Kicker bundle removed in Leopard

Easy system notification gets kicked

Whilst researching a possible notification system for Eject Disks to intercept and replace system eject actions it turns out that the general system events notification system Kicker.bundle was removed from Leopard! A replacement system called crankd is being developed, but frankly due to the complete lack of documentation I gave up!

MacBook peripheral predictions

Firewire makes a (temporary) comeback?

Last year I speculated about the future of Firewire on the MacBook and came to the conclusion that the most logical path for Apple would be to build firewire into the Ethernet port via the new Firewire specification IEEE1394c.

Apple may have taken this in a new direction entirely (which frankly we should all expect from Apple by now!), if reports of Light Peak, the new peripheral bus from Intel are to be believed.  More on that later.

Firewire has now been reinstated to the MacBook line, albeit in a roundabout way.  Firewire 400 is still available on the white plastic MacBook which was the only surviving member of the old MacBook generation that wasn’t transitioned to the new Unibody enclosure borrowed from the MacBook Pro.  Those MacBooks paid the price for their svelte looks and lost their FireWire ports in the process.  Apple has now reinstated Firewire in the form of Firewire 800 to these and rebranded them as the new 13″ MacBook Pros.

So here’s the situation.  Once more every Mac has Firewire (apart from the freak of the family, the MacBook Air).  Although I haven’t had personal experience with the new models, presumably once more every Mac has Firewire Target Disk mode (once again excepting the freak).

So is Firewire back for good?  I don’t think so.  I think Apple was frankly surprised at the backlash to losing Firewire (especially after it was dropped from iPods with only a little angst) on the MacBook, and that was part of the reason to it’s comeback.  But I believe it will only be a temporary measure, until Light Peak replaces it.  When I first heard about Light Peak I was amazed that we didn’t have a peripheral bus based on fibre optics already, and that no-one seemed to have thought of it before.  I firmly believe that the future will be in wireless peripheral communication, but wires aren’t going away any time soon.  If we have to have wires, why not have one small, high capacity connection that can carry all types of communication now that fibre optic has matured to make cables flexible and durable enough for this purpose?

My only concern is that Light Peak will be developed as a master/slave architecture that will make technology like Target Disk mode and daisy chaining (that makes Firewire great) impossible to implement.  Its multi-device, multi-protocol design would most probably make that unlikely though.

Snow Leopard guts

Snow Leopard’s internal bits and bobs

Another release of Mac OS X, another excellent, in-depth review by John Siracusa over at Ars Technica.  I got hooked on his reviews after I stumbled on the review of Tiger, and all the under-the-hood goodies he reveals.

Eject Disks in Snow Leopard

Quit that application fool!

It seems that Apple are taking notice of utilities like Eject Disks and building notice of what is preventing a disk being ejected into Snow Leopard (see More Reliable Disk Eject at the bottom of the Snow Leopard refinements page).

As a result I will probably not be updating Eject Disks with feature updates once Snow Leopard is released, although bug fixes will still be released of course.

Update: I will most probably be investigating tying Eject Disks in with the system eject function using kicker.xml and configd, so development may continue of Leopard to try and make it similar to Snow Leopard.

MacBooks and Firewire

Hope for FireWire on the MacBook?

A ZDNet Blog casts some hope on the future of FireWire on the MacBook now that Apple has removed it from the new MacBooks. The theory is that because there are plans afoot to implement FireWire over a standard Cat5 ethernet cable (codenamed 1394c) that Apple may build in support for FireWire to the ethernet ports on future Macs. You can see the a summary of the draft specification as a PDF on the 1394c Working Group’s website. The idea is that a standard ethernet port could be 1394c enabled and auto-negotiate whether to use 10/100/1000Mbs ethernet or 400/800Mbs FireWire depending on what is connected at the other end, or as it says in the afore mentioned summary:

“For the end user, the objective is to have a
single RJ-45 socket that is labeled “network”,
and works for any kind of connection.”

I’m not sure Apple will introduce 1394c whenever it is ready. First of all, DV Cameras and other consumer peripherals that led the charge for needing FireWire seem to be mostly switching to a USB connection. Secondly, whilst the real-world throughput of Gigabit ethernet is lower than it’s theoretical maximum throughput of 1000Mbs, it’s still higher than Firewire 400* and probably 800 too considering that collisions are what slows ethernet down at higher speeds and wouldn’t be such an issue in an attached peripheral situation as is likely with FireWire. Add to this the fact that Apple have already implemented their Migration Assistant that previously only ran over FireWire (until the release of the MacBook Air) to run over ethernet and even wireless, and the need for Firewire seems even more diluted, when Gigabit Ethernet could step into it’s shoes.

I see no reason why Apple could not release a Mac firmware that enabled target disk mode over ethernet, and not need that pesky Firewire port cluttering up their laptops, or adding more components internally to enable FireWire using the ethernet port, and waiting for the specification to be ratified of course (not that they’ve waited for official blessings before!). Ethernet also provide the additional benefit of being able to be used over cables of up to 100m instead of the 10m maximum of FireWire (although the 1394c specification does provide for up to 100m cables too).

Well, ok, I see a possible pot hole on the road to ethernet replacing FireWire. Firewire provides power, and although ethernet does, using Power over Ethernet (PoE), it might not be practical for laptops as it is designed to power wireless access points and other networking devices which need more of a power draw than laptops are going to want to provide.

The other (horrible) alternative is that target disk mode is dead and buried, never to return!

* From a company trying to sell Firewire 400 peripherals, so presumably these results are skewed towards FireWire if anything.