Flame Artist by day. Proud Dad by, uhm, the rest of the time. Lover of everything Apple. Hater of everything Microsoft. Except for the Xbox 360 of course.
Dateline is a free application which puts a month-view calendar line on the desktop and it does that beautifully. I love minimalism in applications (well, in everything really) and this app is prefect in that sense. You can customise the colours and width of the calendar, as well as whether the calendar is displayed above all windows or at the desktop level. Double-clicking any date will take you to iCal.
Here’s how it look on different wallpapers on my Mac. Click for a larger view.
If you have an Airport Express you have to get Airfoil. The app lets you stream music from your Mac to just about anything that receives a wifi signal, including your iPhone, a Windows or Linux box or even the AppleTV. You select the source application and activate the destination speakers and off you go!
Since I bought my first MacBook three years ago, I’ve migrated my applications and data across to every upgraded laptop. I suspect my MacBook Pro isn’t working as efficiently as it would after a clean system install. Would re-installing Leopard and the applications stop those random beachballs spinning? At the risk of making a rod for my own back, I’ve decided to do just that. I’ll update this post when it’s all done.
See you on the other side.
Monday, May 4th:
In between birthday parties, visitors, cooking, tidying up, the gym and various other distractions, I managed to resist the surprisingly strong impluse just to restore everything from the Time Machine backup and forget about doing a spring clean. I managed to keep the momentum going though and so far, the system feels snappier. Powering up or rebooting takes a lot less time and applications like Photoshop now launch in one bounce.
I’ll do a final update when everything’s back. Stay tuned.
Monday, May 4th, 9pm:
All done! All apps installed, as you can see from the dock above. I’ll run the Mac through it’s paces this week and see how Photoshop and Illustrator (the main beachball culprits) perform. So far the experiment went smoothly and the system feels faster, as mentioned before. I wouldn’t rush to do this again and I doubt installing Snow Leopard will force me to. Would it?
I tried, I really did. Then I gave up and called Apple to take their underpowered, overprotected media box back. This is the first Apple product I absolutely and unreservedly hated. It made iTunes look bad, and that is one of my favorite applications.
Okay, so it’s hackable. But it turns absolutely buggy and crashes a lot. Plus, I don’t want to spend another night trying to coax it to do what it should do in the first place: play whatever media I throw at it, and iTunes syncing isn’t the way to do it.
Enter WD TV. It should arrive tomorrow along with a 320GB pocket drive. It costs £100 less than the 160GB Apple TV and it should play movies with popular codecs without complaining or transcoding. As a bonus, it plays 1080p instead of just 720p.
I really hope this is the answer otherwise it’s back to the Apple Store to buy another Mac Mini and install Plex.
I just noticed that the new series of Lost is on iTunes in 720p! At £2.49 per episode compared to £1.89 for SD it’s not a bad deal. The whole season pass costs a bit more, £41.99 for HD or £31.99 for SD. Bring on 1080 now!
The first time I saw a Macintosh was when I visited my brother Jamal in San Francisco when I was almost 18. He had a Macintosh Plus and I was absolutely amazed by it. The Finder! Cut, Copy & Paste! MacPaint! MacWrite! A 3.5″ floppy! The Menu! And most significantly, the Mouse!
It’s amazing that I still have the same thrill using my Mac today that I did then, 25 years later.
As a fitting celebration, here’s a video of Steve Jobs introducing the first Macintosh. Happy Birthday Mac!
For the past few years I’ve had a little Apple-related ritual. Whenever iLife is released I walk over to the Apple Store in Regent St and buy it. iLife ’06 and ’08 (they skipped ’07 I think) sit on a shelf in the study upstairs.
The one application from the suite that gets used much more than the others is iPhoto. iPhoto ’06 was a slow, clunky beast but I still faithfully used it to organise, tag and upload to Flickr (using Connected Flow’s FlickrExport) and even created and ordered one or two hardcover books. The ’08 version was much faster and the Events feature was fun to use.
iMovie ’06 was simple and straightforward. ’08 had me scratching my head a few times and came to the conclusion that I preferred the previous version. As for iDVD ’08, I don’t think I even launched it once. That’s no reflection on the software which I think is pretty good but times have changed. The ’06 version was used and used a lot. Garageband is great for recording scratch tracks for work and the ’08 release had a very handy Movie layer to sync voiceovers.
The one app I never used was iWeb. The fact that it doesn’t talk to TypePad, WordPress or Blogger was a great disadvantage and even though I know that it isn’t tethered to .Mac/MobileMe, it still feels constrained.
So, iLife ’09 is the one that’s going to break my little ritual. The one I have no interest in buying. Faces and Places? My D60 doesn’t have a GPS function (there is a third party shoe-mounted one apparently) and I can tag my photos with the person’s name. iMovie? No thanks, Final Cut Pro does the job a lot better. If iDVD had BluRay support it would be really interesting as opposed to being nearly useless now.
There isn’t a single feature that would compel me to buy this version, not one. Does anyone else have a different opinion?
Finally! A delicious plugin for Safari. DeliciousSafari even puts an icon on the toolbar to add a bookmark, including all the popular tags a particular entry has. To add icing to the cake, there’s a free iPhone App!
UPDATE: Ignore the iPhone App. On a uselessness scale of 1 to 10 it’s 9.99995. Delete.
What a great idea! You download the NumberKey connect software, download the App on your iPhone, et voilà! An external number pad for your MacBook Pro! And with skins to match your laptop. Now if there’s only a way to keep the iPhone 3G from bobbing around while I enter timecodes….
Hi. I'm Hani and this is my blog. I also have some photos on Flickr, bookmarks on Delicious, tweets on Twitter and generalities on Facebook as well. Most of the time I can be found at Prime Focus in London, crafting commericals using Flame.
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