I recently had a chance to upgrade my iMac to the 2.8Ghz 24″ with the 800Mhz memory. I had 4GB of the 667Mhz memory on my previous iMac and never had problems with running out of memory. However, here’s my memory usage when playing music on iTunes using the shuffle mode with the cover flow on:
And here’s my memory usage just moments after I close iTunes:
Crazy! I did order 4GB of memory just yesterday so hopefully that will put me back where I was with my previous iMac.
There’s a growing number of these micro-blogging services. And while I’m signed up for all of them except Jaiku, I still don’t know which one to use primarily. I’m now also faced with the question of which one should I use for one of our websites to post more incremental updates that people can subscribe to.
I’ve been looking for a complete solution; an app that will post to all of them at the same time. And while someone has found something of a solution, it’s not a preferred method by any means.
Twitter seems to be the most popular though I’m not exactly sure why. Perhaps cause they were there first? I personally like the Pownce format; especially with Leah’s latest API release. But Tumblr offers a lot of options too like text, links, quotes, chats, photos, video; but no files (Pownce offers sending files).
And while it seems like there’s a lot to consider with four different main players, a year ago someone found as many as 111 Twitter look alikes internationally.
I was lucky enough to get a SocialThing.com invite from Dan Taylor, so I have some invites of my own now. Let me know if you’d like one!
If you’re one of the lucky ones to be able to get one of the latest MacBooks with Multi-Touch, you’ve probably asked the same question I have: “How can I get Firefox to use the swipe gesture to go forwards and backwards like Safari does?”
Answer: MultiClutch
This neat little Preference Pane addition will allow you to associate trackpad gestures with keyboard shortcuts; per application.
So this gives you exactly what you’re looking for: navigation for Firefox 3 (beta) via trackpad gestures. Only apps built with Cocoa are supported right now, so this won’t work with Firefox 2, sorry!
If you found that app useful, please consider making a small donation to Will! It helps make the world go round. =)
I used Boot Camp to make a little partition to dual boot into Windows XP SP3 on my MacBook Pro… and seeing how I have an nVidia 8600M video card with 256MB of dedicated memory in this little notebook, I thought I’d try out Day of Defeat: Source (I’m a semi-regular on a server there).
It was great (other than I didn’t have any sound). I was getting a regular 60-80fps. But it wasn’t long (1 minute?) before I heard the fans starting to spin up (apparently I’ve never had them go full speed before) and I could feel the heat through the keyboard.
So I lifted the MacBook up to feel the bottom which was now HOT. Easily 3 or 4 times hotter than it is under normal operating.
I quickly exited the game and the fans calmed down within a minute or two. And while it may work well for gaming… it doesn’t work well for gaming. There’s no way that much heat can be good for it. So while the power is there if I need it (video editing, photoshop, etc); it’s not there for gaming. I don’t even want to imagine the toll playing a game like that would take on the battery if I weren’t plugged in.
Anyone else have a different experience or opinion?
When buying portable products, I usually like to be (over) prepared for whatever situation may arrive. When I bought my Panasonic HD camcorder, I also searched the web thoroughly and bought two extra batteries and a 16GB SD Card. Plenty of power and plenty of space.
So I found myself looking at an extra battery for my recent MacBook Pro purchase so that I’m never caught dead. As I do before buying anything electronic over $50 I started reading the reviews, which all seemed to be horrible, dating back to 2005 even. I was a little confused since I went the entire weekend without having to charge my MacBook Pro, and even found myself on Sunday night waiting for the battery to die before I went to bed so I could give it a full cycle.
Obviously I didn’t use my notebook more than 5 hours (the rated time it can/should last). I didn’t do any work this weekend (that’s a first really), so nothing more than looking up movie times, checking bank statements and researching some thing (ok, so maybe I did a little work)… but battery life was more than adequate. So I didn’t quite understand all these reviews; especially some claiming “my battery doesn’t last more than 10 minutes!”.
For any MacBook user, you’ll find a wonderfully cool program called CoconutBattery that tells you the actual and rated battery capacity at any time. (Just don’t leave the application open, I found that it locks up my entire system after prolonged use.) So armed with that, and with Apple’s battery notebook care, you’ll have everything you need to help get the most out of your battery.
As you can see from my battery history, as I started to completely drain my battery (2008-04-04), my battery’s maximum capacity increased. April 06 was when I completely drained and charged the battery for the first time. I’m willing to bet that many (the “average”?) user doesn’t know or understand how batteries work. They understand (and I remember thinking in my teenage years) that batteries fill up and drain; there’s nothing else to them.
And who knew you could calibrate your battery to ensure an accurate reading?
