The new camera, for example, would have an eight-megapixel resolution, up from the previous model’s five, with a five-element lens instead of four. The processor would be a dual-core A5 chip, not a single-core A4. Bluetooth would be the new, exciting version 4.0, not the 2.1+EDR of the iPhone 4. And, of course, there would be Siri, the little person inside the phone.

But it wasn’t an iPhone 5. The magic number was simply nowhere to be seen. 4S? What did the S stand for? Since the 4S looked all but identical to the 4 (the giveaway, by the way, is the absence, on the 4S, of a black line by the headphone jack), how could a fanboy show off his new toy? What, after all, is the sense in paying hundreds of upgrade dollars if your new gadget doesn’t scream “I’m new, I’m expensive and my owner is, ipso facto, better than you?” The iPhone 4S is an upgrade to the iPhone 4 — a compelling and persuasive upgrade, to be sure, but an upgrade, not a new model.

There was, as was repeatedly pointed out during the fallout from Apple’s failure to deliver something called the iPhone 5, a precedent to this naming scheme. The third iteration of the iPhone, the 3GS, looked essentially identical to its predecessor, the 3G, and nobody, at the time, used the 3GS as evidence that the world was about to come to an end. But the iPhone 4S, not being the iPhone 5, was destined to fail, apparently — and promptly turned out to be one of the fastest-selling smartphones in the admittedly rather short history of the class.

So I bought one. Apple released the 4S on 11th November last year, and I picked mine up that morning from the Vodafone shop in Papakura. I was ready for a new phone — I had considered an iPhone 4 until I discovered the contract-breaking fee Vodafone wanted from me for upgrading, and my 3GS was starting to show its age slightly. Despite the disappointing plans available in New Zealand, I signed up for a 24-month contract and took my new toy home.

I like the design. I was never overly enamoured of the styling of the 3G/3GS models, which always felt, to my sensibilities, just a little plasticky. There is clearly a reason why Apple decided to retain the 4′s design for the 4S — it looks right. It doesn’t always feel that right, mind — it’s a thoroughly beautiful device, but it feels rather thin in the hand, and so, while I very much like the look of the thing, it feels better in the rather natty case my daughter bought for me.

The screen, of course, is stunning. It is bright, and sharp, and clear, and lovely. It features the 960×640-pixel resolution of the iPhone 4, double the resolution of earlier models and so utterly crisp that, living up to its “retina” tag, it renders images and, in particular, text so smoothly and clearly that individual pixels are simply invisible. Combined with the faster dual-core A5 processor, it offers a graphical experience unlike anything else Apple sell.

Venus flytrap — iPhone 4S camera closeup | Steve's TechBlog

The camera does the screen justice. Photos taken on the iPhone 4s’s rear-facing camera are consistently of a high standard, with the possible exception of lower-light photos, in which graininess starts to become a little more visible. But increasingly the iPhone’s camera, once dismissed as an afterthought bolted on to the original iPhone, has now become a realistic alternative to a separate point-and-shoot.

The real fun of the iPhone 4S starts when you fire up Siri. Once all the silly games like telling your phone to beam you up (“WiFi or 3G?”) or to close the pod-bay doors (“Really? Again?”) are out of the way, actually using voice activation suddenly becomes something more than just a gimmick. The iPhone has supported voice commands for years, but only with Siri has this become meaningly useful. I’ve always been leery of claims of voice recognition on computers — it tends to work tolerably if you’re a TV news anchorman from Nebraska, or possibly a continuity announcer on Radio 4, but my northern vowels have always confounded such systems. But I’ve been extensively impressed with Siri. With rare exceptions, it understands not only the words I say (it’s clearly been watching Coronation Street), but also the meaning behind them, and so simple tasks like sending my wife a text message (“Tell my wife that…” is all the syntax I need) or setting a reminder (“Remind me to…”) become part of what I’m doing rather than something that requires me to stop what I’m doing, mess with my phone, and then carry on.

Siri on the iPhone 4S — Oh, will the hilarity never end?

Siri’s anthropomorphising of the iPhone raises an interesting philosophicolinguistic question. My wife, being American, uses the American English setting for Siri, and so her phone answers her using an American woman’s voice. I, having had the enormous good fortune to have been born in the northwest of England, use the tautologically- and somewhat meaninglessly-named British English setting, and so my iPhone talks to me with the voice of a bloke from the home counties of England. (There is a third English option, Australian English; the default setting for an iPhone 4S bought in New Zealand is British. Of course.) So is Siri a he or a she? Such are the things that keep a technopundit awake at night.

