A relative of mine recently got a fairly sophisticated digital camera and sought my counsel on what sort of photo correction and image editing software to use. He’s been getting along with the version of iPhoto that OS 10.4 installed on his G5 iMac, but he’s not finding it to be quite adequate for the [...]
For the most part, I remain very satisfied with the performance of most tasks I perform on my middle-aged 1.33 GHz 17-inch PowerBook G4, which I bought back in 2006. But not when it comes to dictation. Interestingly, the most dramatic performance boost I’ve realized transitioning from PowerPC to Intel Core 2 Duo is with [...]
After two months of getting configured and acquainted, I’m pretty much comfortably settled in with my first Intel Mac — a little jewel of a 13″ unibody MacBook — and thus far it’s pretty much all good.
It’s been an adjustment going down from the 17″ display on my previous workhorse system, a 1.33 GHz PowerBook, [...]
At my desktop workstation I use an external keyboard and mouse with my Mac notebooks, and one keyboard function I really miss when I use them in actual hands-on laptop mode is the freestanding keyboard’s dedicated Forward Delete key. It’s something I’m accustomed to having, use frequently, and find annoying when it’s not available.
Apple actually [...]
Last weekend, New York Times’ Virginia Heffernanhit a resonant chord with me in a wonderfully crafted piece eloquently relating why she hated the iPhone experience so much she returned her iPhone to AT&T, replacing it with a BlackBerry.
The nexus of Ms. Heffernan’s iPhone discontent was mainly an issue that I can identify with — her [...]
It seems that some new iPhone games in the App Store have the British anti-gun lobby’s knickers in a knot.
Macworld UK’s Nick Spence says reports in British newspapers claim the series of iPhone and iPod touch apps developed by the French firm Damabia, such as Boom!BOOM! Shotgun Pro, Boom!BOOM! Shotgun Free, Bang!BANG!, Bang!BANG! OG Edition [...]
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer set the proverbial cat among the pigeons last week with his contention at the McGraw-Hill Companies’ Media Summit in New York that Mac buyers pay a $500 price premium for merely a designer logo.
“Apple gained about one point, but now I think the tide has really turned back the other direction,” [...]
Sometimes it’s the little things that make your day go more smoothly. One such thing is the cool and elegant freeware utility, Search It.
With Search It installed, when you press a hot key a simple search field pops up (sort of the way the Quicksilver dialog works).
To look something up on the web, instead of [...]
Earlier I referenced a report by Australian news site Smarthouse’s David Richards saying Apple is close to launching a touchscreen “netbook type” computer according to unnamed Asian sources.
Richards is now citing sources at Korean OEM components supplier LG who tell him not only will Apple soon launch new OLED notebooks and flat panel monitors but [...]
Software innovations are often over-hyped, so I approached the Opera Turbo Labs preview version of the Opera 10 browser with — how shall I say? — hopeful skepticism. As one who has suffered (not too strong a word) with a slow rural dial up Internet connection for the past 12 years, I’m eager to embrace [...]
I’m a fan of automobile-computer analogies, and Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu came up with a dandy in a research note last week, noting that “sources” in Apple’s distribution channels are seeing a “stronger-than-expected reception” to new Mac desktop computers, especially the Mac minis announced a couple of weeks ago. “To us,” Wu wrote, “the [...]
An interesting bit of scuttlebutt from Australian news site Smarthouse’s David Richards says Apple is close to launching a touchscreen “netbook type” computer according to new sources in Asia, which is a pretty widely-disseminated rumor this week. But what I hadn’t got wind of before is Richards’ report that Apple has been exploring the use [...]
Our old 700 MHz iBook G3 passed away quietly on Saturday evening. My wife had used it to check her email that morning, and all had seemed well, but when she tried to wake it for a late-night check just before retiring, it refused to respond.
Over the next several hours I tried every method of [...]
Many Mac experts recommend purchasing the AppleCare Protection Plan extended warranty — particularly for laptop users, arguing there are just too many things that can go wrong and that replacing notebooks and their parts can be very expensive. But is it really worth it?
I’ve heard that same argument advocating the purchase of AppleCare for Mac [...]
Mozilla recently released Thunderbird 3 Beta 2, another stop along the road to the final release of Thunderbird 3.
Thunderbird is a full-featured, open-source email client originally based on the old Mozilla suite browser’s Mail module, which in turn derived from the ancient Netscape Communicator Messenger module.
I’ve never been a particularly big Thunderbird fan, but [...]
Last month, reinstalling Leopard on my G4 PowerBook broke Photoshop Elements 6, and one reason I’ve been able to procrastinate about the necessary application reinstall (there oughta be a better way, Adobe — nothing else broke) is that Pixelmator is getting so darned good that I haven’t really needed Elements for anything yet.
PSE 6 still [...]
While my new unibody MacBook is pretty state-of-the-art, and indeed the most contemporaneously avant garde computer I’ve ever owned, I’m still a fan of good older hardware and getting a lot of useful work out of my two nine-year-old Pismo PowerBooks.
The Pismo, for a variety of reasons, has proved an extraordinarily long-lived machine in terms [...]
A Mac writer colleague and I have been engaged in a friendly debate for the past several months over whether the 13″ unibody MacBook is a worthy successor to the 12″ PowerBook as a serious road warrior machine. My friend is not anti-unibody by any means — he has a uni MacBook Pro — but [...]
Apple computers have frequently been compared to Volvo automobiles, more due to the perceived political and ideological leanings of a prominent cohort of their respective users (ie: urban liberals) rather than commonality of design and engineering philosophy. Indeed, while Apple has tended to be a design trendsetter, hanging out on the bleeding edge of the [...]
DEVONtechnologies this week released the second public betas of their new DEVONthink and DEVONnote information manager applications, and I downloaded Professional Office Version 2 to take a looksee. Already one a powerful productivity tool for OS X, this major update adds even more convenience, functionality and versatility to DEVONthink Pro Office.
To recap a bit, DEVONtechnologies [...]
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