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.
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.
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.
Apple brought out there updated iLife Suite – the last one came part of OS X (leopard) 10.5 Series and this comprises of:
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.
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:
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.
When I first got the mac, I had loaded a lot of things on there and when it started to go wrong, I just assumed that I had some crap that was causing the problem, so I wiped the machine but choose to retain the user settings. Upon reboot I had everything more or less as I left it. After another month or so when the machine was getting real bad, i choose once again to wipe it but this time format the HD and start from scratch – this was we could not blame the programs or add-ins but we could point the finger at the OS.
One of the problems that was common was randomly on the Dock when you opened a folder which had Fan View it is supposted to spring open as so:
Now this could work for weeks on end but then one day it would go – the symptoms were the fan View would be corrupted and the Dock would be gone with just the Icons Floating on nothing.
I had spoken and posted about this to various mac users and they somehow never had this problem. As I suggested I did a complete wipe and only installed the programs I needed and made sure any hacks installed were limited to just what was required to make movies work etc. One thing I have always blamed – was iChat, how this could corrupt the Dock is anybody guess but it seemed to me that this always seemed to be the case. I am now running the latest 10.5.3 Beta to see if this fixes the problem – it is defiantly the OS that’s at fault no matter what the MacHeads say.
As a Avid PC User for most of my life, Apple seemed to me to be nothing special – after all, what can you do on an Apple that you cannot do on a PC? To answer this question is nothing but once you use an Apple on a daily Basis – you start to see the little things that make life easier.
Space’s for example allow Multi Screen and more productivity – Dual Screen never really worked for me so switching 4 x 24″ Screen (1920×1200) is really a godsend and less desktop space required for monitors.
Active Spell checker across any application is something that should be included on all Operating Systems not just Firefox on the PC. Simple Install of Applications by way of dragging and dropping – who needs the registry anyhow?
Widgets I have seen many Times, Vista chooses to have a Sidebar which is good as they are visible all the time but this takes up space on your desktop while Apple uses a button to show the widgets, after all yo do not wish to look at them all the time – they are just for Info.
A key to show all the apps running or even move them all out of the way or what about select some text and it speaks it – now thats handy for everybody and not just the Visually impaired. There is many more to name but all I can say is if you use a mac on a daily basis, it just works and well worth the buy.
