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Five features I wish were in iPhone 3.0

June 29, 2009 – 10:45 am

While the introduction of cut-and-paste makes its much-vaunted appearance in 3.0, and we, as a nation can get on with the healing, there are five features I wish were joining it.

1. Connect to multiple Exchange servers. I use Google Sync (which uses ActiveSync) to to view my calendar and contact on my iPhone. I’d be nice to also connect to my work Exchange server. Which brings me to gripe number two.

2. Be able to connect to multiple calendar sources. Even if I could connect to two Exchange servers, for me the most crucial part is my work calendar — it’d be nice to be able to look up my meetings for a given day when scheduling a follow-up appointment at a doctor’s office. Connecting to Outlook Web Access on the iPhone is a horrid experience.

3. Over-the-Air syncing. My iPhone has bluetooth. My MacBook has bluetooth. Logic would dictate I can pair the two devices and sync, right? Well, I guess logic would also dictate it wouldn’t take Apple three iPhone revisions to introduce cut-n-paste. I guess we’ll see non-tethered syncing show up sometime around iPhone 7.

4. “Tagging” apps and building pages built on those tags. It’d be nice to call the second page of apps “games” and tag an app as a game and have it appear there automatically. If this also came across as part of a restore, it’d save me having to rebuild the pages manually.

5. Task syncing. Well, like cut-n-paste, it took them three revisions to get Notes to sync to the desktop. Really, Apple, we can’t sync iCal tasks yet? I don’t get this one at all.

How about you? What are you bummed isn’t in 3.0?

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I’ve switched from Nuevasync to Google Sync

February 18, 2009 – 6:25 pm

Up until last week, I was still using nuevasync for Google Calendar push notifications. Last week, Google introduced Google Sync, and I immediately switched.

Because I use Google Apps for Domains, there were a few extra steps involved — I had to enable Google Sync in my site’s dashboard. After that setting it up was very easy. I followed the instructions on Google’s site, and under username typed in “myrealemail@myrealdomain.com” and it worked perfectly.

After a week, I haven’t noticed any issues on battery life.

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Year-end software wrap up

December 30, 2008 – 11:05 pm

In keeping with Alex Payne’s “Software I Paid For” post, I’m doing my own. While his focuses on software he no longer uses, I’m going to try and remember the apps I bought over the year, and if I regret the purchase.

Desktop:

Office 2008. Scrivener is still my heavy-lifting writing program, but Word 2008 gets a lot of use for academic writing. The built-in citation manager alone was worth the price. However, I paid $70 for it via academic pricing, so it was worth at least that. No regrets.

Spore. I bought it, and couldn’t get through the cell stage without wanting to poke myself in the eye. Deep regret.

Wrath of the Lich King. Fantastic job by Blizzard. Only regret is time lost to it.

Parallels Desktop Upgrade (3.0). At least, I think I got this in 2008. I don’t use my Mac for the day job anymore. I bought it due to their promise of better 3D support, which it failed to deliver. Moderate regret.

CrossOver Games. I bought this before they had their one-day free promo. It lets me run LOTRO and D&D Online on my Macbook, and does a good job at it. No regrets.

Delicious Library 2. I’m trying to get more organized with my media library. Delicious Library lets me throw an XLS file of my books on my iPhone, which is handy when I go into a used bookstore and can’t remember if I have that book or not. No regrets.

Pixelmator. I think I got this last year as part of Macheist. It’s pretty much been the Photoshop replacement I was hoping it would be. It gets less use now that I’m not fudging with graphics for WoW Insider/Massively. No regrets.

iPhone Apps

Bejeweled 2. Fantastic game that’s great for those moments where I’m parked on the couch waiting for my wife to get ready. Quick loading and mindless play. No regrets.

Chess Classics. I don’t play this as much as I’d like, but I have no regrets.

Cro-Mag Rally. Only played one race. Deep regret.

FileMagnet. Handy for  the infrequent times I need to get a file onto the phone. No regrets.

MLB At Bat. I’m not a big baseball fan, but this is the app I use to show off what the iPhone can do. Plus, it’s handy for those times I actually give a shit what the score of the Sox game is. No regrets.

Spore Origins. I’ve played it more than he OS X version. It’s not bad, and kinda fun. Moderate Regret.

Scrabble. My wife loves scrabble and this is great for when we’re waiting on food or for a movie to start. No regrets.

Texas Hold’em. Like Spore, I don’t play it much, but it’s pretty good. No regrets.

Twitterific Premium. I’m using Twinkle more now, and I don’t like how it doesn’t start at the top of the list. Deep regret.

X-Plane 9. Another one I don’t play much and the controls are a little hard to get used to, but I don’t have any regrets.

I have more regrets about my iPhone purchases than I do desktop purchases, but I think that’s due to the ease of impulse buying. On the desktop, I’m more likely to do serious research and try the demo before I feed in my credit card. Being able to grab a $1-5 app on the iTunes store is sometimes hard to resist. I’ve gotten better at resisting this siren’s call, though.

Posted in Macintosh, Technology, iPhone | No Comments »

Time tests loading Word 2008 vs. Word 2007 via an emulator

November 20, 2008 – 8:25 pm

Today at the day job, I was working on getting Word 2007 to connect to SharePoint on my Mac via Parallels, and it got me to wondering what the load time differences were between Word 2008 12.1.4, Word 2007 via Crossover, and Word 2007 via Parallels.