So all is right with the iPhone 4S, then? Well, no. There is a flaw, a very major flaw, with the phone. Its battery life is, frankly, dreadful. And this is odd, since even better battery life than the iPhone 4 was touted by Tim Cook as one of the 4S’s big selling points. But I struggle to get a single day of moderate usage out of mine. I’ve had it replaced once (and that was a struggle), and my replacement phone isn’t a massive amount better. I’ve never managed the 7 hours of video, or 8 hours of talk time, that Apple advertise; I certainly don’t see the “truly better battery life” advertised on the Vodafone website. Apple’s release of iOS5.0.1 (featuring both interCaps and multiple decimal points) was supposed to address this issue, but, on my phone at least, hasn’t. A complete restore to factory defaults improved battery life somewhat, but neither completely alleviated the problem nor actually allowed me to use the features I paid for on my new iPhone — hardly a success on either count, then.

But I’ll stick with my iPhone 4S. I’m happy with it. There will be an iPhone 5 released one day, I’m sure. But until then, the iPhone 4S, despite its lack of the magic number 5, is a strong update to an inordinately successful product.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

As has been documented quite extensively elsewhere, I moved a couple of years ago to New Zealand, where I find life to be, in so very many ways, a thoroughly pleasant experience. One of the few entries, however, in the debit column is the cost of living, and one of the most significant aspects of this headache is the price of electricity. While I’d never wish to return to living in Florida, among the few aspects of life there that I miss is the low, low cost of electricity.

As I said, we’re not going back, and so we — the lovely and talented Mrs. McCabe and I — decided that we needed to find a way of reducing our monthly spend on electricity. Back there, a unit — a  kilowatt-hour or KWh — cost, typically, around 8¢. Here, it’s more like 23¢. This does not, of course, please us, particularly when we were paying for electricity to heat our home. But what does please us is the abundance of sunlight that streams down on New Zealand much of the year, and so we have, finally, commissioned our very own solar-power installation.

The system is fairly straightforward. On our north-facing roof (this being the southern hemisphere), we have sixteen 190-watt solar panels. What this means, then, is that when the sun shines, and especially when the sun shines directly on the panels, we can expect to see up to 3KW of electricity being generated. Of course, we don’t expect to be getting that much power constantly, and, of course, we only get peak output when the sun is high in the sky, but we’re still optimistic that we’ll see plenty of power being generated.

The panels feed a 3KW grid-tied inverter, which takes the DC output from the photovoltaic panels and converts it to AC. This is essential for two rather critical reasons. Firstly, our home is, like most homes, an AC installation, full of appliances that are designed to take a 240V AC input. Secondly, and this is a rather cool and groovy consideration, the national grid in New Zealand is also a 240V AC system.

The practical upshot is simple. During the day, when our panels are generating a stream of as much as 3KW of power, whatever we need is used to power the house. Any surplus is sent off to the grid. When the sun either goes down or hides behind a cloud or two, then any shortfall is supplied by the grid. Meridian Energy, our new power supplier, will give us 23¢ for each unit we sell them — the same price they charge us for electricity they generate. In effect, we’re using the grid as our battery, storing any surplus we crank out during the day so that we can then use it back up at night.

So far we’ve had the system running for three days, and we’ve liked what we’ve seen. It’s late winter, or, if today is any measure, very early spring in northern New Zealand. We’ve bought about fifteen units from the grid, generated a dozen, and of that dozen sold five back. In other words, we’ve used, in total, about 22 units today, but only actually paid for ten. That’s a positive step; when the months and months of golden sunshine that characterise a New Zealand summer roll around, we expect to be, on a daily basis, net exporters, and, if we’ve done our calculations right, we expect that, over a year, what we buy from the grid should be, within a significant figure or two, pretty much what we sell back.

And let’s not forget the Web aspect. The inverter that converts our solar array’s DC output to an appliance-and-grid-friendly AC also contains a monitoring system and a web server, which, as soon as it was up and running, I patched into my own home server system, so it can be monitored worldwide. My very own personal power station is now online at threelionstech.com:81 — take a look at how much electricity we’re not paying for!

But this morning’s email contained something more surprising than scary. Amid the usual “Visit my webcam” invites and assurances that hot teens are standing by at their computers waiting to hear from me despite never having met me or spoken to me before (or indeed realise that I’m old enough to be, if not their father, then certainly their slightly creepy uncle), I saw a message that my email programme labelled as “junk mail.” It was an iTunes Store receipt.

