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MacWorld 2007 Predictions

by on 07/01/2007 in Apple, Hardware, Software, Technology

My predictions:

1. ‘ITV’ available right away, has a HD but no DVR capabilities. When this was first announced in September, I was really exited. Not so much anymore, it’ll really have to be something revolutionary to rock. At $299 (which will probably translate to about £220 [well above the regular rate]) it’s well over priced. You can already get software for Wii to play shared iTunes music and I think video will follow soon. The Wii is £180.

2. Refreshed display’s. 20″ goes HD, 23″ goes 24″ and all of them go iSighting. I don’t think there’s gonna be anything bigger than this for a while, user interface would have to change a lot. Try moving cursor across two 20 inch displays. Yes, it’s quite a trip.

3. Previewing Mac OS 10.5. New Finder, cool new features that were still secrets in WWDC. Time Machine gets an overhaul from what was shown in August, it’ll stop looking like Star Wars and more like a real application. Available by the end of March.

4. Apple Phone. (hey, you’ve gotta believe in fairy tales) US only for quite a while, unfortunately. But then again, that’s not really gonna matter as, although it’s made by Apple, it will not be able to beat the forthcoming Nokia N95 (check it out, it’s the new pinnacle of mobile phones.)

5. Octal Mac Pro. This, you could maybe say, is already delayed taking that the processors have been out for a while. They will be really fast theoretically.

6. iTunes TV show and movie downloads available in some select European countries. But as long as you can use bit torrent to get HD content for free and only 480×640 from iTunes, it’s not gonna pick up (this is not to say that I would use bit torrent to download content I don’t have a license to use).

And obviously iLife ’07 and iWork ’07(with addition of spreadsheet application)

Also, there’s gonna be some other really cool shit. Taking how Apple’s been hyping this, it’s gonna rock our socks off. I’m betting we’re gonna see 3 ‘one more things’. None more, none less.

See you all soon,

admin

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Photoshop 10 (CS3) Beta Benchmarking

by on 18/12/2006 in Apple, CS3, Hardware, Software, Technology

Hey All,

First benchmarks for PS 10 beta:

MacBook (rev A) 2Ghz/2Gb/120Gb : 1min 25sec(!)

This is the same machine that earlier did the benchmark in 2:10 (CS2) and 1:39 when booted to Windows. This obviously means that optimisation to Intel processors has been done very well and as this beats CS2 in Windows XP Photoshop itself is a lot faster.

I’ll be adding other benchmarks (CS3 Windows and CS3 PowerPC) later on when I find time to do them. Do post your own timings as comments.

Back soon,

admin

[edit] Almost forgot, here’s links to the image and Photoshop action that is used to do this benchmark. Also, you can find the other, earlier, benchmarks from here.

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WWDC 2006

by on 08/08/2006 in Apple, Hardware, Software, Technology

Most anticipated event in the Mac Calendar has started again this year. And Steve Jobs has delivered his Keynote. Here’s how I felt about it.

[EDIT: Notice that I'm not going into too much detail as I just feel like having a little rant. It's really early in the morning and I'm not feeling good.]

1) Mac Pro. Good stuff, I’m sure it’s a fine machine. Dual optical drive bays, good. Four HD slots, good. Still only 1Gb RAM as the standard configuration, not good. Who in their right mind would every consider having anything less than 2Gb on these machines (4Gb is the minimum in my opinion)? As the benchmarks have show, this for many tasks is more important than having lots of processor speed, which often is left spare as RAM gets over worked. But, I guess, as Apple advertises it as the ‘most configurable Mac ever’, the consumer must be left with an option to spend £1600 and still get a slow machine.

2) 10.5. Time Machine, good. All the other little improvements, good. Spaces, sounds cool. I just hope they let you have different Docks for different profiles. This would be cool ‘cos at the moment I’ve got about 40 apps in there and I can’t tell which one is which since they’re so small and I hate the magnification effect, it’s stupid and useless.

Where is the finder overhaul?

They still have over half a year to finish this before the expected release in the Spring 07, so they better get on with it and not just give us few almost-must-have features and leave rest of it like it is and has been for years. Blaah.

3) Cinema Displays, bad. Bad. Bad. Why is the 20″ not true HD yet? I know I know, it’s only 30 pixels short but still, IT IS NOT HD YET! Price drop, good but bad. Let’s take the 23″ model. It’s $999, in the US, which is £523. That’s one bloody great price I’ll buy one! No! You won’t. It’s £779 in the UK store! If we factor in the US sales tax, which in NYC is 8%, if I remember correctly, we’ll get £564. Take the original $999 and add UK VAT, you get £614! Over £150 more than the US price! Why!? (It does make me feel a bit better to find that it is around £639 in the UK Edu Store.)

