And so it begins
Over five years ago I wrote a commentary piece bitching about OS fanatics (archived here if you care for the additional context), in which the following sentence appeared:
I'd hate to think of [OS fanaticism] progressing to something like a Mac cult deciding to wipe Redmond, Washington off the map because they thought Steve Jobs put some sort of hidden message in Mac OS X.
Now comes word of a man in New Zealand running down a woman at a church, jumping out of the vehicle with his laptop, and shouting Steve Jobs's name. Clearly, this is only the start of the larger OS wars, as apparently those Methodists were all Windows users and had to be dealt with first. I suggest Microsoft beef up security around its campus, as I was obviously prescient in my earlier piece. I guess those hidden messages in OS X took a little longer to filter down to the faithful than I originally thought.
At any rate, I'm sure the Mac haters out there will have a field day with this one. I hope that poor woman pulls through.
Posted at 01:54PM Jul 24, 2007 by Kevin Schmitt in Mac and Apple |
Conditional AppleScript as a sanity saver
Let's go through two very specific scenarios to see if some conditional AppleScript might cure what ails us. [Read More]
Posted at 12:42PM Jul 17, 2007 by Kevin Schmitt in Mac and Apple |
Anyone else sick of the iPhone?
iPhone this, iPhone that. It's seemingly all iPhone, all the time these days, from the moment it was introduced back at (non)Macworld in January. Here we are, with two weeks to go until the iPhone is available, and the hype is in overdrive. [Read More]
Posted at 10:40PM Jun 15, 2007 by Kevin Schmitt in Mac and Apple | Comments[5]
Seriously... how wrong is this?
I'm sure the novelty of this will wear off by lunchtime (indeed, most of it already has), but I just had to get a screen capture of this. It's the Safari 3 public beta for Windows, running on an XP VM in Parallels Desktop's coherence mode on Mac OS X. Couple more layers of this and I think I could travel through time.
So, the question is this: how many times does hell need to freeze over before it stops being a big deal?
Posted at 08:05AM Jun 12, 2007 by Kevin Schmitt in Mac and Apple |
Where's the user-swappable hard drive?
OK, so the new MacBook Pros are out, and there's a lot to like. But lost in all the enthusiasm over the backlit LED display and the new graphics cards is the fact that there still doesn't seem to be any easy access to the hard drive bay. That's a big reason why I'm holding onto my plain ol' MacBook (Amateur? Anti-pro?), because it is beyond trivial (and won't void the warranty) to add a higher-capacity SATA drive when the need arises. I'm sure there would be some tricky engineering involved to put the MacBook Pro's hard disk in a place where it would be user-accessible, but I can't really even consider one without it, despite the need for at least marginally faster graphics performance out of my mobile machine.
Maybe next time... dammit.
Posted at 09:50AM Jun 08, 2007 by Kevin Schmitt in Mac and Apple |
New Macs! (Updated 9AM EDT 6/5/2007)
The Apple Store is currently being updated... are these the new MacBook Pros that were rumored to arrive before WWDC starts next week? Guess we'll find out shortly. While new notebooks would be nice, I'd love to see a Mac Pro bump (2 GB RAM standard, eSATA ports, better stock video cards, faster processors, and a price cut wouldn't hurt).
UPDATE: Yep, they're refreshed MacBook Pros. Highlights include:
And with that out of the way, let's see what Apple has on tap for WWDC...
Posted at 07:19AM Jun 05, 2007 by Kevin Schmitt in Mac and Apple |
Apple and the little things
I don't know how many of you out there use Apple Motion, but with my feet firmly in the After Effects camp, I've only followed Motion from afar in the three years since version 1 was announced. Sure, I've played around with an eval copy for a bit, and it's a nice program and all, but I always went right back to AE. Now Motion 3 is out (shipping only as part of Final Cut Studio 2), and like many other After Effects users, I found myself snickering at the flowery language used by Apple to describe Motion's 3D capabilities (variations of which have been available for many years across a variety of motion graphics apps). Since then, I haven't given Motion 3 much thought. [Read More]
Posted at 09:00AM May 21, 2007 by Kevin Schmitt in Mac and Apple | Comments[1]
Wanted: the sub-$1500 headless iMac
Having gotten an almost shocking amount of use out of my original (Core 1 Duo) MacBook, I've been in-between main development Macs for quite a while now. [Read More]
Posted at 10:00AM May 11, 2007 by Kevin Schmitt in Mac and Apple |
679 days
By my count, it took 679 days (give or take a day or two) from the original Apple-to-Intel announcement before all the pieces were in place to finally allow me to be able to use an Intel Mac—booted into OS X—100% of the time for everything. [Read More]
Posted at 09:24AM Apr 18, 2007 by Kevin Schmitt in Mac and Apple | Comments[7]
Leopard in October
Oh, man. This is worrisome news. Apple has a tidbit on their "Hot News" page (link current as of April 12, 2007) that due to shifting of personnel to meet the iPhone ship date, Mac OS X 10.5 (AKA "Leopard") won't be released until October. [Read More]
Posted at 06:22PM Apr 12, 2007 by Kevin Schmitt in Mac and Apple |
