Wheelz Online

So, for anyone who didn’t know or didn’t care, today was the day that apple fanboys wait all year round for.  That is the keynote speach from Steve Jobs to show off the best that Apple have to offer at the start of the year.  This is quite a fun time as people online start wondering about the smallest bits of news which is usually completely wrong in the first place but they swear they are correct all the time.

What did this year bring?  Well a few updates really…  Updated iphone/ipod touch, updated apple tv and downloading and renting of films and then a new subnotebook.  Its a very pretty laptop, entitled the macbook air, but I can really see use for it myself.  I’m not going to bother putting up lots of shiny photos and going on about it for pages as you’ll be able to find that on practically every tech site on the net at the moment.

Right whats next??  Well i’m into my second week in the new office with my new team.  I’m still not sure how well we are all settling in together.  I’m enjoying it as its really quite most of the time and on the odd occasion that there are other people in the office, its plesent and I have things to talk about to them.  The more I’m getting to know some of them, the more they are suprising me for different reasons.  But i’m babbling now.  Its 2am and I really should be in bed.

So, like a lot of geeks do when a new bit of kit comes out, I went and spent 2 hours in a queue outside the Regent Street store of Apple (well is was more like around the block from the apple store) And at 6.02pm the doors opened and by 6.30pm I was sat in a restaurant looking at my shiny new phone.  I’ll give you a more detailed review of it later, but for now all I have to say is WOW!  this thing is great.

So on friday i was in a queue for Leopard at my friendly Apple shop.  This was the time to find out if all the hype was justified and could it really kill Vista. Fast forward to 8pm and i’m sat in front of the tv with my macbook and leopard.  It took about an hour to upgrade from Tiger and then I was greeted by a really sexy interface that game me a happy feeling deep down inside.  From the start it just makes everything easy. “Found a wireless network.  Would you like to connect to it?” wow, yes please.  There are a few things which I still have to get my head around like Time Machine which lets you recover deleted files.  I have an external hard drive which i want to use, but can you have more than one use for the time machine drive?  I don’t know yet.

But on first impressions, I have to admit that its better than Vista.  Am I glad I made the jump to mac?  Too right.

I’ve had my mac now for over a week and am now able to give it a proper review in my opinion.  The first thing I have to say about it is that it really looks good.  I’ve had 3 pc laptops over the years, and yes they have been functional and did all I want, but they were heavy and really rather boring.  But this macbook is sleek, black, shiny and quite light too.  It is easy to open up - no trying to fumble with a catch on the front or side - it has a magnetic lock on the lid which keeps the mac together.

The best thing I have found with it though is the speed.  Its a 2gh Intel Duo chip and 1gb mem and it boots up amazingly fast.  Again, comparing it with the pc, it only takes a few seconds to turn on and ask for your login details and then within 30 seconds its ready to use. With Vista you can go make a cup of tea once you’ve switched it on before its ready to use.  Then once its on and ready to use, the load time of software is unbelievable.  I can have Photoshop, Dreamweaver, itunes and mail all running at the same time and there is no lag on it.

So at the end of the day, I can honestly say that I make the correct decision about buying a macbook

** still miss the right click though **

Well, i’ve had my shiny black macbook now for four days and my first impressions are great. As I said i’ve never even switched one on before so I didn’t really know what to expect and I was in for a shock to be honest.

The first thing I have to note is the boot up time. Even with Vista and my very fast PC I still have time to go into the kitchen and make a cup of tea before its loaded up and all the drivers, tsr’s and all that have opened up and its ready for me to use. I assumed this would be the same with the mac, but no. I swiched on this little box of tricks and in 20 seconds I had the dock at the bottom and a message telling me it had found an configured my home network and all i needed to do was give it my wep key.

I’m still having a couple of changeover problems thought. I miss the right click and also the alt button doesn’t do the same things on OS X as it does on windows. I have to remember that I used the apple key with letters for shortcuts, but i’m getting there.

I just need to say that I doubted all the people who said they were fantastic, and now I appologise to every one of them. I love my mac.

I’ve been a PC user ever since the 286 of the 80’s. Through windows 3.11 and onto Vista. I love the PC; I know it intimately and can pretty much sort out any problem that comes my way with it. But today i’ve moved to the dark side - I’ve bought a macbook. I tell myself that this is because as a web designer, I need to be able to view what my webpages will look like on Safari. But looking around the internet there are many websites that can emulate the look for a PC user, but still i’ve bought one.

