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If your Launchpad was a mangled mess with 8 pages of everything that could possibly be ran as a program on your Mac like mine when you upgraded to OS X Lion, you’re annoyed you didn’t find this before you spent a ridiculous amount of time organizing it to accomodate your OCD tendencies. Wait, maybe that was just me. Either way, it would have been nice to know this before, still glad I know it now though.

Run this command in Terminal.app to wipe Launchpad clean

sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db "DELETE from apps; DELETE from groups WHERE title<>''; DELETE from items WHERE rowid>2;"; Killall Dock

Run this command in Terminal.app to rebuild the default database

rm ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db; killall Dock

Thanks Macworld!

Today I officially announced this at work, and I am very excited to share it with all of you. As of next week I will no longer be working in the SharePoint and Office Business Intelligence space. I’ll be joining the team at Microsoft that makes wonderful products for Apple platforms.

Those of you that know me well will probably find this to be of little surprise, but it’s a very welcome change and something I am very excited about.

I can’t quite say what I’ll be working on yet, but for the Mac faithful readers of my blog, stay tuned and I’ll divulge more as it’s appropriate to do so.

This weekend I embarked on Major Suckage. I had outgrown the OS drive on my laptop again, and decided that it was much safer to reinstall my entire system from scratch rather than just clone my hard drive for the 3rd time.

I ordered a 750GB 7200rpm drive from Other World Computing and when I got home from work Friday I began the process. I immediately realized a huge problem with OS X Lion as an upgrade.

I had to install Snow Leopard, download 3GB of updates to get it up to App Store compatibility, then immediately upgrade it to Lion.

That’s right, my goal was a clean start and before I installed my first application, it was already upgraded. Grrrr.

I get it was only $30, but I was really missing the disc and only on principle. I am sure the upgrade went smoothly and all is well, but I’d rather not start a new computer build with outdated stuff potentially scattered on a brand new drive.

This laptop is used for music and video production and by the time I got everything back to status quo I had spent 20 hours and reduced a 750GB hard drive to 370GB without a single bit of my own data on it. Yikes.

I am ok with delivering the upgrade through the app store, but there needs to be some way to go to Apple.com and download a burnable or thumb bootable ISO you can use to install from scratch. Asking a user to recover from a hard drive failure or data swap by having to install, update then upgrade is more hassle than it should be. Agree?

When I purchased the Spyder2express, I managed to miss that it didn’t work with multiple monitors. At the time I was only calibrating an iMac so it didn’t really matter, but when I upgraded, I resigned to only calibrate the main monitor. Recently I came across this little trick to easily calibrate multiple monitors with this gimped software.

The trick is simple. The Spyder Calibrates your main monitor. In OS X, your main monitor is whatever monitor you have placed your menubar on. In the case of my machine I have 3 monitors and the 3rd is obviously connected to a 2nd video card that has a totally different color tone than the other. With a little trickery, I was able to calibrate them easily, here’s how:

1.) Install the software and calibrate your main display (the current one with the menubar on it.)

2.) Open the Display Preferences, Color Tab, and select “Open Profile” to edit the Spyder2Express profile that was created. Click on the “Localized Description Settings” and change the name in all 3 boxes. I chose to name mine after Pacman Ghosts and label the monitors accordingly to keep things straight.

3.) After you have renamed the color profile in the ColorSync Utility, do a “Save As” and save it the same as the description you chose.

4.) Open the display preferences again, and move the menu bar to another monitor.

5.) Restart the Spyder2Express software and begin again at step 1.

6.) Repeat until you have calibrated all of your monitors!

It’s too easy. Enjoy.

If you have seen Apple’s recent crop of ads to counter Microsoft’s Laptop Hunter Ads, you will find two themes: Apple Genius’ are amazing at technical support, and Windows computers just don’t operate without crashing and constantly catch viruses. Of course these are just marketing gimmicks, just like the Laptop Hunter ads were also, but I think it’s fair to take a few minutes to talk about something we often forget, reality.

