Technology Matters
Macintosh
My First Visit to an Apple Store
Jul 23rd
Today I went to Meadow Hall Centre which is shopping centre based in Sheffield and I spotted they had one of these so called “Apple Stores” – so I ventured in. The Store reminded me of a mobile phone store with products laid out on tables, chained to the desk and people playing with them with the odd person walking around asking if you wanted any help. This would be a good time for me to have a play with all the apple products and see them in the flesh. Would I pull my wallet out and by something or would I walk away laughing to myself that people pay so much for these things?
Valve Brings Steam Service to Mac
Mar 8th
It’s officially official: Valve will bring its Steam online distribution service and titles from its massive library of hit games to the Mac this April, the company confirmed Monday.
The successful content-delivery service will bring Valve titles like Left 4 Dead and the upcoming Portal 2, as well as games from other publishers, to Apple computers for the first time.
The move was telegraphed last week in a series of teaser posters that mashed characters from Valve games into retro Apple ads. Dan Connors, CEO of Telltale Games, called Apple and Steam a natural fit.
“If there’s anything like iTunes on the PC right now for games, it’s Steam,” Connors said. “So you’ve got two great leaders in digital distribution coming together.”
CamTwist – Version 2 is out
May 15th
Camtwist Verion 2 has finally hit the streets – Higher resolutions suppotted and a host of new features – This is MAC Only and basically gives you multiple effects as a virtual Camera. Example include having your Video, A chat bx underneat and the current iTunes song playing.
iStopMotion2 – Boinx Software
Apr 4th
Remember how you watched, fascinated, when King Kong climb the Empire State building? When Luke Skywalker rode the ice beasts? When Wallace and Gromit hunted down the Were-Rabbit? For centuries now, stop motion animation has made the fantasies of film makers come true.
It’s simple to use, it’s deceptively powerful, and it’s tremendous fun. It brings purpose to the digital lifestyle, making it more than a marketing phrase for Apple.
Mac inability to see Windows Shares.
Mar 14th
I am running Mac OS X 10.5. 6 and through the long history of the updates from 10.5.0 till now there has been a problem with seeing Windows Shares on the Mac Finder. The way it should work is simple enough, you open a window showing your drives and listed right there would be all the shares it has found but the list remain empty meaning you have to do this the hard way.
What were they thinking when they wrote this?
Feb 5th
While I am a proud owner of a iMac 24″ with all the trimming – I have come across 3 ‘features’ that in my eyes are plain stupid on the OS X Platform. Remember that I have various machines running XP, Vista, Ubuntu – so I am not a die hard Apple fanatic that will defend it no matter what, its good but not perfect.
iLife '09 – a quick review
Jan 31st
Apple brought out there updated iLife Suite – the last one came part of OS X (leopard) 10.5 Series and this comprises of:
- iPhoto
- iMovie
- Garageband
- iWeb
- iDVD
Apple ripoff pricing
Jan 27th
Ilife 09 on the apple store USA comes in at $79 but if you now convert across to UK prices – that £69. I used XE to see how much it really is – it comes out as £56 and let us not forget that shipping is added anyhow on top of those prices. The only thing I can think of is Taxes – maybe it is more to sell to UK?
The problem of swapping the $ sign for the £ sign happens way too much though – making the price of the item double the price, they wonder why people torrent? well this is maybe one of the reasons.
More Effect for iChat & PhotoBooth (MAC)
Dec 27th
The Mac comes with a program called Photobooth and this has the ability to add effects to shots taken from the webcam:
CatEye
You can download these effects (Free) from:
10.5.3 Is out for OS X
May 31st
I have been testing 10.5.3 for some time now via the Developers Program and was keen that it fixed a lot of the problems I was having with the Stock 10.5.2. I need to add that so far 10.5.x was not looking good for me and had a lot of rough edges that needed sorting out.
I know from my daily usage that 10.5.3 has fixed a lot of the memory issues, the dock Issue and countless more, only now I consider that Leopard is on the right tracks to been a quality Apple Product as Tiger was. I have also downloaded the update for the hackintosh (my Dell GX620) and this went on fine after I followed the RTF document that came with it – it also came down pretty fast considering it was a torrent. I was half expecting it not to come back up but it did after a 2nd reboot. I had on hand the fixed Drivers for the Intel GMA950 and sure enough the Resolution was forced back to 1024×768 – soon fixed by injecting the Kext.
