There is a lot of legitimate criticism around: closed and not extendable, missing software, poor hardware features, little storage, over-prized, etc.
But,
the usability of the new iPod touch is simply sexy.
Watching the demo video instantly produces this must have feeling in me…
CNET has an article about virtualization solutions for running Windows on a Mac and posted some benchmark results for the most popular applications: VMware Fusion 1.1 and Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac (aff links).
I’m using Parallels Desktop mainly for working with ArcGIS on my MacBook, which works quite well (more info on that). For completing heavy tasks, where I could use some extra spice, I usually restart into BootCamp.
So I found it interesting that Fusion significantly outperforms Parallels. Taking a closer look at the article, things became clearer: Fusion makes use of multiple cores while Parallels only uses one single CPU core. The benchmark limited to only one core shows very similar results.
I suppose Parallels will catch up on that issue and won’t try Fusion, since I think both of them are not quite compatible and I’m really not in the mood of setting up Windows again if something breaks (never change a running system!).
If you’re setting up a new environment for using ArcGIS on a Mac, I’d recommend giving VMware’s Fusion a try.
How to determine a file type of some really old Macintosh data with no file extensions, where the resource fork got totally screwed and you give up on visually scanning 6 and more megabytes binary code in your favorite text/hex editor?
It will filter any human readable text in your file and let’s you take a good guess by what program the file was originally created. Brilliant! [via FILExt]
The German news magazine Focus reports (in the meantime TechCrunch too) that Apple is working on an in-car navigation/entertainment device. According to Focus it’ll be released in 2009, whereas the first 6 months Mercedes Benz apparently has exclusive rights on the device.
Once Apple is working with navigation technology, can we expect some LBS features on the iPhone too?
Apparently Apple focused Safari development on gaining milliseconds instead of improving their web browser. According to Apple’s marketing department Safari 3 outperforms every other available browser. And you really need those milliseconds to compensate the time you loose while using Safari caused by the lack of new and innovative features, compared to other popular web browsers.
E.g. the implementation of a simple but very handy feature like bookmark keywords and the wonderful %s for adding search functionality:
That way I can possibly search every searchable site on the internet very fast and easily.
In Safari I use
You see what I mean?
Search is one of the most important features on the internet, a web browser should therefore ease the access to search and information.
By definition beta software is feature complete and ready for testing. So that means I’ll have to wait for Safari 4 until I eventually see more features…
Presentation software shouldn’t crash, right?
It’s not about losing unsaved data, it’s about embarrassment and breaking the flow.
It was the first time I tried Keynote, mainly because we wanted to show a large Quicktime movie and I thought we’re on the safe side to embed the movie in Keynote rather than in PowerPoint. All test runs of course worked just fine, but the application crashed during the presentation, fortunately at the end, there were only a few seconds left, so it wasn’t a big problem, but it shouldn’t happen with presentation software anyways.
I’m wondering how Google Desktop will handle indexing on the Mac?
On Windows Google Desktop index files grow up to multiple GB file sizes. So the question that came to my mind is: does Google Desktop make use of the Spotlight index or will Google create it’s own local index from scratch?
Spotlight obviously stores its index somewhere on the hard drive and I think it must be already quite large, supposedly more than a GB on my MacBook. I don’t want another local search application to create a second index, parallel to Spotlight’s, containing more or less the same information – there is only one local drive to index – and clutter up my hard drive with a few GB of index files.
Besides, Spotlight does a fairly well job. Extended by some plugins it searches within my del.icio.us bookmarks, Open Office documents or online on Google.
While it’s good to see that the European Commission cares about consumer rights, I don’t understand why they worry so much about entertainment industry (cf. Times). As if there weren’t other problems in the EU than varying music prices. Besides, I doubt Apple came up with the idea of separate iTMS for each European country by itself.
What’s next? Cars are in UK more expensive than in Spain too, and they even have the steering-wheel on the wrong side!
Lately I had some troubles with my MacBook battery: no, fortunately it did not explode, but when it came down to 10-20% the MacBook shut down without any warning. A quick search at Apple discussions showed that I’m not the only one experiencing this problem. Apparently it’s somehow related to the latest firmware update or something.
Anyways, people there recommended to contact Apple and ask for a new battery. So I called the support. Since I’m no AppleCare customer the friendly support person told me that he first must confirm that’s an hardware failer before he can get me a new battery. To do so I had to open a support case, charged with EUR 49,-. But if it turns out to be a hardware failure it would be covered by my warranty and nothing had to be paid. Hmm, I was pretty sure the battery is broken, but if I was wrong I would pay EUR 49,- for a hint I possibly could find at Apple discussions too (at that moment I had no idea what hint the friendly support person is going to suggest me).
After I agreed to that procedure the friendly support person explained to me how to do a PRAM reset. That was all. My battery remained broken but with the difference that it was now approved as broken by Apple and they sent me a new one.
Parallels is making it around some news sites today, for mainly two reasons:
After the update of my Parallels installation I found out that in Coherence mode I can drag&drop files between Windows Explorer and Mac OS X Finder even from and to external drives not visible in Windows. Pretty cool, didn’t know it before. I always shut down Windows, added the drives to my Parallels Windows set-up and rebooted Windows again to access them.