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Sync data with Macs, iPhones Using Google
He's Seen The Future, And It's SSD
A Writer Looks for the Right Word Processor (and Fails to Find It)
Buying a Mac for Less and Spreading Apple Joy
Another Ultrathin MacBook Air Clone Surfaces In China
Penguin's Incredible Vision of Books on the iPad Doesn't Look Anything Like Books
How Penguin Will Reinvent Books With iPad
Taiwan-Based Component Makers Doubt iPad Production Delay Rumors
MacBook Pro Running Low On RAM? Change Energy Settings
Do You Need To Run Windows Software On Your Mac?
How to Build a Kid's Desktop PC
The Tech Night Owl: Now It's Inevitable: Flash is Dying!
Sync data with Macs, iPhones Using Google
Macworld's Joe Kissell says:
If you have two or more Macs, or an iPhone or iPod touch, you ll undoubtedly want to keep your contacts and calendars on all your devices in sync. One way to do so is to use Apple s MobileMe service ($99 a year for individuals; $149 for the five-user Family Pack)....
But what if you don t want to pay for MobileMe, or if you simply prefer using the free Google Contacts and Google Calendars (both accessible from any Gmail account)? Google lets your iPhone or iPod touch connect to your Gmail account (either with a gmail.com address, or an address at your own domain via Google Apps) using Exchange ActiveSync, which provides over-the-air push e-mail, contact, and calendar data, just as MobileMe does....
To read more, click here.
http://bit.ly/bmT3F3
He's Seen The Future, And It's SSD
TUAW's David Winograd says that on the Macworld show floor, he didn't really see one specific product that blew him away, but was able to identify what he thinks is the next big concept that's going to not only blow all of us away -- the SSD (solid state drive), which he thinks is almost ready for prime time.
David notes that Other World Computing's new Mercury Extreme Enterprise SSD drives start at US $229 for 50 GB and top out at 200 GB for $779.95, and that his jaw dropped when one of OWC's demo Macbook Pros booted up and started running applications in 32 seconds while a HDD equipped Macbook Pro took at least three times as long to accomplish the same thing.
For the full commentary visit here:
http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/03/i-have-seen-the-future-and-its-ssd/
A Writer Looks for the Right Word Processor (and Fails to Find It)
Low End Mac's Jason Walsh says:
Words are my life.
They are, of course, the way I make my living, but they mean so much more to me than that....
Language, with all of its complexities and contradictions, is truly a thing of beauty. It is not just the means by which we express ourselves; it also has a palpable effect on our thinking.
Consider the term word processor - only an engineer could have come up with such an appalling appellation. I don't want to process words, I want to write them down, one after the other, in things called sentences. Yes, I greatly appreciate the ability to edit as I work, to correct typos and move entire paragraphs around, but processing sounds too much like what goes on in sausage factories for my liking.
I'm not precious about it. After all, I'm a mere journalist, not a lofty writer, but there's more to words than processing. Still, forget about the nomenclature for now - there is a more pressing matter to think about: Which word processor should I use?....
Jason says he tends to be irritated with ridiculous features that he has no use for, mainly wanting word count, a blank page, and some very basic formatting options. He's tried Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, and NeoOffice, ClarisWorksback in the day,Nisus Writer in many of its manifestations, Bean, Jer's Novel Writer, LightWayText, Mariner Write, Mellel, Scrivener, Ulysses, WriteRoom, even OmmWriter - which plays ambient music as you type, and finds them all wanting in various ways. He wrote the column in Google Docs.
[Editor's suggestion: Tex Edit Plus - a fast and usefully-featured styled text editor that isn't limited to monospaced fonts. Jason might also find it useful to check out Wikipedia's Comparison Of Word Processors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparisonof_word_processors Ed.]
For the full commentary visit here:
http://lowendmac.com/ed/walsh/10jw/mac-word-processing.html
Buying a Mac for Less and Spreading Apple Joy
Low End Mac's Dan Bashur says most of us in the Apple community have always understood that Macs hold their value and generally outlast PCs, and while no computer is immune to failures and manufacturing defects, modern Macs have something that their PC counterparts do not - special attention to aesthetics, software interface, and superior engineering across the board, from case to the OS to the last tiny screw used.
So what does that mean to the typical PC consumer who is thinking about switching and wants to try a Mac, but is used to cheap, disposable PC pricing? Dan asks and answers that there are affordable Mac options out there, especially on eBay where he just bought a batch of five 14" G4 iBooks for just over $1,100, which worked out to a PC netbook-esque sub-$300 each even after maxing out ther RAM (1.5 GB) and buying original 65W Apple power supplies.
Comparing the 14" 1.42 GHz iBook with new netbooks in the same $300 price range, and you have a machine that can Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard," has an adequate 14" 1024 x 768 screen, 1.5 GB of RAM, Core Image capable Radeon 9550 graphics, Bluetooth, a scrolling trackpad, a 60 GB hard drive, and AirPort Extreme, as opposed to a 10" Intel Atom 1.6 GHz netbook with lame old Windows XP, a shrunken keyboard, 1 GB of RAM, poky integrated graphics, and a 1024 x 600 screen.
