 | Macworld Keynote Thoughts January 16, 2008 10:07am in tech |
So Apple's Macworld Keynote was yesterday and several new products and upgrades were announced. The big one of course is the Macbook Air, an amazingly thin laptop that looks pretty sleek. Here's my take on the Keynote and new products iPhone 1.1.3 The latest update to the iPhone firmware. For those with hacked iPhones, this update is not a good idea right now, but for those without, this update adds a lot to the iPhone. First it brings in sending text messages to more than one person at once. Second it gives you faux GPS...locates your position using cell tower triangulation, as well as providing hybrid view in Google Maps. One more thing it allows for is for you to save websites as shortcuts on the main menu. It allows for a few other things as well, but I guess those are the big ones. Overall it seems to be a pretty good update, I've been fooling around with it some and the new features aren't bad, although I wouldn't rely on the triangulation as a GPS device...placed me in Philly last night while standing in my bedroom some 45 minutes away.
Time Capsule This is seemingly a very nice product. Essentially what it is is a wireless-N router with a hard drive built into it for backup. For those who use OS X Leopard's Time Machine on a Macbook, Macbook Pro, and I guess now the Macbook Air, this is a viable solution to storage space. It comes in sizes of 500GB for $299 and 1TB for $499 which aren't horrible prices considering the storage space and speed that they're said to have, but it still may be more economical for people just to go out and buy an external hard drive. But, there are some nice things about it as well. One, it acts as a network server allowing for Windows, Mac, and Linux to connect to it, and two they can all connect simultaneously when you compare that to an external hard drive only being able to connect to one computer at a time. It seems like a nice product but I don't know if I can justify it at the moment since I have my server.
Apple TV Take Two A new software update and price drop still is not influencing me to even consider this. In order for me to consider a product like this, it would have to include a DVR and support for Divx. Guess what, the Apple TV still doesn't. If Microsoft and Sony can get Divx on their game consoles, there should be no reason why Apple can't get it on Apple TV. Also, while it doesn't affect me so much, it'd be nice if Apple TV would support 1080p.
iTunes Movie Rentals What seems like a good idea gone horribly wrong, although they are close. Essentially what it is is you pay $2.99 for a movie, $3.99 for a new release, and I believe $4.99 for high-def. So where did they go wrong? Two things. One, when you rent one of the movies, you have 30 days to start watching it. BUT, once you start watching it, you only have access to the movie for 24 hours. For a tad more at Blockbuster, I can rent a movie and watch it 24/7 for 3 days to a week if I want (depending on the return date). With iTunes, just 24 hours. If I were to go to Netflix, i could pay double the iTunes price and be able to rent unlimited DVDs per month with no late fees keeping each DVD as long as I want to. It was a step in the right direction, but they still have a lot of things off in my opinion. Also having to wait 30 days after the DVD release to rent from iTunes..and STILL pay a new release price is ridiculous.
Macbook Air Most likely the thinnest laptop around right now. It looks sleek and seems to have decent power, but I'll take my Macbook Pro thank you. With the Macbook Air, you can't access your RAM, Battery, or your hard drive. Now the hard drive is not that big of a deal because I can't access it on my Macbook pro either, but the battery and the RAM, are biggies. To have to take it in to Apple to replace the battery, or pay Apple's prices to upgrade the RAM, is the sad reality stemming from the thinness of the Air. Now granted the replacement of the battery is at cost only. You'd only have to pay for the battery which is a slightly pricey $129.99, but the installation would be free. Personally I think the price of the Macbook Air should be slightly less as it is comparable in technical specs to the Macbook. I respect that by making it thin costs a little more, but $1800 for it is a little much. In all honesty, the Macbook is just about as portable. |
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| Leopard VS. Tiger: Front Row December 27, 2007 6:59am in tech |
So I've been using Leopard now for about 2 months and so far I'm really liking it. There is however one little feature I do miss. The new Macs come with a feature called Front Row that pretty much turn your Mac into a giant iPod. (Imagine your entire screen becoming that of an iPod...it's a full screen dashboard with music, video, photo, and podcast playback) With your little remote you can skip songs, play, pause etc. It's a really nice feature and since I like listening to music while I fall asleep, it's great...I can control the playback while lying down. The one thing that I miss with Leopard is the seemingly seamless integration between Front Row and iTunes. In Tiger, I could open up iTunes and start playing a playlist. Ten minutes later, I'm done working on the computer and I just want to bring up the playback with Front Row. I would bring up Front Row, go into the Music menu and click "Now Playing". The screen would then go to the song I was playing and never miss a beat. Playback was constant. The same would go for if I left Front Row and went back to my desktop. This however is not the case in Leopard. Front Row and iTunes seem to be two separate applications with the only linking between them being the shared iTunes music library and playlist. If I start playing in iTunes and then try to switch to Front Row or vice versa, playback stops. I would then have to navigate to the playlist in Front Row, or open iTunes and select my playlist to