With the arrival of the new Iron Man 2 trailer, available on Apple’s lovely little site, it’s taken me over an hour to download the 720P version. It comes in a lowbie 110MB, yet I’m currently downloading at 30k/sec. Lovely. And here I thought they used Akamai for some distribution. Clearly not! Even other movies take ages. Uncool! Either it’s something to do with Quicktime & the servers it chooses, or Apple just plain fails at bandwidth.
Tag Archive for 'apple'
I’m not sure why I haven’t chimed in on this before, but 1Password is a must have for OSX. Version 3 is newly released (earlier this month) and finally has Firefox integration — this solves so many problems, especially for those of us who prefer Firefox over Safari.
Also, if you have an iPhone, do a search for 1Password and grab the app — it’s free until Dec 1. All hail technology.
A developer wrote a rather nice and well thought complaint/plea to Steve Jobs of Apple. Jobs’ response just about made my day.
Switching applications is easily enough done on OSX. Command-Tab. Except if you are like me, you have lots of applications running, each with tabs or individual windows inherent to a particular process.
Well, there’s a handy little utility out there called Witch. It’s far more granular by design as it gives you much more control over your window swapping needs.
In the above screenshot you can see how each application is listed, including each sub window that said application may have. While Expose can do this too, I just find Witch easier for me being such a heavy keyboard user. It’s cheap at 10 bucks too! Not to mention you can close minimized windows without bringing them to focus. That alone makes me a happy user. For those feeling more adventurous with keyboard short cuts, Witch includes a boat load of other highly configurable methods/options too. Well worth the investment!
I wrote about Microsoft’s super secret tablet device, named Courier, a little while back. Gizmodo has some really good screenshots outlining the user interface design. Hot damn, I have to say this is looking better all the time.
Laptops are great but the dependance on what software you have, and your personal workflow, influence just how well you use it. I’m not talking about surfing the web or updating your social networking sites. I spend an awful amount of time, probably too much, in searching out new software to make my life easier. It’s a dangerous game in that you can fall pray to never using what you have effectively.
A nagging problem for me over the last few years has been the need for storing and referencing vast amounts of research material. I use a combination of text notes for fast, easy indexing and searching. Evernote covers my screenshot needs from saving emails to forum threads worth a read later, and I get Evernote’s awesome ability to search those images as text! But in the end I’m still stuck with a clunky ol’ keyboard, and two different methods of handling two different types of media.
These rumoured tablets/booklets could be the missing link in computing. Apple tried it once-upon-a-time with the Apple Newton (I still think it was a beautiful device). But given the power of today’s mobile chips, network infrastructure, software, and materials, a proper tablet would be a godsend. We’ll see what both Microsoft and Apple deliver soon enough.
Plus I would slap a Don’t Panic sticker on that so fast. 
Talk about annoying.
iTunes likes to update, at seemingly random intervals, the same bit of software for my iPhone. As an example, I am positive I have updated this one particular app three times in the last week. To make matters complicated, my iPhone then decides to pick its own updates, all of which are mutually exclusive to its desktop overlord (iTunes). This repetition is getting troublesome and irksome.
Fooie.
set phasers to awesome
Ever watched Star Trek?
Ever watched Star Trek The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine?
Ever notice those data pads?
Ever notice how the pads aren’t used for anything overly excessive except for informational/planning actions?
Ever notice how if the characters wanted to do something of value, a pad may have been used, but ultimately the hard work was done through a terminal, or interfacing with the Computer, there by allowing for multitasking and more difficult/complex computing to be accomplished?
Congratulations. You just realized what they were using was an iPad in conjunction with a workstation/desktop.
TEH FUTURE IS NOW. etc.
My point is, the iPad is taking a serious amount of slag from people, but ultimately the apps, the creativity/imagination/ingenuity will make (or break) the iPad. Those apps, the ones we HAVEN’T yet seen, will have a major impact on computing. Just you watch and wait.