By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in utilities, Apple on November 18, 2008 at 11:26 am
When we first moved here it seemed the local population spent an unhealthy amount of time having haircuts and their nails polished. In a nearby road, just half a mile long, every other shop is either a hair dresser or nail bar.
We usually go mid-week for our haircuts, when it’s cheaper. Taking the first appointments of the day as the coffee is fresher then. The salon is much like any other, with a large TV on the wall, tuned to one of the music channels sandwiched between shopping shows and adjacent to Virgin. The music is always the same modern pop pap. Girl singers who look as though they should spend more time on their homework and less on make-up, singing three-note songs full of false emotion. All interspersed with occasional Barry Manilow-style key changes to add “interest”. Our fascination lasts a few seconds before deciding whether to play Doom on our mobile phones or read the tatty magazines on offer.
These are something of a revelation. No glossy photos of Posh and Becks, rather the antithesis, with grainy, long-lens shots of celebrities in the wild. It comes as a bit of a shock to see that without cosmetics, film stars over school-leaving age start to get wrinkly bits and sags. Unless they are Helen Mirren who must have sold her soul to look so good in a bikini. Or they have an addiction to the surgeon’s knife. Even though this inevitably leads to a plastic complexion as successive face-lifts replace nostrils with navels.
Kira Knighley’s acne
There is also the disappointment these magazines bring when they enlighten you with facts such as Kate Beckinsale’s broad northern accent and she has to wear tight leather jumpsuits to hide her addiction to cream cakes and french fries or Kira Knighley is really aged 45 and has acne. The funny thing is that, being written for women, one imagines they would have articles on Mark Wahlberg’s Dirk Diggler, real or just a tribute to the rubber industry?
Our MacPro gave us a similar deflated feeling. The keyboard volume controls need two keys to operate them, a new fn key plus the usual sound up/down/mute. Plug earphones into the front din socket and nothing happens until sound output preferences are switched from speakers to headphones.
This is the first Mac to work in this way. Usually, plugging in earphone turns off speakers automatically and switches sound to the earphones. In the end, we put the Sound control panel into the dock by dragging its icon onto the dock from System/Library/Preferencepanes. It’s a useful way to get easy access to any of the preferences installed with the System without opening all the System Preferences.
Rogue Amoeba
Then yesterday we came across a free menu extra called SoundSource, made by Rogue Amoeba, here. With SoundSource installed, you can select it from the Mac’s top menu bar and from its drop down window, control any input or output sources attached to your Mac. DJs and music buffs can play with their midi devices and the rest of us can easily divert system sounds such as beeps, to secondary hardware. Best of all, it can toggle the auto-switch to headphones, so when plugging them in sounds are diverted from speakers to the headphones.
But if this is built in, why hasn’t Apple kept things as normal (ie like every other Mac) or at least given us the choice of how the earplug socket works?
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Comment by Roberto Avanzi - November 19, 2008 on 6:37 am
For the keyboard. You can go to the system preferences and decide for yourself how the function keys and the fn key works. go to the “Keyboard and mouse” panel, and you will see a check-bok with the string “Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys”, and below “when this option is selected, use the Fn key to use the special features printed on each key.”
No big deal - inform yourself before ranting.
Comment by - November 19, 2008 on 8:54 am
Robert that’s all very well, but then the function keys don’t work in applications such as QuarkXPress without pressing the fn key. As I use them more while doing work than just turning volume up and down, it’s back to a two-fingered volume control.
Comment by - November 19, 2008 on 10:47 am
I agree the new FN-based keyboard shortcuts are a pain if you’ve become used to one-touch F-key access to things.
I was not aware of the sound preferences issue, and that really strinkes me as a stupid move on the part of Apple. It’s not just previous Macs that automatically switch audio output to headphones when you plug them in - all laptops do it.
Hopefully this is a bug that will be fixed in a forthcoming OS or firmware update.
Comment by - November 19, 2008 on 11:26 am
I agree, Chris, but I don’t think it is a bug. I think Apple have made it that way and from my Googling for info on 10.6 it seems that nothing has changed.
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