start playing music again, pretty much starting from scratch. This may not seem like that big of a deal, and in all reality it's really not, but with how well Apple integrates the various programs in OS X, you'd kinda think that doing this wouldn't be that hard, especially since they did it in Tiger. I also have 2 other small issues with Front Row, unless you select "Shuffle All Songs" at the beginning, it will play the songs in order. With my relatively large music collection, I like to keep my playlists on random just to get a variety of playback. I can't just select the first song I want to listen to and have it randomly go from there. If I select an individual song to start with, it will play that song and play the remainder of the playlist in order. The second small issue is that there's no option to turn repeat on from Front Row, so when it reaches the end of a playlist, it just stops. These things aren't dealbreakers by any means as the rest of Leopard to me is amazing, including the important stuff like basic functionality. But these are just things that I wish Apple would have done. |
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| 10 Reasons I Switched to my Mac November 06, 2007 5:31pm in tech |
I recently decided to start using my MacBook Pro as my primary machine, so I figured I'd make a quick list as to some of the reasons I decided to make the switch. 10. Little to No Worry About Malware and Viruses - Windows is always under attack by new and old viruses. Most anti-virus software does at least a decent job shielding your PC from such threats assuming they are kept up to date, but no anti-virus software is perfect. With Mac OSX, these threats are hardly an issue. I heard of a trojan for OSX, but it apparently requires you to enter your password in order for it to be able to install which pretty much decreases its threat level by a pretty big factor. 9. Cleaner Interface - This may be more of a personal preference, but personally, I find the user interface of OSX to be much cleaner than Windows. The dock is the perfect application launcher in my opinion. 8. Hardware and OS Support- I personally find the computer hardware in Macs to be of higher quality than say of Dells or the equivalent. I've had my MacBook Pro for almost a year and a half now with no hardware issues. Yet both my Dell and the Dells I used to work with at the Army Corps of Engineers were failing left and right. To go along with this, OSX is run on a tighter hardware base, meaning there's limited hardware that Macs use. Some people might consider this a problem, but look at it this way; fewer hardware options can mean better driver support for the hardware. With Windows machines, you have so many different motherboards, graphics cards, network cards, etc, that Windows needs to be able to recognize in order for Windows to be able to use the hardware. Now part of this is for the manufacturers to release proper well-written drivers for their hardware. A lot of times Blue Screens of Death are caused by poorly written drivers. Microsoft should be more open with giving out info for the hardware manufacturers so better drivers can be produced. This is not always the case, but it could help Microsoft improve hardware support for Windows. But with OSX, the drivers can be better written into the operating system since Apple knows what hardware are in their machines. 7. It's BSD Based - This might not mean a lot to everyone, but being a supporter/user of Linux, having a BSD/Linux terminal built into OSX helps me out alot, especially dealing with my Ubuntu server. 6. The Screen - I have never seen a computer monitor/laptop screen as clear and crisp as the one my MacBook Pro has. That's not to say others don't exist, but for the built-in factory screen to look as good as I think it does, is pretty damned good in my opinion. 5. Integration Outside of OSX - Let's face it, we live in a world primarily run by Windows computers. With my MacBook Pro, I can access the shared folders on my Linux server, I can use my printer shared through my Windows Desktop, and access the shared drive on my Windows based PVR. So no matter what OS environment is being used, I can still access what I would need to. 4. No Internet Explorer - I believe Internet Explorer stopped coming on the Macs beginning with OSX 10.4 Tiger. Either way, Macs don't have to deal with an incredibly vulnerable web browser that in all essence is slow as all hell when compared to Firefox, Safari, or Opera. OSX comes with Safari which is a much better option when compared to IE. 3. Boot Camp - Personally, I'm going to try to avoid this feature as I bought a Mac for OSX, not Windows. But it still is nice to know that if I really need to run Windows, I can use Boot camp to run it natively. Try running OSX on a PC. (Yes, I know it's been hacked for PC, but I don't see a PC being able to run OSX as well as a Mac being able to run Windows) 2. All Those Nice Little Features Built In - There are many little things that I really like about OSX, features like Expose, Dashboard, Quick Look (Leopard), Cover Flow of files (Leopard), full integration of Mail, Safari, Address Book, iCal, and several others. Each feature alone might not make or break my thoughts, but put them all together, and to me, it packs a punch. 1. Unbloated - If anyone uses Microsoft Windows Vista, they should realize that the OS is incredibly bloated which can cause problems running on lower end machines. I remember reading somewhere that in order to FULLY utilize all the features of Vista (Ultimate?), you need 4GB RAM. I'm sorry, that's a problem. I currently run 2GB on both my desktop and MacBook Pro, but you should not need 4GB of RAM (maybe in several years when the RAM gets cheaper, but not in today's age). OSX by comparison runs smoothly on fewer resources. There is very little bloat to OSX and it runs very smoothly. I bought my MacBook Pro with 512MB RAM and OSX 10.4 ran fine. My old iBook had 384MB RAM and also ran Tiger just fine. I can't vouch for how that would handle Leopard (10.5), but I would suspect it would fare much better than a PC with 384 or 512 MB of RAM trying to run Vista. One More Thing: This cool effect from Photobooth  |