This was, on the face of it, odd. The message came from Apple, with none of the obvious hallmarks of spam — there was a legitimate reply address, one that matched up to the “from” address, and there was none of the drunk-kitten-walking-across-the-keyboard random typing that’s supposed to fool spam filters but now screams “spam” louder than a peroxide-blonde teenaged girl in a 1950s horror film called “Attack of the Killer Spam,” or .gif images containing a bitmap of the text of an advert for prescription drugs from highly legitimate and reliable sources. As far as I could tell, this message was utterly, entirely on the level.
What was singularly baffling about the entire episode was the fact that the message was flagged as possible spam by Mail. Apple’s very own email client was telling me that “Mail thinks this message is Junk Mail.” I was willing to overlook the capital letters (although I still fail to see how junk mail might be considered a proper noun), but I’m still at a loss. Apple’s email programme thinks that Apple’s email is Junk Mail (not just junk mail, mark you, but Junk Mail). Only a receipt, I realise, but where will this end? Will Safari start flagging the Apple Store website as a phishing site? It has all the indicators — flashy products, places to enter credit card numbers — but I don’t see any alerts warning me that I might want to be on my guard.

There is, quite clearly, a breakdown in communications of the most alarming order here. I have changed no settings in my installation of Mail; my spam filter is no more or less aggressive than Apple want it to be.  Apple, it would appear, considers its own email to be Junk Mail. This is a rather bizarre corporate logic. Is there inter-departmental conflict within Apple, with end users becoming little more than pawns? What next? I’m becoming afraid to connect my iPhone to my Mac, in case there’s been a spat between iTunes and iPhone developers, and iTunes suddenly decides that my phone is a Junk Device that needs erasing and reformatting. If I connect to the Internet via my Airport Extreme, will it refuse to visit the apple.com website because of a power struggle between hardware and software?

Or maybe something slightly more sinister is at play here. Apple can, having sent me a receipt, claim to have done everything required to keep me notified of my purchases at the iTunes Store. But Apple’s very own software then does its best to prevent me from actually reading and reviewing this receipt, thus preventing me from making an informed decision on my spends, and hiding from me my daughter’s latest Mary-Kate and Ashley download. I blithely carry on downloading, unaware (because Apple, while not actually hiding the information from me, has done little actually to make it easy for me to keep track of what I’m spending. I’m not at all happy about this, not entirely unreasonably. My tech budget is already out of control — I’m not a tech addict, honestly; I just like my tech, I could stop any time I want, it’s just that that new iPhone was particularly enticing, but I didn’t have to buy it, I chose to; I’m not addicted — and the last thing I need is an Apple-wide conspiracy to seduce me to channel even more of my hard-earned (and, trust me, it’s very, very hard earned — when I’m not sharing my wisdom with the world in a magazine column, I’m sharing it in a classroom, for I, against all better judgment, am a high-school teacher; what specific sins I’m atoning for I’m not entirely sure, but, after twelve years at the chalk face, I’ve done enough penance that I’m pretty certain I’m owed a few sins by now) cash on downloads from the iTunes Store.

Of course, if I’m going to complain and criticise, I really ought to offer an alternative, and then answer is simple. Every time you want to buy something from iTunes, a voice should, regardless of your computer’s volume settings, ask in a very firm and determined voice, “Are you quite sure you need this? I mean need, not just want. I mean, come on, you’ve already bought five talking-monkeys apps this month. Do you really need a sixth? And Desperate Housewives? Really. You should know better, shouldn’t you? You’ve not even finished watching the last season of Entourage yet — I don’t really think you should be buying more shows until you’ve watched the last lot. And Lady Gaga? Honestly! A grown man? Come on!” Actually, I already have that feature. It’s called my wife.

This was a touch disappointing, but $49 for a server package that had previously cost five hundred dollars still seemed quite reasonable. After all, for the money we would be getting “the server for everyone,” to quote the banner on Apple’s website plugging Lion Server. The banner is subtitled:

Now you can quickly and easily turn just about any Mac into a powerful server that’s perfect for home offices, businesses, schools, and hobbyists alike. Lion Server is coming to the Mac App Store in July for $49.99.

“Just about any Mac.” “Perfect for hobbyists.” Under fifty dollars. Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Sadly, it is. Clicking on the “How to buy” button in the top right-hand corner of that page leads a rather more distressing page, one listing three steps to turning “just about any Mac” into a server that’s “perfect for hobbyists” “for $49.99.”

Step one is fair enough: make sure your “just about any Mac” has the requisite processing oomph. Can’t argue too much with that, even though “Your Mac must have an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor to run Lion” isn’t quite the same as “just about any Mac;” in fact, of my three Macs — iMac, mini and MacBook Pro — only the last two fit the bill, meaning that, for me at least, “just about any” equates to “less than 67%.” But let’s not dwell. Onward.

