I have been running a 17″ i7 Macbook Pro since it was release earlier this year. Ever since I got it I have been waiting for the price of SSD’s to come down so I could swap out the 500Gb hard drive with an SSD drive and put the 500Gb drive into the optical bay.

Yesterday my 120Gb OCZ Vortex 2E SSD drive was delivered and all I can say is WOW, this thing is fast. OSX now boots in just over 10 seconds and Photoshop launches in 3 seconds flat! This thing is EPIC!

SSD drives are amazingly fast but the price is quite high so the best way to configure the system is to have your Operating System on the SSD drive along with you applications, then have your home directory (profile) on the normal hard drive. This means you can load your original hard drive up with your massive video and picture files, while using the SSD drive for things that will really benefit from the speed.

If you are really short of memory (RAM) then it is always worth upgrading, but providing you have a relatively modern computer (with a decent disk controller) then an SSD drive is far and away the best bang for the buck!

First of all, feel free to skip to the end for the solution. Please leave a comment if this helped you in any way (or not).

My Dad recently bought a Mac and designed a website in iWeb. When it came to publish the site I configured it and hit “publish”. Up popped a message telling me that the site was now live at “<sitename>.com/site”. Mmm I thought, I must have made a mistake when configuring it. I went back and checked the settings and found in actual fact this is “just the way it works”

Rubbish!

I Googled the situation and found that using the only way people were getting around this issue was to upload their website in an FTP client like Cyberduck. All well and good, but hardly the most tidy solution.

I decided to go about this a different way, by telling the server that instead of looking in the “www” folder as the root of the site, it should instead look inside the “site” folder.

This was achieved by creating a “.htaccess” file inside “www” (or “public_html” as it may be). You need to edit the next bit to fit your site, but you get the idea:

RewriteEngine on
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} yoursite\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/site
RewriteRule (.*) /site/$1 [L]

Note: make sure you keep the slashes the way they are, they look odd but they are needed.
This simply tells the server to look inside the iWeb created folder whenever anyone goes to your site. Set this up once and you should be able to forget about it from then on, it just works.

I hope this helps people resolve an issue that really should not be there in the first place. Please leave a comment with your thoughts.

It looks like a member of the Dev Team called pod2g has discovered a vulnerability in the booting mechanism for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices meaning that a jailbreak for iOS 4.1 is just around the corner.

The Dev Team have been producing jailbreaks for the iOS devices for a long while, but what makes this exploit extra special is it is hardware based, meaning that Apple cannot simply update the Operating System and fix it. Any of the aforementioned devices can (and will always be able to) be jailbroken.

This is a major coup for the jailbreaking community, as there has been talk of Apple clamping down on jailbreaking and making it much harder to do.

One thing that may hamper their future efforts is the advent of the Gaming community on iOS. This is something that has enforced legality in the gaming community in the past, as once a device has been detected as being exploited it could (in theory) be black listed from the gaming service. That said, if they had the ability to do that with games, then they also have that ability in Apps too, but as yet Apple have not played that card.

Some cynical people also believe that behind the scenes Apple don’t really mind the jailbreaking going on, providing the majority stay towing the Apple line.

Rumour has it the jailbreak will be with us within a day or so.

I sat down to watch the Apple presentation last week, interested to see what new products and software releases Apple are coming out with. I nearly fell off my chair when I saw the new iTunes 10 logo.

Now I am not one to get all upset about these things like a lot of people on Twitter/Facebook/Forums etc, but as soon as it came up on the big screen I just LOL’d (yes, it really WAS out loud!). This thing looks like it was designed by an (underachieving) school kid. The first “web 2.0″ tutorial I saw on the web did a better job of making a logo look good.

I can see why they wanted a new logo. The old one has a picture of a CD, and let’s face it, when was the last time we consumed music via CD (yes, I know there’s always one!)?

I could understand if they replaced the CD with an iPod or something. I can even understand the use of a musical note, but this is your bog standard “gel button” with a flat note dumped on it with a bit of glow added for good measure.

I saw a tweet where someone recommended a replacement icon, and immediately you can see it took more than 5 minutes to design:

http://dribbble.com/shots/51446-iTunes-10-Replacement-Icon

At first glance you can see straight away it is a lot more modern (dare I say it, “funky”!) and also encompasses the social media angle of the new Ping service. This icon would not look out of place on any Mac Dock.

I was trying to think how on earth this gel icon go the thumbs up and the only thing I can think of is Steve designed it. I have seen it time and time again where a client thinks they know best. I am sure a lot of you have too. You know the conversation…. “can you make my logo BIGGER?!”.

This has to be a similar situation, and we all know that at Apple nobody argues with Steve Jobs (not for long anyway).