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| My Thoughts on OS X 10.5 Leopard October 31, 2007 10:59pm in tech |
Friday night, I had the pleasure of installing Apple's new operating system, OS X 10.5 Leopard on my MacBook Pro. Leopard is Apple's answer to the ill-fated Microsoft Windows Vista, and boy does it blow Vista away. It runs smoothly, and like Tiger, has a much cleaner feel to me that does Vista or even XP. Until shortly before I got my iBook in April 2006, I was a pretty big Mac basher. I got my iBook and that all changed. I now use my MacBook Pro as my primary machine despite the fact that I have a pretty powerful Desktop. But enough background, here are my thoughts on Leopard so far. My first taste of Leopard left me with somewhat of a sour note. There apparently is an issue with doing a direct upgrade from Tiger to Leopard where after restarting post-install users get a "blue screen of death". This isn't quite the same as Windows' BSOD; all you see is a blue screen with a mouse cursor and it hangs there what seems like infinitely. Not exactly the best experience, but it made me do what I wanted to do but felt too lazy to do initially...reformat and start from scratch. Fortunately I was smart and backed up my files that I needed. *****Let that be a warning to everyone. When you are performing an upgrade of an operating system (be it OS X, Windows, Linux, etc) back up your files FIRST.****** I'm not quite sure what the issue is/was behind the blue screen, but, while seemingly major, it was to me, only a minor hiccup. I ended up starting from scratch and the remainder of the setup went very smoothly. Initial Impressions 
The first thing I noticed was that the default wallpaper was not the blue waves (I don't know how else to describe them) that were seen with OS X 10.3 & 10.4. Something else that changed is also the dock. I've heard some people call Leopard's dock "ugly". Personally I kind of like it but I guess to each their own. Something new in Leopard are the stacks. 
These stacks allow you to put a folder in the dock and when clicked on, brings up a "stack" that shows any files or folders located in that folder. What I did was simply create a folder for my games (yes OS X has games) and you can see what it does when I click on it. It may not seem like much, but it can be used for convenience and make things easier to access. A New Look for Finder 
Anyone who's used a mac before knows what Finder is. It is Mac's file explorer. Generally, Finder looks about the same. What it does now feature is actually pretty cool. If anyone has used iTunes 7, they probably can recognize what the screenshot above shows. Finder now adds a cover flow view that will allow you to page through folders, text files, and like above, images. It's nothing incredibly revolutionary, but it does provide another way of previewing images without completely opening them. 
There is also the quick look feature which allows you to pop open files without actually opening them. This is an example of quick look on a picture I have, almost like some websites do nowadays. This might not be anything extraordinary, but definitely a nice feature that Leopard supports. Also noted is that like pictures, some video files can be viewed the same way in quick look. Tabbed Terminals 
While this may not seem like much, for those of you who do work with terminals like myself, the tabbed feature of terminal is definitely a good thing to have. Notes in Mail 
Again, this is not that big of a feature, but it still helps you keep organized within Mail.app. Final Conclusions I know I didn't touch on MANY of the things that Leopard brings to the table. Spaces (multiple desktops), Time Machine (automated backup), & some of iChat's new features are some to be mentioned. While Leopard may not bring loads of revolutionary new features to an OS, what it does bring is stability, an amazing user interface, and many nuances to help make certain tasks easier. I really do wonder if Leopard will help bring people over to Macs from Windows machines. Mac computers are very good machines, and OS X only makes them even better. Vista is bloated and the chances of really getting it to run well on older machines is a joke. Leopard on the opposite side of the fence, is said just fine on most of the older G4 and G5 Macs. Plus the cost is notably cheaper than Vista. There is only one version of OS X Leopard and it comes with all of the features. None of this 4 versions of Vista that Microsoft keeps trying to push. It's an amazing OS and in mine, and I'm sure many other people's opinion, significantly ahead of Vista. |
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| Apple planning iPhone SDK October 17, 2007 11:55am in tech |
 The one thing that made me lean against getting an iPhone apparently might soon be making me reverse my thinking and actually consider getting one. Apple apparently is planning to release a 3rd party SDK for the iPhone. So what does this mean? If this means what I think it does, it means that all the hacking that has been going on since its release, should become all for naught as this SDK would allow for the 3rd party applications to be developed properly for the iPhone. While this rumor does not guarantee anything, its interesting and definitely exciting to think that the iPhone could soon see new applications coming to it. You almost wonder if the change in stance has something to do with the hacking and the bricking of the iPhones and Apple wanting to allow for a legitimate way for 3rd party applications to be developed and installed. Update - This may be more than a rumor afterall... Steve Jobs on iPhone SDK [apple.com] |
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