Step three (yes, I know…) is — fortunately — pretty hard to take issue with: “simply open the Mac App Store from your Dock to buy and download Lion and Lion Server.” Can’t argue with that one, can one? Just as well, really, since it’s step two, the one we’ve saved until the end, that really chafes.

Step two: “Get the latest version of Snow Leopard Server.You’ll need Snow Leopard Server v10.6.6 or later to purchase Lion and Lion Server from the Mac App Store. If you have Snow Leopard Server, click the Apple icon and choose Software Update to install the latest version.”

I’m sorry, but this is very, very, very different from “just about any Mac” for “$49.99.” The reality is that you simply can’t install Lion Server on any Mac for $49.99 unless it’s already running Snow Leopard Server.

I have no problem with Apple charging five hundred dollars for Lion Server. Actually, that’s not entirely true. It does bother me that, having abandoned the X-Serve, and with it much real chance of being taken seriously in the future as a viable server option for anything bigger than home offices and hobbyists, they still want to charge the same price for what they now appear to consider a hobby.

Apple can charge howsoever much they see fit. They’re not bound, even, by hints and suggestions, promises inferred from preview releases never meant for public consumption or analysis. But what they shouldn’t do, what they’re better than, is advertising as misleading as this. Lion Server is not available for $49.99, not available for “just about any Mac.”

Apple are — I believed Apple are — better than this. I’m disappointed.

Three Lions Tech is finally broadcasting on Twitter, Facebook and across the sub-etha network.

Three Lions Technologies, the corporate monolith for which Steve’s TechBlog is the warm, fuzzy and human face, finally had a Facebook page (be the first among your friends to like it!), to which I was now posting via TweetDeck, of which much — oh, so very, very much — to come forthwith, or at least after a few more cups of coffee. As part of a massive social media push that saw me posting like a madman to my moving to New Zealand blog, I also decided that I would also expand the online presences of my other online personae, and so I set about setting up Facebook and Twitter presences for Auckland’s premier Mac consultancy service. The Facebook experience was streamlined enough; all that’s required now is a little content, and all that’s required there is a little more coffee.

Twitter, on the other hand, has been an experience that can only be described as other. To be utterly blunt, I’ve never really got Twitter. From its beginnings in the late mesonettic period, I’ve been sceptical. Even more than blogs (to which I confess to being a late convert; viz this very blog, and this one), Twitter has long struck me as being as narcissistic, as vain, as woefully and dismally self-indulgent as any use yet found for the Internet. I have little interest in the colour of Lady Gaga’s underpants, or indeed whether she’s wearing any, and so a live feed of updates on the colour and deployment status of same seemed fabulously unnecessary. And yet, and yet…I saw a need to be using Twitter. Eventually, after much soul-searching, contemplation and beer, I did the only smart thing a man can do — I asked my wife.

My wife, among her many talents and wonderfulnesses, is the webmaster and social-media specialist for a major American corporation that, in the interests of national security, I should probably refrain from naming. Fortunately, however, she is willing to discuss her work with me, and so I grilled and interrogated her about the merits of social media networking; now, I believe, I start to see the point. And the point, put simply, is this — if everyone else is doing it, then I pretty much have to. Even North Bloody Korea’s got a Twitter feed. Yes, I know, this runs utterly counter to my mother’s “And I suppose if everyone else jumped off a bridge, you’d want to do that, too?” logic that I came to love so very dearly as a teenager, but I see the merit of it, which is why my various online presences are sprouting social-media badges like so many toadstools after a mid-summer downpour such as the one that has deluged much of the top end of the North Island this afternoon.

And so, duly put straight by my wife, yet again, I decided to set up a Twitter account for Three Lions Technologies. The setup started as smoothly as one would expect when dealing with one of the largest and most inescapable services in all of Netdom, one which has had five internet years — centuries in human years — to get things right. I followed the steps required of me on the Twitter website, and all went well, but as soon as action was required from the other end, it all went to custard.

In order for a Twitter account to become fully activated, to emerge from its shell so to speak (see what I did there? Shell, birds, tweet….get it?), a new user must respond to an activation email from Twitter. And in order for a new user to respond to an email from Twitter, Twitter must first send that email. And…well, that’s rather where it all broke down. I entered my super-secret private and personal email address, clicked “save,” and then looked in Mail for an incoming message. Nothing there, so I refreshed my mail — still nothing. I returned to the Twitter website, asked for a resend, and checked again. And again.

I run my own mailserver, and so I thought that maybe that was where the problem could be found. I tried using a different email address, at a different domain, but still Twitter failed to send a confirmation email. In sheer, utter desperation, I turned to The Google, who in turn referred me to Twitter’s help pages, where I found this remarkably helpful advice:

Use an email from a large domain.