Dan's proved once again that the best cheap PC alternative is often a used or refurbished older Mac.
For the full commentary visit here:
http://lowendmac.com/ed/bashur/10db/buy-a-mac-for-less.html
Another Ultrathin MacBook Air Clone Surfaces In China
Chinese Tech site M.I.C. reports that thin and cheap laptops are getting more common in Shenzhen s knock-off markets, and reviews another great MacBook Air knockoff that looks like the MSI X340 and it may be as thin as the MacBook Air and is a 13-inch ULV based system.
Sick of Atom netbooks with low performance on gaming and watching HD movies? This laptop is equipped with 1.2GHz Intel ultra low voltage (ULV) processor and 1080p high definition video (including HDMI out) - a 13-inch laptop that weighs just 3 pounds with its 4-cell battery and comes with 1GB of RAM, 160GB or 250GB hard drive, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, 3 USB ports, VGA & HDMI out, LAN, SD-card slot and audio in/out in a slightly thicker form factor than the MacBook Air, but it's got Apple's look and feel so who cares? On the downside, the reviewer says the keyboard is mediocre and pretty ugly in comparing with the chiclet keyboard on MacBooks but thinks PC users won't mind, and at $2400 RMB (about $350) there have to be some compromises.
For the full review visit here:
http://micgadget.com/2162/another-ultrathin-macbook-air-clone/
Penguin's Incredible Vision of Books on the iPad Doesn't Look Anything Like Books
Gizmodo's Matt Buchanan says:
The ePub format that'll be the vessel of choice for ebooks sold in the iBooks store is designed to translate traditional books to a digital format. Which is why, Penguin Books CEO John Makinson says that "for the time being at least we'll be creating a lot of our digital content as applications for sales in app stores in HTML, rather than as ebooks. The definition of a book itself, as you can see, is up for grabs."
For the full report visit here:
http://bit.ly/bzGIIx
How Penguin Will Reinvent Books With iPad
paidcontent.org says:
As the race to be be ebook format of choice hots up, Penguin is making some bold, experimental bets. These first-look demos of forthcoming books from iPad's iBook Store, presented by Penguin Books CEO John Makinson in London on Tuesday, give an idea how publishers might approach Apple's tablet...
Many of Penguin's iPad books seem hardly to resemble books at all, but rather very interactive learning experiences....
For the full report visit here:
http://bit.ly/a9eX8v
Taiwan-Based Component Makers Doubt iPad Production Delay Rumors
DIGITIMES' Ninelu Tu and Joseph Tsai reports:
In response to reports that initial volumes of Apple's iPad in late March will be lower than originally planned and the launch will be only in the US market because production by Foxconn Electronics has been delayed, Foxconn's component suppliers have said their supplies are on schedule and Foxconn should be able to ship 600,000-700,000 iPads in March and one million units in April.
For the full report visit here:
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20100303PD227.html
MacBook Pro Running Low On RAM? Change Energy Settings
MacFixIt's Topher Kessler says that if you have one of the newer unibody MacBook Pros, you may encounter problems where the system seems to run out of available RAM more than expected, especially when running programs that can reserve large amounts of memory, an example being Adobe Creative Suite, and applications that use a lot of RAM such as virtualization solutions. He suggests and discusses several workarounds.
You can check it out at:
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10463551-263.html?tag=mncol;title
Do You Need To Run Windows Software On Your Mac?
MacGroup-Detroit's News Blog's Jack Beckman says:
Do you need to run Windows software on your Mac? Maybe MS Project or something else not available natively? With the coming of Intel Macs, there are now many ways to do this. You can use Apple's solution Boot Camp to reserve a portion of your disk and install Windows. I usually don't recommend this solution, as it requires restarting your Mac to switch between Windows and OS X, unless you need to run very intensive software (like games). It also eats up a lot of disk.
I usually point people to VMWare Fusion or Parallels to run a Virtual Machine. There's also an open source solution, VirtualBox, which isn't quite as full-featured as Fusion or Parallels (but the price is right!). But today I want to talk about a new release of yet a different approach.
CodeWeavers solution, CrossOver, is based on the open-source program WINE (which stands for WINE Is Not an Emulator). What WINE does is take the Windows APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) the hooks programs use to talk to Windows and get dialog boxes, windows, etc. and convert them to OS X APIs.....
For the full report visit here:
http://macgroup.org/blog/2010/03/03/crossroads/
How to Build a Kid's Desktop PC
PC Mag's Daniel S. Evans says:
Are you tired of having your offspring hogging your home desktop PC? It's time to think about building them their very own system. With our step-by-step guide, it's never been easier.
You can check it out at:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2360849,00.asp
The Tech Night Owl: Now It's Inevitable: Flash is Dying!
In 1998, Apple killed the floppy drive. It took a few years for the rest of the industry to catch up, but the handwriting was clearly on the wall. Of course, anyone who actually lost data on a worn or defective floppy would only cheer the end of that flawed storage scheme.
Here's the URL for today's commentary:
http://www.technightowl.com/2010/03/now-its-inevitable-flash-is-dying/
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