by R.I. Pienaar | Oct 27, 2007 | Uncategorized
Last night I joined a few 100 people in queuing for Leopard. My first plan was to go to Regent Street but I decided it might be a bit mad out there so I headed to Buewater shopping centre instead.
I am really glad I went there, there were several 100 people in the queue but I got in around 5:15 and were maybe number 15 in the queue so I was in and out in about 10 minutes with Leopard and a swanky tshirt.
I put it on my iMac with no problems at all, re-indexing the spotlight indexes took ages and made my machine a bit slow but once that was done it is all smooth sailing.
So far I have 2 3rd party application problems:
- Parallels let you mount your guest drive as a drive on your mac, for some or other reason this gives a time-out problem. Parallels have committed to a free patch for any issues so Kudos to them
-
Little Snitch stopped working well and will require a paid upgrade to version 2. Version 2 is much improved and I think this is a must-have app so will be happy to pay for it, its very inexpensive.
Other than these problems, I’ve been 100% happy with it. So far I don’t think its a total killer upgrade really, the unified look and feel is nice and makes for an all round more polished feel to OS X something that Microsoft have right for years now with their Designed For plans that requires you to comply to their design guides, I think the unified look and feel of Windows apps is invaluable.
The big feature for me is perhaps the new Finder, quick look and coverflow makes dealing with images so much easier, in the past I had to rely on all sorts of 3rd party apps to just browse images without pain, now Finder does it perfectly.
The biggest disappointment is Spaces. I had high hopes for it, from a UI perspective its too hard to pin applications to a given Space. I might have to stick to You Control: desktops. Will give spaces another try though.
by R.I. Pienaar | Oct 10, 2007 | Uncategorized
I previously mentioned how I am not a fan of the new iPods, I did not get a chance to see the touch then yet.
Now I have and I am sold, they are expensive but I think ultimately even without being able to get one in from a cheaper country I’ll end up getting one.
It’s really nice and fun to use, performs and responds quickly to your commands, even coverflow is usable which is what I really want from this device at the moment, a great ipod.
Obviously I would have liked it to be an open platform where I can run 3rd party applications, that would be fantastic. It is not however what I am looking for in an iPod so I am pretty happy to get my hands on one, might do so ‘morrow when I am in the city if they have stock.
The only 2 major missing features in my mind would be more storage and bluetooth, other than that I think it’s the one to have.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 20, 2007 | Uncategorized
Firstly, I am sorry I have not been posting here often, work has become incredibly busy as I recently started a big push in getting my own business off the ground which as anyone know is very time consuming.
Now about the iPods, Apple recently released all new iPods through the whole range and of course the new iPod Touch. I went to the shop to take a look at the iPods (not the touch yet) and have to say I am incredibly disappointed.
Each iPod that has a display now does video, cover flow, animations and a revamped interface, all of this comes at a cost of processing power. Unfortunately it seems the CPUs are not up to it. Consistently throughout the range the interface is sluggish and you end up waiting around for things to happen quite a bit.
The wheel on the classic is also not as precise as you’d want it. I have a old (now dead) iPod and I found it much easier on it to go direct to the song/album I wanted because the wheel was much more accurate.
There are work arounds for the sluggishness – turn off album art – but that distracts from the niceness of the whole thing.
So now I am holding out hopes for the Touch, even though it is too small to hold my music it might be the solution. Reports indicate that the screen is bad compared to the iPhone and so might not be that great.
So have we reached the point where there is no iPod worth buying? I am starting to think so ๐
by R.I. Pienaar | Feb 4, 2007 | Uncategorized
For yonks now I’ve wanted to do proper 2 way sync of my iCal on my mac and pretty much anything, it’s thus far been a virtual island and therefore useless.
I’ve it syncing with my Windows Mobile 5 devices using The Missing Sync which is ok, but not all I want yet, since I am not always by my phone. It also does not answer the sharing problem, I want to have a shared calendar with my SO and thusfar it was just not possible.
Today the fine people at Spanning Sync opened their public beta of a tool that syncs – bi-directional – Google Calendar and iCal. This means I can have my Google Calendar, share it with my SO and use Spanning Sync on both macs to sync to iCal. iCal is a much better interface to use for her than the web interface so this way everyone is happy.
Spanning Sync is still in Beta, final pricing is not finalised yet but judging by the influx of people to their systems and my own experience I’d say they hit the jackpot.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 24, 2006 | Uncategorized
DPReview has finally posted their in-depth review of the D80, in the past with my D70 I waited for their review before buying the camera because there were a lot of questions about it, with the D80 I didn’t bother waiting since the word on the ground from those in Asia who got it first were very good.
From the conclusion part of the 29 page review:
The number of cons, and the fact that there are no serious ones, is a testament to the thought and work that has gone into the D80’s design. It’s one of those cameras which just feels ‘right and sorted’ from the moment you pick it up. Things just get better the more you use the camera, you will begin to discover the usefulness of major features like the customizable automatic ISO and the subtle touches like being able to tap the DELETE button twice to delete an image
This is a very good review and they give the camera a 8.83 average out of 10 points.
Very interesting to me are the new areas they’ve started including in their reviews, these relates to RAW vs JPG performance and for me it validates what a lot of people have been saying, always shoot RAW the advantages are staggering, now it’s been quantified.
If you look at Page 19 of the review they go through a test that defines the color range captured in JPG vs. RAW – a full explanation of dynamic range is in their Glossary. The test clearly shows that in a RAW file will give you a lot more luminance out of your images than just shooting JPG would. The D80 now has a RAW+Fine JPG mode so you can get best JPG and RAW files out of it for each photo, this gives you the best of both worlds.
Another RAW vs JPG related test in the review is that of resolution, it basically just takes a group of lines on a piece of paper that comes ever closer to each other, this demonstrates when the camera just cannot tell the difference between 2 lines anymore. The D80 test is on Page 16 near the bottom. From the samples you can clearly see that by just shooting JPG you will loose a lot of finer details in some circumstances.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 20, 2006 | Uncategorized
A quick post to point out some Apple freebys that I’ve come across recently, first up is a replacement for the standard unzip tool that comes with OS X, it is called Unarchiver and adds support for a ton of new formats from inside Finder:
It is very simple to use and install – simply copy it into your Applications folder or
whereever you prefer, and then set archive filetypes to open using it. This can either
be done the usual way, or by double-clicking the icon to show The Unarchiver’s
preferences.
Supported file formats include Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, Rar, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt
and many other more or less obscure formats. Support for so many formats is
achieved by using the libxad unarchiving library.
It’s opensource and unobtrusive, there really is no reason not to use it.
Second app is a replacement for the normal Flickr Uploader, this one is called Gleam, it is still early days for it but already it shows major potential, supports Geotagging, setting custom descriptions etc before uploading and some other nifty stuff, if you’re a Flickr person and you use a Mac you should check this out.