I’d love to hear peoples views on this issue, as I am sure there are many, but looking at the amount of blog posts that have popped up discussing this it is quite clear what people think of it.

I just find it bizarre that a company founded on (and obsessed with) the fit and finish of their products can produce something as laughable as this.

I sense an iTunes 10.1 around the corner, with a slightly more polished logo

It is often infuriating when you find people linking to your images online. Firstly they are stealing your bandwidth, and while this may or may not be a problem depending on your host (and the popularity of the site doing the stealing) it is just not polite.

Secondly there is the issue of copyright theft, people using your images without permission, often giving the impression they own, or even created them, themselves. Again, depending on the site/person doing the stealing it may or may not be an issue.

There are a few ways of dealing with this, I will go into just a few of them in this post.

Firstly, you really want to establish whether or not the person linking you image is doing it deliberately and whether they know it is wrong. The first move is usually to simply ask them to remove it.

If you establish this is a deliberate act there are some options open to you:

• Legal (mostly over the top and expensive)
• Pass on the responsibility (i.e. ask their ISP to remove the site for copyright infringement)
• Revenge (will go into this later)
• Prevention (Instructions below)

I will explain the above points one by one:

Legal

I am not a fan of premature legal action, I think it is often over the top and unnecessary. It is nice to have the option to hand but I would personally keep it as a last resort.

Pass on the responsibility

This is often a good low-effort way of dealing with things. ISP’s don’t like lawyers and they also don’t “usually” know if you are one. If you drop them an email asking them to remove the offending site due to copyright infringement (or even better drop them a letter) then they will often act pretty quickly. This really does depend on the ISP though, so there are mixed results for this method.

Revenge

If you are SURE they are doing it deliberately stealing your images then follow these steps to make their eyes water (or just give them bad press)

1. Rename your image
2. Change the link in your HTML to match the new name (so it looks the same on your site)
3. Change the image (e.g. boat.jpg) to an image of something “different” (you know what I mean)

As long as the linked image has the same filename then people going to the offending site will no longer see the picture of a “boat” but will either see a jpg with your own message or an image of your choice

Prevention

This way is usually the best way of preventing people linking your images (it won’t prevent them stealing them though, but that is another issue)

As long as you have an Apache server (most are) then put a file called “.htaccess” (don’t forget the dot!) into your images folder.

Add the following lines to it, and save it:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourwebsite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ - [F]

With this in place, any gif or jpg images linked from anywhere other than your site will fail to display.

Like doctors often say, prevention is best. I do agree with this, but I also believe “revenge is sweet”

Facebook status’s and Twitter feeds have been set alight over the past couple of weeks surrounding Facebooks “Instant personalisation pilot programme” and “What your friends can share about you” settings.

For those who don’t already know, Facebook has made changes to the settings (defaults) that mean not only do you get to share (or not share) your information with the world, unless you actively go in and change the default settings your friends can share your information on your behalf.

It is all part of Facebooks plan to know everything about everyone, based on a persons friends and their taste in music, clothes etc..etc.. The problem is it is impossible to develop such a model without some form of invasion of privacy and Facebook seems to have battered down the privacy door in order to move forward.

It is one thing having the ability to share your information with the world, but to default it to on (and add default on settings to previously secured accounts) is not good.

Facebook has been criticised for having an over complicated security model, such that you have to dig deep into menus in order to find the settings you need to turn off. It has improved a little over the past year, but not nearly enough.

The funny thing is I read “The Accidental Billionaires” (the story of Facebook) a few months back and the way Mark Zuckerburg is portrayed (rightly or wrongly) it is absolutely not surprising that Facebook act this way.

I wonder if there was a viable alternative to Facebook if their numbers would take a hit? I know a lot of key figures who are cancelling their Facebook accounts, but I guess the general public are just not aware that their privacy is being given away. It is no wonder that Zuckerburg defends Facebook by stating that they are loved by the public, it is just the bloggers and the media that are on their back.

Anyway…

If you want to secure your account you need to do the following:

Go into :

account > privacy settings > Apps and settings > What your friends can share about you

untick all the boxes (if you dont want your friends sharing your info)

Then go back to privacy settings and into Instant personalisation pilot programme

Untick the box

Now, to be completely secure you must visit each of these pages and select “block” (on the left)

Microsoft Docs.com, Pandora, Yelp

That should do it for now. If Facebook sneak in any more defaults I will post what you need to do to turn them off.

I ordered a 17″ Macbook Pro on the day the new models were released. Due to speccing it with different hardware it had to be custom built in China. Not a problem usually, but then again there isn’t “usually” a volcano spitting ask all over Europe.

Deliveries halted last week and seeing my Macbook Pro was sitting air-side in Shanghai I had resigned myself to not getting my new machine until next week. However, UPS seem to have come up trumps and my MBP is now sitting at home, just over 24 hours after it was the other side of the world.

