hmurchison's Profile

  • http://hmurchison.blogspot.com
  • Jan 30, 2008
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Latest comments made by: hmurchison

  • Since Amazon.com sells .mac for 69 dollars I'll certainly pay that annual cost. If Google has free stuff there's nothing wrong with me using both right?
    United Stateshmurchison had this to say on Jan 30, 2008 Posts: 130
    Goodbye to .Mac
  • Hadley, VM products like Parallels and Fusion can indeed impact Apple. I'm curious to see what the next decade brings. I believe that we're moving towards a ubiquitious hardware platform. We now have Linux/Windows and OS X running on X86 hardware. What if the future brings computers that ship with all 3 major OS and the consumer decides which OS to unlock and each OS runs in a VM environment? The OS just becomes another application. Imagine that Apple gets a small fraction of EVERY computer sale regardless of whether the user unlocks the OS or not. It's a win/win for everyone but perhaps Linux which has so many flavors no one company stands to profit. At any rate I expect that Mac only applications are going to become more popular as Apple improves development tools and provides incentive to be Mac only. The future is fearsome...and fascinating all at the same time.
    United Stateshmurchison had this to say on Sep 17, 2007 Posts: 130
    Parallels and VMware Are Gateway Drugs to Windows
  • No one said Apple had the market cornered on innovation nor do they deserve your haughty attitude in calling them fanboys. Almost everything is derivative. Whilst Vista may have some features that Apple is adding to Leopard, innovation doesn't lie solely in the creation of items but also manifests in the improvement of existing items. No one here stated that Apple is perfect. The premise of the article is "The Coming Leopard Letdown" to which many of us are wondering just what we are supposed to be let down on. Apple's innovation or lackthereof is not the focal point of this discussion. Still waiting to read what I'm missing in Leopard that's going to have me letdown.
    United Stateshmurchison had this to say on Aug 29, 2007 Posts: 130
    The Coming Leopard Letdown
  • My ideal computing enviroment revolves around efficiency. Adding a little pizazz to the UI is fine but the core functionality has to be there. What consumers saw during the Leopard WWDC keynote was stuff that consumers could digest easily. Jobs needed to tailor what he demoed and how so that the "take home message" was clear. The more geeky people are going to want to know that the underlaying stuff has been fixed and for the most part is has. Networking- the Finder doesn't choke when volumes are unmounted. The finder doesn't seem to choke when a lot of small files are copied. Calendar- Not only are Data Dectors back but they're infused nicely in mail and iCal data can now be written to from 3rd party apps. To Dos are accessible from 3rd parties. If you're a Productivity hound this is Heaven. UI- The GPU now has a dedicated thread for rendering UI. Resolution Independence is included. OpenGL 2.1 is there with enhanced shading support. The whole OS is Unix 03 compliant and undergoing certification. The Help menu is vastly better the whole OS is 64-bit yet still runs 32-bit apps natively. Quicktime 32-bit has been deprecated for QTkit 64-bit. Quicktime encodes faster and has alpha support. If you're letdown or dissapointed it's because you "choose" to be ..not because Apple's engineers were sucking their thumbs for 3 years rather than coding.
    United Stateshmurchison had this to say on Aug 29, 2007 Posts: 130
    The Coming Leopard Letdown
  • Hadley I'm sorry you guys lost your Media Access but that's not Apple's fault. You guys have tried to swim upstream and the current doesn't favor focusing on the negative aspects of Apple which are relatively few. Almost invariably when someone calls Leopard a disappointment or letdown they fail to support their statement with substantive supporting data. What exactly am I missing in Leopard that is so vital to my computing experience? I personally would love to see Speech Recognition but that'll have to wait.
    United Stateshmurchison had this to say on Aug 29, 2007 Posts: 130
    The Coming Leopard Letdown
  • Good article Chris. The Smartphone market is a potential huge bonanza for anyone that can grab significant share. When subnotebooks are starting to be too large for some it becomes clear that a mobile platform that runs smaller yet functional apps is clearly needed for a large segment of the populace. I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple license out the iPhone. I don't believe they will be as dependent on the iPhone as they are on the Mac as phones are still a lower cost of entry product as compared to a computer system. I say they will grow the market for 5 years and then perhaps seek to become a MVNO and bring more of the marketing and customer relations stuff in house if they find success.
    United Stateshmurchison had this to say on Jul 11, 2007 Posts: 130
    The OS Wars Are Back
  • Apple is confronting screen size and desktop management with a slew of features. Spaces is a way of designating modalities for certain task regardless of screen size. Thus if I have a collection of applications that I keep open for writing I encapsulate those apps into a "space" that I can switch to. I can do the same for graphics for web/app development. Spaces can improve the experience on a small screen or a large screen. But it is still a tool for organizing your workspace and it should would nicely with Resolution Independence which should improve the legibility of high DPI LCD screens regardless of size. I think tabs is redundant in the context of spaces. You set your workspaces up in a grid of boxes. Adding tabs to the UI would likely just confuse the issue. In essence each box is a "tab" that you navigate to. I actually may use Spaces more than I thought I would. I think the benefits improve as you load up your Mac with RAM and leave applications running but developers will have to be keen on ensuring their apps don't have memory leaks.
