 | 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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| 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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| Hmmmmmmmmm September 14, 2007 12:36am in thoughts |
| So now that I'm using my Macbook Pro a little bit more than I have been, I'm really missing the feel of OS X. I love how everything just seems to flow in it. Damn the computer games keeping me on Windows! |
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