Setting aside the fact that they clearly, clearly need a new tech writer, I looked further and came to the opinion that, no matter the size of the domain from which I used an email (I tried everything from the oddly small threelionstech.com to the paradoxically huge me.com; size clearly didn’t matter to Twitter), it wasn’t Twitter’s fault. Delivery to small domains is inconsistent. Spam filters are over-aggressive. Changes in the Earth’s magnetic field. The dog ate your email. Vint Cerf ate your email. A litany of excuses that all lead back to the basic problem: my Twitter account remains un-activated.

I do remain, however, unclear as to what that means. I can be searched for and found; I can tweet; I can follow and be followed. Still, don’t you expect better from Twitter?

(If you liked this post, then feel free to Like it or retweet it using the buttons at the bottom of the post, and, if you’re really interested to find out what happens next, then be sure to follow Three Lions Technologies on Facebook and Twitter.)

This has been an almost entirely unqualified success. The people in New Zealand are friendly, the food is astonishing, and the wine is spectacular. But, even in God’s Own Country, nothing is perfect. New Zealand is a truly splendid place to live in many, indeed almost all, regards. But for a techie – and I am, quite unashamedly and unabashedly, one of that number – there are definite quibbles, of which by far the largest is bandwidth, or the lack thereof.

When I lived in America, I was undeniably spoiled, as many Americans tend to be. Life, however shallow it may have been in other regards when one lives in Florida, was certainly easy from a connectivity point of view. My home office had a broadband connection with, as I simply took for granted, took for my birthright, unlimited data. I could slurp down, and throw up, all the data I wanted. The Internet was mine, all of the time.

But when we signed up for our New Zealand connection, we were stunned – stunned, I say! – to discover that the Internet, in New Zealand, is a highly limited and finite resource. We went from “all you can download” to “you get 20 GB a month, you’ll pay $100 a month, and you’ll be grateful for it” in the time it takes to fly from Los Angeles to Auckland (which is, now I come to think about it, a horrendously long time). This was a most atrocious imposition for the Internet junkies that my wife and daughter had become (not me, though, of course – I was far too virtuous, too self-restrained). For all that New Zealand had to offer, the narrowness of its Internet pipes was simply intolerable.

We opted for the “double your data” option (and the additional $30 per month that wasn’t optional), but we still find ourselves limited by 40 GB per month. I check the online usage-meter every few days (using, in the process, a few more precious bytes; oh, the cruel, vicious, bitter irony!), and issue imprecations to Wife and Daughter, reminding them that Facebook is a luxury, not an absolute necessity; they, as addicts always do, try to justify their endless status-checking as being entirely reasonable, indeed essential. I calculate the bandwidth usage of Skype and of YouTube; I flinch when I see Daughter download another Mary-Kate and Ashley movie from iTunes (that’s not really a bandwidth issue; that’s just on general principles – I’d cringe if that were happening if we had a free and entirely unlimited T3 connection direct to the trans-Pacific backbone). I have developed new and careful Internet habits: I use the “Open link in new window” option if I think there’s any possibility that I might want to visit a second link from the same page, to avoid potentially having to load the original page a second time, and Apple Mail no longer checks automatically every minute – each check uses several dozens of bytes, I’m sure, and they all add up. I even avoid visiting Japanese or Chinese sites, conscious of two-byte character sets using more than their fair share of bandwidth.

I check my Google Analytics numbers with conflicted emotions: every page view for our various blogs and online presences is, on the one hand, a cause for celebration – more visits, more revenue, more Internet fame and glory. On the other hand, those page views are also an occasion for more hand-wringing, since they were served up from my Mac mini, over my desperately and mercilessly limited Internet connection. I post photography from the beautiful country we now call home, but wince when I see that I’ve had visits to my site. Even the very act of visiting the Google Analytics Web site eats up a handful of kilobytes that I can scarce afford. Even writing this article is a painful experience; while the catharsis of venting about the primitivity of our connection is undeniably therapeutic, every adjective, every atom of invective, every single character I devote to letting the world know how abjectly deprived we are is one fewer byte that can be used elsewhere.