This is also great advice for anyone using anything that has a battery. Batteries need to be used to be kept healthy. Windows users can use tools like BatteryMon (30-day trial, $24) to get battery capacity monitoring and recording.
iPhone users should take this advice to heart also, especially since replacing the iPhone battery is only free within your first year of purchase under the warranty; and that’s only if the battery is holding less than 50% of what it should. Otherwise you’re looking at almost $90 and a week or two without your phone.
In short, use your batteries!
According to Zac Bowling the iPhone developer program, who many are being turned away from, isn’t all we would have hoped it to be. Or to use his own words; “total, laugh-out-loud, crap”.
Take a look at Zacs’ post for a list of some of the major limitations. To put some shortly:
- No way to write a usable IM or IRC client
- No Silverlight/Moonlight
- No third party flash support
- No apps can run in the background
- No apps can interact with the file system
- No access to the dock port
- No access to the Bluetooth hardware
- No way to tie in to the data sync integration (so no syncing a 3rd party app from you Mac to a corresponding 3rd party app on your iPhone)
But, as you read some of the comments made on his blog, there are some very real and sound reasons there are such restrictions. Chris (site) did a nice summary:
To you it may be completely OK to drain your iPhone battery in 3 hours to have your IM or IRC client running in the background checking every 5 minutes for a new message. It might be completely OK that other applications would want the exact same privilege. And that’s because you’re application developers and you only see it from your point of view.
But what about Johnny Knowsnothing that installs the app from The App Store and finds that his iPhone battery suddenly sucks? Do they understand the state of application development enough to blame you, the application designer? I don’t think so. They blame Apple. They cry out that their battery life sucks and demand Apple fixes the issue. Apple starts replacing batteries that don’t need replacing and that increases cost. All because you didn’t understand that the iPhone isn’t a desktop and requires a different approach to your application design.
As a recent switcher, I’ve already bought several books to start learning Objective-C and to begin developing apps for the Mac and (eventually) the iPhone; so at first glance, Zac’s post kinda irked me. But I can understand some of the limitations and hopefully with time things will progress and be more open. I could see value in having access to the Bluetooth hardware and data sync integration. I would prefer stable battery life over an IM program, but that’s not to say there aren’t any apps out there that wouldn’t greatly benefit, or rely, on being able to be used in the background.
We’re already allowed to have mail check our mail for us whenever we want (in the background), so hopefully (under some guidelines and maybe some warnings to the consumer?) the SDK will open up a bit more in the future to allow such things.
In a change of mind from what they previously had decided, the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft has announced that IE8 will “by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can.” If you haven’t seen, a quick view of the comments about their previous decision and their latest announcement should give you a good idea of what everyone thinks of it.
I don’t generally post comments, but their initial decision to turn web standards off by default sparked even me to give my thoughts (twice actually, I had forgotten I replied the first time). As a web developer, this decision really helps in so many ways; the biggest being that we won’t be stuck with old, broken rendering engines in web browsers that we have to program around… and neither will anyone else! We get to move forward and use the latest and greatest, and so does everyone else.
I remember being very excited about IE7, and moving a step forward after years of working around IE6; but then being disappointed once again at the poor standards support. But IE8 even passes to Acid2 test. Things are looking good!
Upon getting my Mac, Spaces was one of the first things I checked out. I had tried Virtual Desktops in Windows and Linux, but never found them to be too terribly helpful. Not to mention I used a dual monitor setup with my Windows machine, so I felt I had plenty of room for things.
Despite having a nice big 24″ screen, I have often felt my desktop to be cramped and cluttered; especially coming from a dual monitor setup. So the idea of Spaces seemed perfect, except using the keyboard shortcuts felt too slow and like to much work just to get to another application or space. (F8 + Click on a space OR Cmd + Arrow) So this tip from Mac Os X Hints sounded like the perfect solution. Although they don’t actually offer a tip on how to do it (just the tip to do it), this is what I’ve done:
1. Assign Spaces to use the Cmd + Arrow keys too switch between Spaces.
2. Use SteerMouse to assign the right and left mouse scroller to use those combinations (Cmd + Right Arrow) (Cmd + Left Arrow)
3. There is no three!
I’m using 6 spaces now, for web browsing, coding, FTP, RSS Feeds, iChat and iTunes.
Any other suggestions on a good/better way to do the key assigning let me know!
I thought it was just me, but others are reporting an increase in the amount of spam received in their Google Inbox, as well as increasing false-negatives and false-positives. One person reported in the comments only noticing this in the last weekend, which the graph here from MessageLabs seems to indicate is a/the case.
I wrote briefly a few days ago about how much spam Google had caught in one month, but in the last day and a half, it’s caught over 500 messages so far. That’s 1/12 of what was caught in a whole month before. At this rate, it’ll only take about half a month to fill what I had before.
I have yet to have any false-positives or negatives. Hopefully Google’s on top of this and is working passionately to get things back to normal again, if that’s possible. Then again, maybe there are some new tricks the spammers have learned.
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