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Tips For Great Battery Life
Jumpy and Erratic MacBook Trackpads
Apple Mac Pro - Goes Like The Proverbial **** Off A Shovel
Snow White And Her Apple (MacBook)
Stanford To Publish Free iPhone Course On iTunes U
Power Your Gadgets with Water?
3D Games on iMac "early 2009"
'Freakishly Fast' Ruby Coming To The Mac
The Takeover Of The Apple Mac
Mazda RX-8 Controlled With iPod touch, Batman Said To Be Jealous But Coping
PC Mag: Samsung's Q2: iPod Nano Features at a Shuffle Price
Tips For Great Battery Life
MacFixIt says:
As the world of personal electronics grows increasingly mobile, issues surrounding battery life, lifespan, and consumption are becoming hot topics for users and manufacturers alike. Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are the standard power source for many of our favorite Apple products: portable notebooks, iPods, and iPhones. Although at some point all rechargeable lithium ion batteries will fail, there are some tips and practices that can help extend the life of one of the most valuable components of your mobile experience.
THe article has sections of tips for prolonging battery life with iPods, iPhones, and notebooks.
You can check it out at:
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20090402092253299
Jumpy and Erratic MacBook Trackpads
MacFixIt reports:
Apple has gone through great lengths to be at the cutting edge in terms of input devices, particularly with its laptops. With the MacBook, Apple introduced and evolved the multitouch capabilities and has invested heavily in research and development to ensure the feel and functionality are as flawless as possible. For the majority of people, this effort has paid off; however, for some, there reports or erratic trackpad behavior.....
For a full discussion of the topic and suggested fixes and workarounds, visit:
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=2009040211463661
Apple Mac Pro - Goes Like The Proverbial **** Off A Shovel
The Register's Stephen Dean reports:
It's expensive, but the Mac Pro's price is justified by the raw power of the Xeon processor.
The recent updates to Apple s iMac and Mac Mini desktop systems rather suggested that the company was treading water. Both machines sported new graphics chips and faster system buses, but their processor speeds had barely changed and there was a steady trend towards higher prices that suggested Apple was planning to weather the recession by padding its profit margins as much as possible.
The profit margin on the new Mac Pro can't be that bad either, but Apple's early adoption of Intel s latest quad-core, 64-bit Nehalem Xeon 5500 processor does represent a significant step forward for a machine that s only had one other upgrade since its launch back in 2006....uniquely in the Mac range, the Mac Pro also has three PCI Express slots that can be used to upgrade the system - two PCIe x16 and one PCIe x4 - as well as three additional 3.5in drive bays for adding extra storage....
We have to admit that we were rather impressed that the machine didn t crash when we accidentally opened up the wrong drive bay and pulled out the hard disk by mistake. We just slotted the disk back into place and the machine seemed to carry on without a hiccup.
[Editor's note: That's actualy an old trick with Macs. I recall also being rather impressed when one of my kids who was running an old Mac LC 520 at the time yanked the hard drive out when the machine was running and connected to the Internet without bothering to even log off, performed the task the HD was needed for elsewhere, then returned and stuffed the drive back into its bay, with nary a hiccup from the forgiving LC]
For the full review visit here:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/04/02/review_desktop_mac_apple_mac_pro/
Snow White And Her Apple (MacBook)
CNET's John Chan says:
In what could possibly be the coolest MacBook cover ever, Flickr user LubeckerJung put a picture of Snow White holding the Apple logo. For those not familiar with this fairy tale, Snow White bites into a poisoned apple and falls into a coma, awakened only by some prince later on. The one thing that would make this mod even better was if she was standing on the right, so the bite would be on the correct side......
You can check it out at:
http://tinyurl.com/d7gtze
Stanford To Publish Free iPhone Course On iTunes U
Appleinsider's Prince McLean reports:
Stanford University will be publishing a video podcasts and slides from its popular "iPhone Application Programming" course on iTunes U for free to the general public, beginning this week.