The reason for this caution is simple. As soon as we reach our allocated 40 GB – think about that for a second; it’s only a gig and a third per day, and the lovely and talented Mrs. McCabe, with whom I share everything, including my bandwidth, is a Web designer – a Gollum-like finger, somewhere in a dungeon buried deep in darkest Auckland, reaches out in the gloom, flicks a switch, and says “It’s dial-up for you. Your bandwidth is mine, it’s mine, my precioussss.” And that’s it. We’re reduced to an Amish connection, one so slow it would be more efficient to hand-write packets of data and strap them to the legs of carrier pigeons. Web pages load – if they load – in minutes, rather than seconds. YouTube is a pipe dream. Downloads, well, downloads don’t. There has been much discussion around the blogosphere in the last month about when the first decade of the 21st century will end. Here in New Zealand that discussion is academic – we’re still, at least in terms of Internettery, stuck back in the 1990s. My connection today is so slow that I half-expect to hear the dolphin-screech of a modem actually dialing in to Vodafone as I try to connect, and I’m grateful that I’m not on deadline for this article. Looking at the cave paintings of Lascaux would represent a faster data transfer than the one I’m hobbled with right now.

I have, I would like to stress, been more than diligent in my attempts to figure out where our precious data might be going. My first thought was Skype, given that Daughter spends much of her time video-chatting with friends back in the Northern Hemisphere. I installed iStat Menus; as far as I could tell, a two-way video conference was using only around 120 KBps. But Vodafone’s (for they are our current Internet provider) online “check your usage” tool was reporting that there were days when we used as much as 6.5 GB of data. The day we reached this number (our record so far, by the way) was a school day – I doubt, then, that Daughter’s Skyping can be the culprit (she would have needed 15 hours of non-stop chatting, and while she’s good, even she’s not that good).

I suspected that it might be my server. I was reluctant to give up running my own server after moving to New Zealand because I’ve localized a handful of my domains – mccabe.net.nz, threelions.co.nz, astralgraphics.co.nz – and it’s hard to find U.S.-based hosting services that handle .nz domains. I host my personal site, stevemccabe.net, as well as my clients’ sites, through a European hosting-and-reselling service, but they don’t offer anything in the Kiwi domain space, so I’ve bought my domains through GoDaddy. I’ve become familiar with GoDaddy’s DNS setup system, and so, frankly, it’s just convenient to register with them and then host myself. That said, GoDaddy’s pricing structure for hosting is Byzantine beyond belief (I’ve had clients in the past want me to set up their sites on GoDaddy – oh, the power of advertising, especially if it involves scantily clad ladies with large chests – and I now make it a condition of service that I provide hosting as well as design) and life was so much easier when I knew that I had all the Internet connectivity I wanted.

So I looked at the traffic stats on my server. This was a bittersweet experience because on the one hand, no, I wasn’t ploughing through my data, which was good, but on the other hand, this meant that my sites weren’t getting the traffic I would have liked. Still, at least that was another possible culprit struck from the list.

I issued the sternest of imprecations to my girls, and, to all intents and purposes, stopped using the InterWebs. But no matter how much we cranked back our usage, we still found that we were using – or, at the very least, we were being reported as using – at least several hundred megabytes a day.

It was time to talk to Vodafone. I contacted them several times, and received several different bogus explanations: I had viruses (_ahem_, my network is Apple-only), I had moochers (WPA2 password, a house built of brick, a large garden) – basically, it was my fault, one way or another. It certainly couldn’t be Vodafone’s fault. I pushed a little further. I was told to install a data tracker – I was even sent Vodafone’s recommended monitor, SurplusMeter. I installed it across my network, and it reported, of course, that I was using monstrous amounts of data. The reason was simple – it meters not only wide-area, but also local-area network traffic. My iMac, for example, was pushing through megabyte after megabyte, even though I had no applications open at all. Well, none that would use the Internet.

Except iTunes. But I wasn’t downloading anything. What I was doing was streaming music to my AirPort Express. SurplusMeter was recording every last packet that went out of the data port it was charged with monitoring – in this case, my AirPort card. I called Vodafone again, and explained that the numbers SurplusMeter was reporting were meaningless. They said I should shut down my local network for a day and see what my numbers were like. I did – and on that day my wife’s iMac managed not to report a single bit going in or out. Not bad for a Web designer who telecommutes between New Zealand and Florida.

Vodafone’s next suggestion was that we had a line fault. This was a possibility – I live in a very old house (we think it’s pre-war, but we’re not sure which war; my money’s on the Boer War) – and one of the call-centre people I spoke to noticed that, while a DSL modem typically reconnects four or five times a day, mine had already reconnected over a dozen times – and I still hadn’t finished my first cup of coffee. They assured me that they would look into this, but in the meantime I’d need to disconnect my phone line (a service, mind you, that I pay for) for a day in case there was a problem with my DSL filters. This may, or may not, have been the problem; I have no way of knowing. Maybe they’re still running tests. At the very least, they haven’t replied.