    United Stateshmurchison had this to say on Jul 02, 2007 Posts: 130
    When It Comes To Leopard Is Bigger Really Better?
  • Jon...you don't need it. The iPhone isn't for everyone.
    United Stateshmurchison had this to say on Jun 29, 2007 Posts: 130
    Before You Buy the iPhone...
  • It's pretty fascinating to think about Chris. Adobe moving to Windows could indeed have saved Apple or it could have hurt Apple. The variables here are "who would have risen to the challenge on Windows? Corel ..maybe or it could have been some company that decided the market was worth going after. The thing about time space continuum is that the events are all connected. Who knows Microsoft could have become the domnant graphics software developer if the need necessitated it.
    United Stateshmurchison had this to say on Jun 28, 2007 Posts: 130
    Did Adobe Save Apple by Supporting Windows?
  • Tanner "Cover Flow is Pretty, but Fairly Useless" isn't a headline that seems to posit that Cover flow is worthy regardless of bugs or resource management. I am fairly unimpressed with the performance of my hammer when used in lieu of a screwdriver. Silly? Yes, but the analogy holds when you have articles written about tools that focus on the inappropriate use for such tools. Cover Flow isn't about caching every icon in your system. It's about another method for viewing your files within a particular hierarchy. Simple as that and each of us has the right to be impressed, unimpressed or indifferent. However when James rights an article from his PoV we have the right to refute his arguments if they don't match our own particular values. So I think we fully understand what he's trying to say and we don't agree. The burden is on James to persuade us and not the other way around.
    United Stateshmurchison had this to say on Jun 26, 2007 Posts: 130
    Cover Flow is Pretty, but Fairly Useless
  • I think the consensus has spoken. While people agree that Cover flow is not the approprate file browsing metaphor for "all" data it does represent a viable choice within certain contexts. Thus the original authors premise that it is fairly useless has seemingly been overridden by the responders. It is my opinion that if an author posits that a feature should not have been included the burden of proof resides with that author since computing tends to improve by being more inclusionary rather than exclusionary. I don't see sufficient support in the following narrative from the author that warrants Apple not including Cover Flow in the finder. The jabs at the Finder itself and the menu bar were irrelevant and specious IMO. Give me options and I'll decide myself how to use my resources.
    United Stateshmurchison had this to say on Jun 25, 2007 Posts: 130
    Cover Flow is Pretty, but Fairly Useless
  • Time Travel that's the key!
    United Stateshmurchison had this to say on Jun 21, 2007 Posts: 130
    7 Ways to Avoid the iPhone Hype
  • Interesting..you're telling Apple they need to get it together about a phone that you don't even know the full featureset. I think the article is confusing because the author has such a paucity of actual and verifiable knowledge about the iPhone so that he makes sweeping assumptions and generalizations. The headline is flamebait and there's no summary to be had. If you want to have any success writing you will have to do better. This is not even High School level journalism here. What happens when June 29th rolls around and we find the iPhone does indeed support flash? FWIW I've read a blurb about the iPhone from a WWDC attendee and while I don't know him from a can of paint he's duly impressed with the iPhone based on demoes given. I'm not faulting you Tanner but the content and delivery here is pretty weak.
    United Stateshmurchison had this to say on Jun 15, 2007 Posts: 130
    3 Reasons Why I Hate The iPhone
  • I consider it another "no floppy on the iMac" issue. Granted, there are some nice 4:3 TV out there the puck is clearly headed in the widescreen/HDTV area of the rink. Am I bummed that that I can't "easily" add the ATV to my Panasonic SD TV? Nope..it's time to step up to a DLP or LCD this year. The Xmas pricing should be great.
    United Stateshmurchison had this to say on Jun 06, 2007 Posts: 130
    The Contradictions of Apple TV
  • Steve Jobs said that the real limitation to HD online movies was filesize and I think you're going to find that the next 5 years contains some nice advances here. Wavelet compression has the ability to further shrink files down yet keeping the same quality. The Red Camera (red.com) uses a wavelet based codec for their Red Code codec. Apple's Pixlet is a wavelet based codec. Next up will be the successor to h.264...appropriately named h.265. Check out this blurb. http://www.ibc.org/cgi-bin/ibc_dailynews_cms.cgi?db_id=23665&issue=5 "The ink is seemingly hardly dry on the H.264/AVC MPEG-4 standard yet the engineers are looking down the road at H.265, and a "further 50% saving in bandwidth" said Ralf Schaefer, from Germany's prestigious R&D company Fraunhofer. He told delegates at the 'HDTV-Technology Challenges' panel that while the labs were looking hard at assorted promising developments including Wavelet technologies, it was likely that H.265 would emerge in five or six years, " That's a nice savings. Imagine 720p content at 4GB and 1080p content at 8GB. In 5 years the bandwidth of many homes will make streaming this efficient enough.
    United Stateshmurchison had this to say on Jun 05, 2007 Posts: 130
    The Contradictions of Apple TV