It’s thirty years since the Mac first went on sale, and twenty-two years since I replaced my MS-DOS PC with one.
It wasn’t that Macs were unknown to me, my uncle had had a succession of Macs (starting with a Mac 128k) by the time I woke up to the revolution. One of my dad’s friends had a demon fast IIfx (paid for by his work, the lucky devil). My dad was firmly in the Microsoft camp though, and that informed my own computing choices.
Continue reading “Happy Birthday, Mac”
The Xcode 4 Cookbook (by Stephen F. Daniel) is the most misleadingly named titled that I’ve read in a while. If you’re after an Xcode 4 Cookbook and you’re planning a little Mac OS X development then, make no mistake, you’re in the wrong place. If you’re after an iOS Cookbook (that name is already taken hence, I suppose, this title) then read on – this book might be right up your street.
Everyone likes to customise their Mac, perhaps by sticking a sticker or two on its body, or at least with individual screen-savers or wallpaper. Now there’s a new option for customising you Mac, making it your very own. USBleat.
On the face of it, USBleat is a simple customisation App. Install it, plug in a USB device, and your Mac will bleat (or moo, or bray…) at you. Plug in a whole hubful of devices and it’ll be like the entire farmyard has landed on your desk!
More usefully, USBleat represents your USB device tree in the menubar. So if you want to know where a device is plugged in you can look in the menu – no more hunting through the spaghetti of hubs and cables on your desk. Once you’ve found your device in the menus, click on it and USBleat will tell you about it.
It doesn’t stop there either – USBleat Pro will be available shortly, which can itself be customised. USBleat Pro has more options (and sounds) available ‘out of the box’, and additional packs can be downloaded – just in case the farm yard isn’t your thing, or if you’d like something a little more useful than a fun sound effect.
USBleat is available now (for free) on the Mac App Store (https://itunes.apple.com/app/usbleat/id657950431?mt=12)
USBleat Pro will be available soon, subject to review by Apple.
Switching. Such a little word, and it makes it sound so easy. All you have to do is buy a Mac, copy your files over, and your done. Easy as that, you have a new computer. Except that this is very much a best-case scenario and things are never that simple in ‘real life’.
Take e-mail for example. On your old PC you diligently saved the email that you cared about by dragging it to your desktop. Easy. And when you wanted to open it, you just double clicked on the email icon and there it was.
So you switched to a Mac, copying all those e-mail files, and now you want to read one. No problem. You open the folder and… wait a minute… here is the first clue that something might be amiss because all the email icons have gone, replaced by generic document icons. Never mind, it’s a minor thing. You double click and… Nothing. You can’t read the email. Damn.
Is all lost? Have you lost those emails? Have you lost the attachments? No. Not a bit of it. Just visit the App Store and search for ‘MailRaider’ (or ‘Microsoft Outlook msg’, if you want to check out the competition too.) Download MailRaider and try double clicking on that Outlook file again. Hey Presto. Problem solved, and for the unbeatable price of Absolutely Free. You’re all quite welcome.
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One of the major problems with the Apple App Store is that it loads the dice against high quality free software. Take the example of two competing applications on the App Store, one free and one paid for. The developer of the paid app can download, at no cost, the free app and then bad mouth it to the world. The developer of the free app cannot respond (because there is no global mechanism for response in the App Store), at least not without paying good money to the developer who slandered him in the first place.
Money is tight, and the recession is an absolute swine. Up to now I have always resisted adverts on my site – I feel that it cheapens my ‘brand’.
Every little helps though, and I am now seriously considering putting ‘adsense’ on the 45RPMSoftware website – and maybe the blog too.
Before I do though, I’d welcome your thoughts. How would it change your perception of my site and the products that are available here*? Is there a way of adding advertising without devaluing the brand? Your thoughts and opinions would be most welcome.
*don’t worry – the apps will still be advert free!
As you will all have seen (and, I hope, enjoyed), I develop handy little apps for the Mac in my spare time. I only develop an app if no-one else has developed a similar program – I always like to be first in the Market.