"There's a lot of interest in the iPhone," said Brent Izutsu, Stanford's project manager for Stanford on iTunes U. "This course provides an excellent opportunity for us to show the breadth and depth of our curriculum and the innovation of our students."
....Students taking the class will also need an Intel Mac and will probably want an iPhone....
For the full report visit here:
http://tinyurl.com/cbwrno
Power Your Gadgets with Water?
Wired's Charlie Sorrel reports:
Hook the Self Generator" up to an available faucet and the water will turn a turbine and generate enough electricity to power an electric toothbrush, a shaver or a hair dryer. That s the theory, at least. In practice, we doubt that Jin Woo Han s concept design would do anything more than trickle-charge (sorry) the most undemanding of gadgets.....
You can check it out at:
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/04/power-your-gadg.html
3D Games on iMac "early 2009"
Barefeats' rob-ART morgan reports:
Though we have the iMac with the CTO Radeon HD 4850 on order, we decided to post some 3D Game results for the iMac 3.06GHz with GeForce 130 GT to appease the restless natives.
We wanted to compare it to older iMacs as well as certain Mac Pro combos. Because of that, we ran a mix of old and new games at both 1920x1200 and 1280x800. Here's what we have so far...
Remember when the iMac was laughable as a game platform? Nobody is laughing any more......
You can check it out at:
http://www.barefeats.com/imac09.html
'Freakishly Fast' Ruby Coming To The Mac
The Register's Rik Myslewski reports:
Mac developers intrigued by Ruby's ease of use and simple maintainability but deterred by its turgid performance will be happy to hear that MacRuby 0.5 - aka its "experimental branch" - is remarkably snappy.
Exactly how snappy is remarkably snappy? A suite of low-level benchmark tests recently performed by Antonio Cangiano of Zen and the Art of Programming shows MacRuby 0.5 to be on average just under three times as fast as Ruby 1.9.1, with some operations coming in at nearly eight times faster.....
For the full report visit here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/02/macruby_0_5/
The Takeover Of The Apple Mac
The University of Otago Daily Times' Emily Menkes reports:
Looking around the library it is more and more apparent that Apple Macintosh computers are becoming eerily common.
PCs are still the most common student laptop, and the university's predominant operating system.
But the ratio between PC and Macs is rapidly closing, with Macs being the fastest rising brand of computers, according to influential US technology journalist Glenn Derene.
I have a Mac. And I love it. I didn't jump on the bandwagon with this though; my family brought me up on them, much to my distaste at the time. I hated them.....
For the full commentary visit here:
http://www.odt.co.nz/on-campus/university-otago/50087/the-takeover-apple-mac
Mazda RX-8 Controlled With iPod touch, Batman Said To Be Jealous But Coping
Engadget's Ross Miller says:
We've seen some interesting ways people have tried to meld iPhone with car, but this one might top them all. Meet Jon's Mazda RX-8, controllable from anywhere in the world using an iPod touch over WiFi. As demonstrated on video, his custom web app can be used to lock and unlock the doors, start and stop the engine, and open the trunk. A telemetry window provides data such as fuel level, battery voltage, RPM, speed, and temperatures. It's even got a GPS so you can track the car's wherabouts with Google Maps. All of this is accomplished with computer hidden in the trunk, hooked up to the on-board diagnostics, and equipped with a 3G modem to stay constantly connected to the interwebs......
For the full report visit here:
http://tinyurl.com/cjvg8b
PC Mag: Samsung's Q2: iPod Nano Features at a Shuffle Price
At Samsung's annual spring showcase of its upcoming line-up, the company showed off three players. One of them, the P3, was announced at CES (look for our review next week here on PCMag.com); the other two, the Q2 and U5, were on display for the first time.
The most remarkable facet of the Q2 is its price: $99.99 buys you 8GB of storage, with a screen. That's double the storage of a $79 iPod shuffle, with a screen to boot.
To read more, go to:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2344235,00.asp
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