Ok, it’s not all bad at all. It’s actually really good. It’s just that everytime before this event everybody gears up to see so much new and amazing stuff that when it never actually comes one might be a bit disappointed. Good that we don’t have to expect anything to happen at Apple Expo Paris, we might be positively supriced.

[edit: added links]

I’m off,

admin

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RSS Order Tracking

by on 15/06/2006 in Software

First a little update,

I sold my long serving PowerBook 15″ 8 days ago. It was a quick and easy but not painless sell. Two years I spent with her. There were plenty of reasons for this, and not least the topic of my last post.
Anyhow, now I’m waiting for my next one. A black MacBook.

As you know, if you’ve ever ordered anything from Apple, it’s a long wait. I’ve checked their order status page roughly about 562 times between today and 8th of June. Now I found Apecode.com which is great, it actually lets you know where you parcel is, unlike Apple’s site which really doesn’t say much more that “your parcel has shipped”.

I’ve been using NetNewsWire for a while now and have never before read as many news bits from the internet. Basically, I haven’t really been using RSS that much at all. I’ve never been as up to date on Welsh politics as I am now.

It’s nice to be up to date on things that matter to you so why can’t I subscribe to an RSS feed for my order status from Apple. How easy and handy would that be? Very handy, I say.

Or could someone build website to do this? I can’t see it being too hard.. But then again, I don’t do code..

If you know anyone already doing this or would be able to build such a site, let me know, I’ll let both of my readers know about it, too.

admin

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Civilization IV – and why it angers me

by on 27/05/2006 in Software

Bad news to the kinds of me who’ve been waiting for Civilization IV for the past 18 months. Aspyr Media has released the system requirements for the game. What more can I say.

System Requirements:

Operating System: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later
CPU Processor: PowerPC G5 or Intel chipset
CPU Speed: 1.8 GHz or faster
Memory: 512 MB or higher
Hard Disk Space: 3.5 GB free disk space
Video Card (ATI): Radeon 9600 or better
Video Card (NVidia): GeForce FX 5200 or better
Video Memory (VRam): 64 MB or higher
Multiplayer: Internet (TCP/IP) and LAN (TCP/IP) play supported. Internet play requires broadband connection.
Media Required: DVD Drive
*Supported Video cards: NVIDIA GeForce 5200, 6600, 6800, 7800 ATI Radeon 9600, 9650, 9700, 9800, X600, X800, X850, X1600
Recommended System Requirements:

Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4.6 or later
CPU Processor: PowerPC G5 or Intel chipset
CPU Speed: 2.0 GHz or faster
Video RAM: 128 MB

admin

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Activity Monitor 2.0

by on 26/05/2006 in Software

Briefly,

One thing I’ve wanted Activity Monitor to have, ever since I installed MenuMeters, is an ability to sort bandwidth usage by application. I mean, being able to see when your network is used sometimes scares you. I leave my personal file sharing on most of the time when at home or at work to be able to share files between computers quickly. Also my iTunes sharing is on all the time. Then when somebody uses one of these services without me knowing, it can really feel odd. Suddenly your uploading at 3Mb/s or downloading at 300kb/s with out knowing which app is requisting this data or who is uploading something to my shared folder.

I’m not a programmer so I have no actual idea how this might work but i’d imagine there’s a way of knowing which ip certain data is coming from, right? Also should be quite easy to know which folder on the HD it’s being written on. So we know these two things. Now, this app that identifies these activities on your computer asks who owns the ip it’s coming from, result = rikard at 10.2.0.17. Ok, so it’s Rikard interacting with me. And the file is at /user/Public/Drop Box/lost2_20.mov. That sounds quite simple. This could also apply on someone playing your shared tunes. Data read from /thisAndThisMusicFolder/ is being sent over Ethernet to 10.2.0.5 or whatever.

Please could some one make a widget that does this. I would be ever so greatful.

Another widget someone could code is the one that says which TAB in Firefox/Safari is using how many CPU cycles. It’s so frustrating when, especially some like me with not that many cycles to spare, Firefox is hogging 70% of everything. Blaah. You can try this out by openning couple of tabs with images showing from istockphoto.com
Happy coding, let me know if you’re succesful,
admin

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