I think I’ve gone and bought it because I’ve never even switched one on and I don’t know what i’m missing. I can’t ever imagine liking it more than my beloved PC’s but it would be nice if it did a little of what I think it can. So come back soon and I’ll let you know how this PC boy is coping with one-click.

The two things which I connect to my PC which are most important to me are my PocketPC phone and my iPod.  When I installed Vista on my PC I was confussed as I thought that I hadn’t installed it correctly or missed a step or something because I couldn’t get either of my items to be noticed by Vista - Hence, no updating my ipod with my latest music and my Pocket PC was useless as I couldn’t sync the calender and contacts etc.

Fast forward to this morning and both issues are made a little clearer to me.  Firstly, on reading the headlines it turns out that iTunes is not compatible with Vista and has issues with purchased music and also syncing with the iPod; an update will be available “within weeks”.  Great so no new music for me until Apple pull their finger out.  I mean, the Beta has only been available for what?  a year or so???

Secondly and this is aimed squarly at M$.  when I installed Vista there was an app in the control panel called Windows Mobile Centre.  From reading the Microsoft website this is the update to Activsync.  But I couldn’t get my phone to work - no way.   So again, I wake up this morning and windows wants to download and install ‘updates’.  Want to know what the update was?  Well it was the setup.exe file for the above mentioned Windows Mobile Centre.

Why do Microsoft insist on selling up products which aren’t finished?   Now onto the good news.  Lots more hardware and software drivers I need are becoming available, so Vista is at least more stable than it was when I initially installed it.  I still recommend to my clients and friends to wait for a few months before thinking about upgrading.

As you may or may not know, i am a Microsoft Fan, there I admit it. I’ve been using it since the old days of windows for workgroups and am pretty good at it. But recently i’ve been getting starry-eyed over macs. There is no doubt about it, a standard mac looks nicer than a standard pc. Also I look at OS X and thing it looks nice. But is it better? Well its different.

At the apple conference this week, Steve Jobs was rolled out to wax lyrical about the new version of OSX due out soon. And during this he used any excuse to make fun of MS and Vista. One point I did pick up on was their new feature called Time Machine. This is for almost anyone who has ever lost anything or deleted a file. They can just go back in time and get it back. Oh what joy this is and lets take the piss out of Windows for not having it.

Except… they do have it. In windows server 2003 there is a feature called Shadow copy, which keeps old versions of files and lets you retrieve them. Now, ok its part of the server not the client, but that is what its aimed at. most people if they loose a word document at home are a little bit pissed off but thats all. If the same happends at work it can be a disaster. Oh, and Vista is having this feature as a stand alone so you don’t need the server to do this, or so I am led to believe.

All this makes me think, that the new version of OSX is not so cool as Apple would like us to think. Otherwise surely they would be concentrating on their product rather than ridiculing the competition.

OK, so we have all been waiting for years for Windows Vista to be released, and while we all know that it is ’supposed’ to be secure and better for us, we are all thinking “Is it going to look as cool as Apple’s OSX?” From what i’ve read and seen about it I think It will be a huge visual imprtovement on what us PC folk have been used to so I’m waiting for next year somtime for its release with anticipation.

But with all the hastle of trying to ship it when they said so, you would think thats what they would concentrate on. But they have also sent out a “Vista Industrial Design Toolkit” to a ton of PC Manufacturers on how to build a ‘pretty looking’ box for vista to sit in. from an article on the subject

… contains a whole host of suggestions about how to build a PC that will fit with the look and style of Windows Vista

Now lets be honest about this, off the shelf PC’s have come a long way since the beige boxes of 10 years ago, but they are still pretty dull. But why do Microsoft think that its their responsibility to make sure that the PC’s of the future are nice looking and “want PCs to be objects of pure desire”. I think they have stumbled upon the fact that an awful lot of people are into the mac’s because they look cool compared to a PC. But lets be honest, for a techie, even a novice one at that, its not hard to change the box on your computer to something you like rather than a black case, or a silver one.

So is this another sign that Microsoft is starting to get twitchy over Apples encroaching slice of the computer market? I think so

You can read the full article on ars technica