Finally, I wrote to Russell Stanners, CEO of Vodafone NZ, at the end of last month. A week or so later, I got a phone call from Vodafone, and, after a long chat, the rep who called me (also called Russell; hmm…) agreed to waive the $199 early termination fee and release me from the one-year contract that we would have been bound to until June 2010.

We’re switching to TelstraClear. I’m not doing this because they’re particularly brilliant, but because they do one thing that Vodafone don’t – instead of dialing us back to pecking-out-bits-on-a-Morse-Code-tapper speeds, they’ll keep on selling us more gigabytes. I’m willing to pay for a service (especially a service that I actually receive), but the idea that I only get my 40 gigabytes, and, regardless of whose fault it is, that’s it, I’m cut off like a naughty schoolboy, well, that really chafes.

So now we’re waiting. Our Internet connection went back to last-millennium speeds after only a fortnight this month, so we’re struggling – some evenings we can’t tell whether we’re offline, or just really slow. And although I signed up to TelstraClear over a week ago, I just had a phone call from one of their reps letting me know that, because of the Christmas and midsummer holiday backlog, they won’t flip our switch for another week.

I’ll be emailing this article off to TidBITS World HQ shortly. I have no idea when they may get it. The Word document that contains this piece is 41 KB, which, at my current Internet speeds, could take until March to send. It might be quicker for me to save it to a CD, swim to California with the disc between my teeth, walk across the country, and hand it to Adam Engst personally.

[This article first appeared in TidBITS]

My website, before rebuilding in WordPress

The irony, of course, was that I’ve been working on plenty of other sites about, and for, other people and other things. I’ve been using WordPress as my new primary web-design tool; it’s gone way beyond the blogging engine it used to be and has become a fully-featured and quite mature content-management system. I’ve been taking advantage of its flexibility for my other concerns and clients, so I decided it was time to rebuild my own site in WordPress.

The problem was, I built my site a couple of years ago in DreamWeaver, and I quite liked the look of it. It wasn’t, I’ll admit, the absolute last word in design — I’m much more the writer and technician; the lovely and talented Mrs. McCabe is very much the designer of the operation — but I was fond of it. The challenge was how to re-purpose the design I’d created in DreamWeaver as a WordPress theme.

In the end, it turned out to be quite remarkably easy. I’ll post a complete blow-by-blow one of these days; for the time being, here are the basic steps:

• Install WordPress on my hosting service. This was quite straightforward — my hosting service use Fantastico De Luxe, a very simple couple-of-clicks installation system. Once it was set up, it was time to
• Create a new theme. This basically required two files in a folder in the Themes directory of my WordPress installation. Despite what I’ve read elsewhere, it looks like all that’s required is a basic template file, index.php, and a stylesheet, stylesheet.css — so long as those two are there, you’re in business. The next step was to
• Upload the stylesheet. A little bit of tweaking of the .css file and it was ready to upload to the server. This contained all the designy goodness of the site; all that was left, now, was to
• Replace verbiage in the home page to WordPress .php code. This was the tricky bit, but, with a fair old bit of trying, reloading, re-trying, re-reloading and so forth, it turned out to be a fairly straightforward process.

So there it is. SteveMcCabe.net is now live again. It’s all but indistinguishable from the old version. I did make a couple of very small adjustments that I’ve been meaning to make for a while, but otherwise the site’s where I wanted it to be.

Apple have been trying to get the mouse right ever since they first brought it to the market. The first was a horrible, blocky affair, a brick of pale-turd-brown plastic with a slightly less pale turd-brown button on the top. Since then it has become curvier, then — and this, surely, marked the utter nadir of mousely design — perfectly round and exactly one-and-one-eighth inches too short to use with any real degree of comfort. Oddly, though, because it was part of the iMac package, it did prompt plenty of strangely gushing comment, including remarks in MacWorld that watching the two-coloured ball rotate as the mouse was moved was “hypnotic” and “mesmerising;” clearly MacWorld’s editorial staff back at the turn of the millennium didn’t get out all that much.

Apple’s next mouse was a much more successful design for one particular reason — it used laser tracking instead of a ball. Suddenly mousing became much more accurate. But it was still a one-button mouse, and this was the cause of much consternation to many users, who simply could not understand why Apple refused, so totally obstinately (a quality surely not attributable to Steve Jobs?), to incorporate a second button. Right-clicking, it seemed, was PC thing to do; right-clicking was of the Devil.