It took quite a route to get here though, and I am astounded how it managed to get here so quickly.

I am quick to bash companies for bad service, but on this occasion “well done UPS”

I blogged about my first impressions of Chrome a while ago and have barely touched it since. Largely I have been happy with Firefox in terms of what it gives me in terms of a browser and the extended features I have come to rely on in my day to day life.

However, recently (over the past year) Firefox has also started to give me some other things… headaches and  high blood pressure to name just two! I have loved using Firefox for so long I am tempted to blame Windows for the constant freezes, crashes and general slowness. Unfortunately I can’t. I use a PC at work and a Mac at home, and Firefox behaves the same on both of them.

Today I found out that Firebug is now available on Google Chrome, which prompted me to take a look at what else is available. To my surprise I found a Twitter client, XMarks, a great page screen-grab utility and an SEO tool. Wow, things have moved on since I first tried out Chrome.

In fact, all my deal-clinch extensions are now available on Chrome!

So, as of 2 hours ago I made the jump to Chrome. So far I am loving it. Despite having my extensions active the browsing experience is still very slick and it has not frozen up once. I still have an open mind, but for now I think I have closed Firefox for the last time.

I will keep trying Firefox from time to time, but I think until they release v4.0 their back-end core is just too flaky for my liking.

I am glad Chrome now has extensions. I know it is a matter of debate as to whether it should be kept as a “clean browser” but I kind of figure if you want it clean then don’t install the extensions. Completely bare of extensions Chrome is still faster than Firefox!

I hope Firefox does get it’s act together. It has done wonders for the web community, helping topple IE off its perch (or at least getting them to play ball, not sit on their market share). If Chrome does compete with Firefox I think it could be a game changer for the web. With the Google Apps behind them I think they have a better chance of reaching the general public and hopefully will eventually push IE below the magic 50% market share mark!

What are your thoughts on Google Chrome?

I have blogged before about being somewhat of a Apple Fanboy. Ever since I bought my 15″ Macbook Pro I have loved the Apple hardware and the Apple OS. Unfortunately Apple are making it a little difficult at the moment.

I have planned on getting the new 17″ Macbook Pro for a long time now, but the existing models are using the Core2Duo processors and the rest of the Apple line (and the rest of the world!) has moved on since then. I decided to wait for the Macbook Pro product line to be refreshed before getting the new one, but each time the rumor mill says it will be updated, it doesn’t happen.

Once again rumor has it that tomorrow will be the big day and I will be able to get my new MBP, but alas I am getting used to it not happening and will have to make do with the 15″ for now. This is not a problem, but it has recently been slowing down and is in need of a good blatting, but I don’t want to do that with all my data on it, I would prefer to get the new one up and running before formatting the existing one.

Why am I blogging about this? I am not sure really, I am just anxious to get to grips with the new 17″ as it will be a LOT easier for Lightroom work as it has a lot more scream real estate available.

So, will tomorrow be the day? I will just have to wait and see… watch this space…

I made the jump from IE to Firefox as soon as I was told about it and I have never regretted it for a moment. The experience was faster, slicker, more accurate and altogether more enjoyable. This was when tabbed browsing had just been introduced and so that was welcome as well.

Over the years Firefox has grown up. As the market share continues to increase more and more developers are bringing out really cool and useful tools and plugins that make Firefox very powerful, especially for the web designer/developer. I would actually go so far as to say Firefox is now an essential part of my workflow as a designer.

Tools such as Firebug for HTML/CSS debugging, Colorzilla for grabbing a particular colour off screen, and SearchStatus for SEO information are just 3 examples of tools that I would really struggle to do without.

It is not all good news though. The more advanced Firefox has got the more problems it seems to have, especially on the Mac platform. It seems to have got progressively more sluggish and often consumes complete cores of CPU for no apparent reason (albeit more often than not it is Flash related). Stability is not what it used to be, and while all this is going on the competition are reigning it in and in certain areas overtaking it.

If you judge the browsers on a performance basis only then Google Chrome blows Firefox away, mainly in the javascript execution area but also arguably in stability. Firefox doesn’t even come second!

Unfortunately Firefox seems to have cornered the market in terms of plugins in the same way IE forced itself in the market based on being bundled with the most popular Operating System in the world. I say unfortunately because we are now in a situation where one of the best browsers available has a lot of people using it that have nowhere to go and no other alternative. This situation is never good for the end user.

The ideal situation is either one of the other smaller competitors will introduce a versatile plugin system to rival Firefox’s offering, or someone new will enter the fray with another, probably webkit based, browser which will force Firefox to pull its finger out and tidy up its core product.