MailRaider kind of broke this rule because, when I first developed it (in 2008), there was already an application which purported to open Microsoft Outlook msg files – it just didn’t work. At all. So MailRaider was born. MailRaider does work, and very effectively, and users who encounter an edge case file (not very often these days) have been very good about giving me the details so that the next version of MailRaider performs flawlessly. Continue reading “Spite on the AppStore”
I’m often asked which computer I’d recommend. I don’t have a stock answer to this question – what I say depends on many things. How technologically savvy the asker is, for example, and what sort of tasks they want to do. If the asker only has basic requirements then I’ve usually recommended a low end Mac of some kind, perhaps second hand, depending on the budget. If a server is required then I’d recommend Linux for heavy lifting and OS X Server for small work groups. For serious, heavy duty, computing then there is very little (which is to say nothing) to beat a medium to high end Mac – I use a Mac Pro tower myself. For the seriously cash strapped then Raspberry Pi is hard to ignore, and it will be impossible to ignore once the Raspberry Pi Foundation manages to sort out a case for it.
Now, though, there’s a new OS that deserves very serious consideration for light computing duties. True it’s been out for a few years now, but I’d say it’s now definitely ready for Prime Time. What is it? Chrome OS.
Who Should Use It?
Anyone who only has light computing requirements. If you only need to browse the web, email, do a little word processing or spreadsheeting and play a game or two then Chrome OS is perfect.
Why Should They Use It?
It has an elegant UI and it’s very user friendly. Google has put some serious thought into Chrome OS, and it’s a doodle to use – even for someone who has never really used a computer before. It doesn’t even require any maintenance. Best of all, it doesn’t require any user accounts to be set up on the computer – a Chrome OS user either signs in their Google account, or signs in as a Guest.
What Are The Disadvantages?
Google doesn’t seem to be as confident of their OS as I am. Either that, or they’re too busy peddling Android (which just isn’t as nice as it’s competitors). This is a pity, because Chrome OS is definitely the finest OS of its kind. Given that it is also the only OS of its kind, this might seem like damning with faint praise – but it isn’t, I assure you. Chrome OS is genuinely a thing of beauty.
And this is the main problem – the only official means of getting a Chrome OS computer is a laptop like Samsung’s Chrome Book which is an over-priced, underspecced, KIRF knock off of the old black MacBook. Good luck finding one of those in Currys or Dixons. You could, of course, download the OS and then install it on your own computer – but if you aren’t very computer literate then that kind of defeats the main point of Chrome OS.
Other than that, the only real disadvantage is a paucity of available software that will run without an Internet connection. This isn’t a big deal though because the main bases are covered and as Chrome OS grows in popularity (and I hope that it will grow in popularity), good quality software is sure to follow.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Linux. My server at home runs DSM, the Synology version of Linux. My routers run Linux. And I’ve got Ubuntu installed as the only OS on my Thinkpad and as one of the three OSs on my Mac Pro. I have high hopes that one day, and hopefully soon, Linux will present a viable alternative to Mac OS X for general purpose use – because Microsoft certainly doesn’t seem to be making any effort to with Windows.
That day is not now though, and the main problem isn’t actually with Linux itself. It’s with the support available. Linux itself is part of the problem, of course – it requires a little too much fiddling around and customisation for it to be recommendable to granny, even with good support. With good support though, it should be a viable OS for the average family, and not just those with tech savvy dads like me.
I’ve been in the strange position of being offered commiserations on the death of Steve Jobs, which is weird because I am neither related to him nor particularly caught up in any cult of celebrity.
Genius is an overused word but, in the case of Steve Jobs, I think it applies. In the fields of technology and art, he made a difference. He changed the world. And, despite trying very hard, I can’t find any products that better his vision yet. That isn’t to say that Apple is perfect, of course, but they’re a lot closer to nirvana than any other product from any competing organisation. On the whole, people who disagree with this statement haven’t tried to live with an Apple product for a month and, in doing so, give it a fair trial.
Would I want to have had Steve Jobs’ life? No. Do I want to be the next Steve Jobs? Also no. One of the saddest things that anyone has ever said to me was that they ‘wished they could have my life’. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Don’t get me wrong – I like my life. I love my life. Most of the time it seems to come up aces, and that suits me very well. But it only suits me. It’s made to measure. Steve Jobs’ life was made to measure for Steve Jobs and the only person who could live it was him.
It is tragic that Steve Jobs died young and at the peak of his powers, but I feel that we should celebrate his life and his achievements and remember that his influence will be with us for a long time, and possibly for centuries. I am also happy for him, that he has now been put out of his pain. I can’t, and don’t want to, imagine what it must be like to live with cancer for eight years. I feel desperately sorry for his family and for his friends.
I don’t want to seem ungrateful though – I am genuinely happy to hear from you all, but a simple hello is sufficient. And telling me your news of course – especially telling me your news. Please offer me your commiserations if you hear that any of my family or friends have died – then I will be in need of them, and very likely in an extremely untogether place.