Watered Down Geniuses

When you walk up to the Apple Genius Bar, the cool cats in the brightly colored shirts give off quite the air of style and chic, but does that translate to great technical support? Before I relay some of my own personal experiences, how about a reality check. On average, Apple Geniuses make about $25,000 a year, that translates to about $12 an hour. Now this is just mean, but if you stand behind a bar for 40 hours a week for $12 an hour, how smart are you really? The reality is that the average age that I see is around maybe 20?

A great place to start is reading “A day in the life of an Apple Genius” from Maclife. There are some great tid bits in this article like:

• Probably 70% of the stuff we see is physically damaged by the customer
• People should not use extensive mods to their OS, it always causes problems

The basic rundown is this. A Candidate gets screened by a round of troubleshooting questions. If he answers most of those correctly, he gets a two week training session in Cupertino that results in three certifications. The source for Maclife’s article admits the tests aren’t particularly hard. After testing, the candidate gets some real world retail training. That’s where they learn the ticketing system and such. In these two weeks they are well versed in AppleCare policies, entering information into the support database as well as general Apple policies. Finally the genius does a couple weeks training in a real store and bam, they stamp genius on his or her head and he may stand at the alter in an Apple Store. Excuse my cynicism here, but 6 weeks does not a genius make. Malcolm Gladwell posited in Outliers, that it took 10,000 hours to become an expert at anything. Apparently it only takes 240 hours to become an expert at all things Apple, and that’s assuming that they were absorbing for a solid 8 hours per day over these 6 weeks.

I want to be clear, I am not saying that you shouldn’t go to a Genius Bar to get your Mac Fixed, I just did. But I will say that had I not did 10 minutes of due diligence on Google before going in, my repair would have cost me $1,000 vs. free. The Genius was not aware that there was an issue with nVidia chips that was nearing class-action status and because of this Apple had extended the warranty on machines with the issue to two years. Seems like something you would hope they knew, right?

The time before I went to get an Airport Extreme card installed in my Mac Pro, only to have them accidentally disable Bluetooth in the process.

The point is, don’t expect them to be all knowing and never make mistakes, they are Apple’s Geek Squad, no different.

For a more amusing read, check out the MacLife article’s source’s blog, Ungenius.

Viruses Smiruses

I encourage you to first think back and tell me the last time you or someone you know got a virus on their PC. I know it does happen, but I also know it is much less common than the general perception is. I can’t remember catching one myself since “I love you” in 2000. It was a nasty bugger, but it was proliferated across the network because at the time people pretty much opened anything that came in an email attachment without ever looking at it. I like to think people are a bit smarter now.

Also software is better. Despite the hordes of Apple and Linux aficionados that will quote the countless thousands you will have to spend to hopefully be protected, I have been using AVG Free edition from Download.com for years. I would say that more often I hear of virus hoaxes than actual viruses.

Probably the only companies happier than Apple that Viruses DO exist, are anti-virus software makers themselves. It’s become a tremendously profitable industry spawning not only software sales but ridiculously expensive subscriptions. I personally have no problem installing Windows XP, Vista or 7 on a new machine and connecting it to the internet with no Virus protection software. 99% of not being affected by viruses is using your computer responsibly.

The point is that the Apple commercials are hyperbole, Viruses and OS Crashes are nowhere near as common as they would like you to think. As a parting note, Apple’s DO get viruses too. You can only expect them to rise with popularity. The most common, and true, argument is that Windows machines have more viruses because 90% of people use Windows computers, if you are trying to cause damage, you go after the larger target. OS X won’t find safety in it’s small numbers forever.

Now That’s Good TV

It is. The commercials are absolutely brilliant from a marketing perspective and have done wonders to create FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) about Windows Vista, PCs and pretty much anything that isn’t Mac. The laptop hunter commercials are great too, and now Apple is attaching those as well. Enjoy the commercials, but I sincerely hope that you don’t use them to make purchasing decisions.