But then came the Mighty Mouse, and this was a decent piece of kit, but it did lead to much wailing and rending of garments, since it, finally, included the heresy of a second button. Actually, it included no such thing — there was still only one button, but the software that read the mouse was sufficiently sophisticated to sense where the click was being applied, and so Apple, as obstinate as ever, managed to produce a two-button mouse with only one button. In fact, this being Apple, there were, in fact, four buttons, real and virtual. But the pinch gesture that constituted the fourth button was far from inspired; simply picking the mouse up was often enough to trigger Exposé or Dashboard. And the actual, physical second button, the scroll nipple, added two-dimensional scrolling, which was a wonderful innovation, but the nipple itself would routinely gum up and become, effectively, useless; a mouse that would scroll up, but not down, was neither uncommon nor helpful.

Apple's new Magic Mouse

Apple tried again this year. The Magic Mouse was released in October, but I didn’t get mine until December (I did write to Apple asking for a review sample for Steve’s TechBlog; I’m still waiting for my reply). Their latest attempt returns to absolute minimalism; there is, it would appear, no physical button at all. The device is, basically, a gently humped surface that sits, cordless, on my desk, all gleaming i-white. That’s it — no cable, since this mouse is only available in Bluetooth, and no nipple, since the surface is the mouse. Just like the Mighty Mouse before it, the Magic Mouse has only one clicking surface, only one physical button, but again the software detects where the click happened.

But other things are missing. The scroll nipple, mercifully, has gone. Scrolling is achieved simply by flicking a finger along the length of the mouse’s surface; with the correct software update installed (it requires Mac OS X 10.6.2, of which more later), you get what Apple are calling “momentum scrolling,” a feature that will be familiar to iPhone and iTouch users — flick a window and it keeps scrolling, slowing down in what seems quite a natural manner once you take your finger off the mouse. It works — surprisingly well. A solid-state solution, then, to the moving-part problem of the nipple. But the nipple also was the third button, and, without it, there is no third button — or, indeed, the fourth squeeze-the-sides button. I wasn’t in the habit of using those two buttons on my old Mighty Mouse, so I doubt that I will miss them, but I have read a handful of rather unhappy reviews and comments bemoaning the loss of this button, claiming that all “serious” users (clearly I’m just a frivolous, trivial user; oh, well) use, indeed need, that third button. I remain unconvinced.

There are, incidentally, third-party solutions to this shocking problem. I’ve been playing today with a little piece of software called MagicPrefs; it extends the Magic Mouse’s vocabulary of taps, clicks and gestures to really explore the multi-touch capabilities of the device, since basically it’s a mouse with a multi-touch surface bolted to the top of it. Frankly, I find it overkill. I’ve configured two extra things — a three-fingered click opens Dashboard, and a three-fingered tap triggers Exposé. But that’s all — anything else and I find windows hiding and zooming and flying across my desktop as though possessed. Not good.

But what does it feel like in the hand? Well, it’s not the hockey puck of days gone by. It’s about as broad and as long as the Mighty, but about half the height, which means that if you’re used to having your hand rest on top of your mouse, you’re in for a little bit of a surprise. It feels not uncomfortable so much as unfamiliar; I’ve had mine less than twelve hours, so I can’t say for sure yet, but I suspect that I will get used to it very soon. I do have decently large hands, mind, and I find that my wrist sits firmly on my desk while my fingers manipulate the thing.

And it is easy enough to manipulate. The wireless Mighty Mouse was a heavy thing — it was a clunky deadweight to drag around the surface of a desk. The new Magic Mouse feels about as heavy as a corded Mighty Mouse — an entirely comfortable weight, even with batteries installed (and full credit to Apple for including the requisite pair of AAAs in the box). On my desk, at least, the two black plastic rails on the underside of the mouse grip the surface of the desk quite decently, so that the two-fingered side-to-side swipe that is the only out-of-the-box Apple-offered multi-touch gesture causes no problems; the mouse doesn’t slip around when I swipe, although a different desk surface might give different results. The click of the mouse is much more positive than the click of the Mighty Mouse; the pressure required to click it is definitely a bit higher, as is the travel of the click, and there is a more noticeable da-dit sound as the button goes up and down.

Aesthetically, of course, it’s enormously pleasing — plain white, with only a ghostly-grey Apple at the tail of the mouse to show which way round it should sit — I have been dense enough once already today to try to use it back-t0-front, which works surprisingly badly. The packaging is typically Apple, too — a clear perspex box contains the mouse, which sits on a small white plastic tray which, I suppose, one could use as a stand or a home for the thing when it’s not in use on the desktop.

Overall, then, a pretty solid upgrade to the Apple mouse line. It was expensive — NZ$119 — but Christmas gave me and the missus a great opportunity to treat ourselves (well, each other, really — we didn’t actually plan things that way; we’re not quite that sad), and so far I think I’m pleased with my new mouse’s magic.

Apple’s Magic Mouse Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars