iWork.com - Something New?

This sounds good. So I can actually use those beautiful apps to compose my documents and spreadsheets without actually buying a Mac. What a great idea!

Well, it turns out much to my disappointment. That's all it is. A great idea.In fact, you still need to buy a Mac, a copy of iWorks and the only thing you can do is share documents online.

Still, I guess it does have it's uses in the 'business world'. I mean, once you've composed your beautiful presentation on Keynote, instilled into your head that your Steve Jobs and honed his presentation quirks and skills, you can just use a PC to view keynote files online without using a Mac. Or do I still need a Mac for that?

Oh dear! So animations in Keynote can't be viewed on iWork.com. I'm suddenly having trouble figuring out what on earth is the purpose of iWork? Sharing files online is... what? Something new?

The Problem with Linux today - A Modern Tragedy.

Let's face it, the computer has now become a lifestyle. Take the recent explosion of netbooks.

Netbooks are for women who like to type a blog, email or upload photos on their dainty computer and shove it into their ever increasing size handbags.

Netbooks are for men who just want to own a new toy and challenge themselves to see if they can do exactly what they can do on their normal laptops, but on tiny keyboards and underpowered chipsets.

Netbooks are for students who like to believe they need a computer to type notes on the go, but secretly they are buying one because their best friend announced they got one in pink through their twitter account. I mean, who is going to bring their old Dell laptop if everyone is using a netbook?

So where does Linux fit into all of this? It doesn't. That's the problem.

Sony Vaio Type P - Sony's New Netbook computer.

So Sony has finally released a netbook to the public. Yet time and time again, I can't help but think that Sony just loses the plot.

They lost the plot with the PS3 when they made it so expensive. When it was launched people didn't flock to it even when it was launched in better economic surroundings. Now, with the economy gloom looming over everyone, it's just not plausible to buy a PS3.

Same principle is applied to their new netbooks. Their netbook type P is equipped with a slow Atom 1.33ghz processor and although it does come with a decent 2gb of ram, they decided to just to use Vista instead of XP. It's like putting a burger into a chocolate cake. It's edible, but the burger belongs in a bun.

Netbooks are for the budget conscious! No one actually does any serious work on them! They are just for fun! I'm definitely not going to buy.....


What the devil?! I'm so getting one. Look how small and thin it is! It looks so cool. I guess Sony do know what they are doing. Now I know why so many people buy Apple Macs...

Apple iWork 09 - Coming Soon.

I am very much looking forward to Apple's latest offering. I absolutely abore office work. Yet Apple iWork 08 seemed to make everything I do look good and the experience was such a good one that I nearly bought an iMac.

Well, nearly that is. For one, it just had too many flaws that I'm just not happy with. The spreadsheet while absolutely simple and beautiful but it was terrible when managing medium sized spreadsheets. What's worse is the fact that it just simply didn't open excel spreadsheets properly. Simple ones are fine, but the ones where invoices and macros are involved and it chokes and splutters.

Still, these must be issues that other users have faced and now with the new iWork 09 coming out soon, I hope these problems are addressed. I just don't want to buy an Apple Mac and have to use Microsoft Office for it. Not that I don't like it, but a PC can do that cheaply.

Mighty Mouse - Mac Users Love to Hate it.

The mighty mouse is one of the most beautiful looking mouse in the world. Mac users must be salivating all over it while admiring it's smooth contours. They might even be chuckling to themselves when they view it from the side.

Oh look, the shape actually resembles a mouse. How clever...

Secretly, they are cursing it. There are so many problems with it LEFT, RIGHT and CENTER!

LEFT - Mouse Cursor jumps to the upper left side of the screen.
RIGHT - The right click behaves like the left click.
CENTER - The little nub fails to scroll downwards.

Anyway, here are some suggestions on how to resolve these issues.

LEFT - If updating OSX doesn't work, then table lamps are the culprit.
RIGHT - Burn it! Smash it! Detonate it with TNT! I'm jesting. Buy a PC mouse or use CTRL and the Left Click button.
CENTER - Turn it upside down. Move the nub in all directions while apply firm pressure and blow. This actually works!

10.5.6 Update

Recently at work there was trouble updating the mac. It kept rebooting the machine. The culprit was the 10.5.6 update. So checking the websites revealed that there was a problem with certain macs and there was a complicated fix for it.

Considering the macs are for users with not much computing expertise, it was a nightmare to follow the instructions. What was even more surprising was the fact that the mac at work was the ever popular aluminum imac. What certain macs are they talking about? Are there so many different versions of the aluminum mac?

I was a little bit surprised and disappointed. After all I've never had problems updating the the regular microsoft updates on the PC and the pc has many different spec and components that the average user doesn't even care about. Even with the updates such as anti virus and firewall which sometimes seem to hang in midstream update, sometimes you just cross your fingers and do it again and it works.

What is going on with world! Isn't there a computer that just works!! Linux pushers, don't even think about it! I'm not going to wait for something to compile or spend futile hours hunting for drivers.

Mac - Fantasy or Reality?

So, I have finally given back the mac that I had been using and now I am using the normal desktop pc at work. How was the experience? It was absolutely brilliant and absolutely rubbish.

The absolutely brilliant things were the incredibly impressive fast boot up, the dashboard with the very very useful snippet utility, the coverflow was actually incredibly useful, the rock solid 'it's not going to crash' feeling, the different but clean look compared to the droll of windows, the ease in outputting most things to PDF without a hitch or crash. Such bliss it was.

The absolute rubbish was the fact that setting up mail accounts was infuriating as the setup procedures were all geared towards PC, so I had to guess which jargon and terms referred to what, which was a security nightmare. Not to mention the times where it seemed like it was checking the mail forever when other times it was a snap.

Then there were the printer drivers that were OSX compatible but had trivial menus in order to get to the required printer setting e.g. color and mono. Laser printers were no problem, but any other printer and you lose functions such as checking how much ink was left and other features.

Also some of the fonts didn't correspond to the PC and some of the web pages didn't look the same as on a PC and sometimes the website pages wouldn't even open because it needed iexplorer. Not to mention the nagging feeling, do I need to open it on the PC just to see if it's going to look ok?

Files that were saved wouldn't open and when they did open, they didn't look right and then there was the utter nonsense when OSX decides to write hidden junk or temp files to your USB when you transfer files.

Critical online apps refused to run on a mac even when using the recommended alternative browser, especially when filling in online data forms where some fields would simply disappear or confirmation buttons would become blank for no reason.

Open source software that had to be compiled and took hours and looked horrible, where as on the PC it was just a simple setup.exe file.

I can see myself using it at home for personal use, but for business that deals with anything financial or international, it's a non-starter.

Still, I want to buy one, and the price is not as expensive as everyone makes it out to be. However, I'm stumbling as it just feels like I'm paying extra for the brand name when currently I can get away with those cheap deals on PC's. Besides, nobody pays RRP for PC's do they?

Critical Update - Annoying and necessary.

I hate those two words. Annoying and necessary. So with recent spates about critical security updates necessary on Internet Explorer your forced to do two things.

One is to update straight away, because it's so criitcal that if you don't, any second from now until you update something very bad will happen. When you do update you find that the update either crashes something or won't install.

Two is to wait until other people update and to see if they report any problems. But while you wait, every second from now until you update something very bad will happen.

So you think Internet Explorer is unsafe and you want me to get a Mac and use Firefox

So your net savvy, your 'puter savvy. You run Firefox with all the security addons that you can find and yet still have your email account compromised. Instead, your grandmother, your father, your mother, your boss and the place you work is still running the internet explorer 6 and the only complaint that they have is that they don't know what to do with a pdf file.

70 percent, 60 percent, 50 percent, which ever one you take show that internet explorer has the largest market share. Yet, I find that the only people who complain about security are developers who understandly are forced to rewrite their sites so they can run on iexplorer and firefox/camino/opera and others because they want to boast that they are the chosen ones.

I happen to agree that it would be better for Microsoft to get with the program when it comes to web standards, and I agree to a certain extent that Firefox is safer than Internet Explorer.

But what I want to know is this, if Internet Explorer is so unsafe, why do you know more people who use it than those people who use other web browsers? I simply find it hard to believe that it's because it's pre-installed and that people are not computer savvy, or people don't like change or are used to something. It's not a switch to a mac campaign, after all it's free.

If users are smart enough to be able to download music programs or accounting programs, they are smart enough to download an alternative browser. Why is it that other browsers have such a smaller number of users.

It's all about market share. Just big enough to be effective and small enough not to attract too much secuirty attention. Just like the mac. Though, just for the sake of argument, I'd be interested to know if there are more Wordpad users than there are Word users.

Mac Dashboard - Snippets of information.

Mac Dashboard - Snippets of information.

I have always loved downloading utilities to make the daily tasks more bearable and to find ways to do those boring desk work.

For example, using a database program to construct a Fax template where I just select the clients and related responses without typing anything. That's just awesome.

Also, little things like downloading a program to check the weather, the world time, rss, delivery etc. The usual things.

Recently, having had to use a Mac for work, there is this clever feature on Safari where you can take snippets off your websites and place it on your desktop or dashboard. What a clever idea. So, rather than downloading the various programs, you can just go to your favorite website, snip the bits that are regularly updated and then put them on your desktop or dashboard. What a clever idea!

Of course there are similar alternatives on the PC, but they are certainly not as fast or as simple or as safe as the one built into the web browser of the Mac. Of course this alone, won't make me switch, well, not yet, but it's damn clever. The only thing is, my dashboard is now cluttered with these snippets and I don't have enough room.