I ran three tests (four if one of the three tests generated a number out-of-whack from the other two): Three from a fresh startup of the OS, and three from just quitting the app and re-launching it. In the case of Parallels, I quit Word from within the VM and then quit Parallels. I did not do a fresh boot of Windows XP for the tests; I left the VM in a suspended state.

I’ve got the numbers at the end of this post, but from a cold boot time. Word 2007 from within Parallels won, with Word 2007 within Crossover coming in second and Word 2008 natively within OS X coming in third. Warm starts Word 2008 won, with Word 2007 in Parallels coming in second, and Word 2007 in Crossover coming in third.

I’ll admit: there are a lot of apples to hand grenades comparisons happening here. About the only valid point is two separate Microsoft Word Processor have drastically different start times between a native app and one running in a two different emulators. You also can run into some issues if the emulator doesn’t want to start up properly – not to mention in Parallels’ case running an entire OS on top of OS X.

I’m not really sure what to make of these numbers. If you told me Word 2007 running in two different emulators would actually start faster than Word 2008, I would have laughed my ass off. However, in none of the cold start time tests I performed did Word 2008’s fastest load time beat the fastest cold start time tests of an emulated Word 2007. If you rarely reboot your Mac, subsequent loads of Word 2008 are faster, but not dramatically so.

One other difference is looks. I’ve attached screen captures of the three versions below, but I found Word 2007 in Parallels to read clearer because it uses Clear Type. Word 2007 in CrossOver looked the worse since it was bolder than the other two. Word 2007 also interacts with SharePoint and Blogs better; this entire post was written and posted in Word 2007. I’m also enjoying the ribbon interface a little better in Word 2007.

That said, I think it’s unlikely I’ll be doing a lot of work in Word 2007 – mainly because it’s not a native OS X and running Windows XP on top of OS X is too resource intensive. I did find it amazing that it loads faster than Word 2008.

 

Time Tests

Word 2008:

Cold Start 1: 1:03.11

Cold Start 2: 34.7

Cold Start 3: 1:09.4

Cold Start 4: 1:22.3

Warm Start 1 7.3

Warm Start 2: 6.9

Warm Start 3: 8.4

 

Word 2007: Parallels

Cold Start 1: 32.7

Cold Start 2: 46.5

Cold Start 3: 43.5

Cold Start 4″ 1:29.8

Warm Start 1: 10.7

Warm Start 2 : 1:36.4

Warm Start 3: 11.6

Warm Start 4; 10.3

 

Word 2007: Codeweavers

Cold Start 1: 40.8

Cold Start 2: 41.0

Cold Start 3: 38.5

Warm Start 1: 12.8

Warm Start 2 :13.8

Warm Start 3: 11.8

 

 

 

 

Posted in Macintosh, Technology, Writing | No Comments »

Initial Wrath of the Lich King impressions on a MacBook (GMA950)

November 14, 2008 – 9:33 am

I threw WOTLK on my circa-2006 MacBook last night for some initial tests. While the card is not supported by Blizzard, I can’t say I noticed my framerates were any worse than I got in Shatt.

I was averaging about 15fps, which was normal for me in TBC. It was definetely playable–at least as far as what I was used to.

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Looking forward to podcast downloads in iPhone 2.2

November 7, 2008 – 8:05 pm

According to this Apple Insider post, podcast downloads are coming to the iPhone.

I’m thrilled for this. Very rarely do I sync my iPhone to my iTunes library — usually when I’ve just bought new music. I only subscribe to a handful of podcasts, but because of how infrequently I sync, I’m usually too far behind to make an effort to catch up.

It’s unknown right now if it will support EDGE, but my feeling is it will. According to that post, we’re under the same 10mb limit for for App Store and that works just fine over EDGE.

I can’t wait for this to be released.

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My predictions for today’s “Let’s Rock” Event

September 9, 2008 – 7:21 am

Obviously, we are going to see new iPods, but I’m going out on a limb and think the Classic form might be retired in favor of the Touch model. The Touch will go to 64g. New Nanos with a larger screen too.

I also think we’ll see a new iLife with improvements to Garageband. I’m 50/50 on a new iWork; a part of me thinks we’ll see that at Macworld, but since the 08 version got rolled out at last September’s showcase, it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw an update today.

What I’m hoping for is firmware 2.1 for the iPhone.

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Testing Scrippets

September 9, 2008 – 12:30 am

Not sure if I’ll ever use this, but testing the Scrippets plug in

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For those on my Guild Wars panel…..

August 29, 2008 – 6:56 pm

… and want in on the guild we are trying to form, leave your character name here. Note: comments are set to require approval, so it may take a few days for me to get to them.

Posted in Gaming | 5 Comments »

Follow up to yesterday’s battery test

August 20, 2008 – 7:10 am

Last night when I went to bed I was at 50% battery — this was with two GMail accounts fetching every 15 minutes. I’ve turned NuevaSync back on as a fetch service to test battery life today.

I think something is wonky with push. My yahoo account was set to fetch, but I think the push setting was overriding it . If  I’m not alone on this, it might explain why the APIs for push on non-Apple apps was yanked from the latest beta.

Since I don’t need my calender updating constantly, if it saves on battery life fetch is fine.

I’ll report back tommorow.

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