Hywel's Profile

During a brief flirtation with blogging last year, I pretty much described the same thing… http://fakebob.blogspot.com/2007/08/yeah-yeah-yeah-but-wheres-mouse.html. I still want one for my Mac Mini media. A mouse is rubbish on the couch.

I think they need to tackle more fundamental things than just the look of the interface. My experience is that OS-X is less stable under Tiger, and has some annoyances. Interface/Finder inconsistencies have been covered enough by Ars Technica. A small example of the kind of thing that annoys me is that if the spotlight field is active, the dock becomes inactive (remains hidden). So I'm all for a new improved look as long as usability is improved and inconsistencies addressed.

PETER Yeah. I, I, I...Listen, that virus you're always talking about. The one that, that could rip off the company for a bunch of money... MICHAEL Yeah? What about it? PETER Well, how does it work? MICHAEL It's pretty brilliant. What it does is where there's a bank transaction, and the interests are computed in the thousands a day in fractions of a cent, which it usually rounds off. What this does is it takes those remainders and puts it into your account. PETER This sounds familiar. MICHAEL Yeah. They did this in Superman III.

It's not just laptops. Thankfully the 'colouring-in' that was done on my 22" cinema display was not done with permanent markers.

I really, really hope they don't do this. It's more akinto losing SCSI that the switch from ADB to USB. I don't it's an easy transition. Not unless all machines have a slot that can take a FireWire card. That means iBooks, Mac minis and iMacs as well as Powerbooks and PowerMacs. There was a mistake made relatively recently by trying to push FireWire too hard, and sticking with USB1.0, when PCs were all getting USB2.0. That means a lot of people with adequate machines have to connect to new iPods with USB1.0. So I think the problem really wasn't so much ditching FireWire from the iPod, but NOT adopting USB2.0 as soon as it was available. Adding USB2.0 didn't necessarily mean that FireWire sohuld be dropped. It needed to be retained, and still needs to be retained for use with all those GL2s(or XM2 if you're in Europe), and for all those audio interfaces. For a lot of things, it makes no difference if they're USB2 or Firewire. For realtime stuff like audio and video, FireWire remains a superior standard, and should be retained in all Macs, or all Macs should be made such that it is an easy after-market addition.

Maybe he couldn't recommend XP. I know I wouldn't recoomend it to anyone in case I was also expected to support it, and I don't know how to do that. Partly selfish reasons, sure. But I would always ask what it was going to be used for. Macs are not the appropriate machine for many. That would include games, of course, but in my recent experience using the Open University in the UK, they just expect the PC that's being used for study to be a Windows one, so many of the online facilities are simply not available due to proprietary clients. If someone was buying it for mainly their OPen University studies, then I'd have to suggest a windows PC. (At least until dual boot Macs appear in Jan ;)

Thing is, without talking to people to find out their needs, you just can't say. It's unlikely that the bundled software will do everything, but the needs above it are different for different people. Some will need office others will not. Office - at least the alst time I looked - was missing features I needed, had plenty of bloat I didn't need, and my experience of Word on windows is that it's a pile of junk. My one essential app is Omnigraffle. Used this morning, for example, because I wanted to print out two photos and needed the width to be the same for both to fit in a frame. Couldn't see how to do this in iPhoto, so I just dragged them to a new OG doc, put in the exact width and printed one page. Other people probably would go straight to photoshop, or straight to Pages to do the same thing. Whatever is right for you. I would steer people away from Office. If it was £50, then sure, get it, but when it costs more than a Mac Mini, you want to be sure you need that kind of software. Plenty of people get blinkered ("blinkers" = "blinders" to US readers) about what they think other people need. If people are mainly surfing and mailing and writing letters, they need Mail, Safari and TextEdit. They don't need Word. They don't need Photoshop.

"what’s bad about airport express? Apart from that Apple does not offer a decent remote with a screen? " Well that's it. No screen and no remote. Basically no UI. It's like worse than an iPod shuffle UI, but for your whole library. Take a look at ROKU, and it's a much better box for music. The express is great for what it is. It's a Wi-Fi base-station/access point. The line out is more of a bonus feature, and a good one too. For me, I'm wired at the moment, so the only reason to go wi-fi is to get music somewhere else in the house. To pay out that much money and have no UI would be madness. I have no network really. I have cable modem to my Mac and that's it. What I do to listen to music is plug my iPod in somewhere instead, but it only holds 10% of my library. Roku's not compatible with Fairplay, but Apple don't license fairplay to them and they don't make a competing product. It's an example of how restricting DRM can be. I am thinking of buying a Roku soundbridge, as I only have a handful of tracks from iTMS, mainly the free ones. The problem I have is that if in the future, CDs get iTumes (rip) proof, then I might want to buy from iTMS instead. I think a lot of people would buy a Roku type device from Apple. I've no idea why they don't make one yet. If they've no intention of making one, then why hold out on the licenses to non-competitors ? Makes no sense. One way to get a UI would be to buy an iBook. It's and expensive remote control though, don't you think ? Keyspan Remote is a possibility, but that's also expensive, and has no display.