Jonathan Davies

Now some of you may be wondering where all my bog posts are on Apple’s new operating system. Well the truth is - I haven’t got it yet. I ordered it from Amazon with a Hard Drive on the Wednesday evening and they originally said that it would arrive on either Friday or Saturday. So both those days went and on Sunday evening they updated my order saying that it should arrive today - it hasn’t, but the hard drive has…

I am very frustrated at the moment. So I will be phoning up amazon and asking for some very good reasons as to why it has not arrived yet - and if they don’t I can’t see me ordering from them for a while (but feel free to order from them through my link! )

And also on a totally unrelated note I will (like yesterday not be doing a blog post on Mondays or Tuesdays. In other words: One week I may not post on a Monday one week and not a Tuesday the other and vice versa. I will probably do this up to Christmas where I will hopefully be able to get back on track with things.

I hope you guys understand both my frustrations with Amazon and my decision to take a day off a week.

How have your experiences with Leopard been so far?

I recently came across a really cool plugin for Mail.app called Letterbox which has really changed the way that I use mail for the better. Just to warn you Leopard users, at the time of writing there is not currently support for Leopard - but he is working on it. The whole idea of Letterbox is to change the workspace of Mail from being vertical to horizontal, this especially suits my widescreen display meaning I am not wasting any screen real-estate that I payed for.

Here is a quick screenshot of how it changes mail:

So as you can see you know have three vertical columns; this doesn’t make any major changes for the first two put the third in which you have far more space to read a message and I find that I don’t spend nearly as much time scrolling down

Simple and sweet. Go check it out today (if you are running Tiger that is).

Cool title isn’t it - not quite sure what it means at the moment; maybe by the time I have finished this post I will know. With the release of the iPod Touch, Apple has created another platform on which to sell music - this time though, it is mobile.

The inclusion of wi-fi was a very smart move by Apple. This feature had not been on the top of most people’s lists when expecting the sixth generation iPod, most of them wishing for just a widescreen, maybe touch interface. I don’t think that anyone would have expected them to release wi-fi if it weren’t for the iPhone; which really rolled up the expectations for it. The inclusion of wi-fi, of course, also gives us the opportunities of Safari  for web browsing and YouTube for watching those great free episodes of Heroes people doing stupid stuff.

The interface for the iTunes wi-fi music store (WFMS) is very clean and elegant. More so, if you ask me, than the desktop iTunes client. The form in which you preview a song; where a dial rotates telling you how much time you have left of the preview. For case and point about the ease of buying music. I takes me only three taps from the home screen to be able to buy something from the store. I am not sure of any online music store which is capable of doing that.

Another advantage the WFMS has over its older sibling is the load time, because of its minimal use of pictures and of course, its size the WFMS loads in seconds -  a lot faster, for me, that the desktop version.

However like all products the WFMS does come with it’s disadvantages. You can’t (to my knowledge) get it to save your password for purchases so I find myself clunky putting it in each time - very annoying.

Another feature, which I can’t understand why they missed out was the ability to buy audiobooks and to download podcasts - as far as I can see and the iPod Touch has shown it is very capable of downloading content via iTunes.

In conclusion, Apple have released a very strong base to build on. With the few changes in the future, it could be perfect. I guess that is what what I meant by the title, it is flawed, but there is no reason for it to be. Apple could have easily put in those missing features - I am going to look into why they didn’t that is for sure.

You may have noticed some new ads appear on the the site lately.  I thought that I would go through and explain what these are and how they benefit both me and you. These are purely to help me host the site and buy new tech related products to review for the site.

There are currently two ad schemes running on the site:

Text-Link-Ads

Text-Link-Ads are a company that help you make money through your blog. If you click on the link - and sign up for free you will be able to in-bed some code into your blog and start making money! They are a great site and I am starting to make a little amount of money every month - but considering I don’t really have to do to much its great.

Click on the link and check them out and even maybe sign up - remember it is free!

Amazon

I’m sure that you all use Amazon, they have insanely good prices and you will probably see about four ads lined up on each post whenever you click on a independent blog post. Why four? Because it looks a lot better, and gives you a more choice. You will quite often see links to products that I talk about on my blog such as the Lacie Hard Drive and iLife 08.

So if your in a spending mood feel free to buy something for yourself and help me keep the site going!

I am looking at getting some better looking advertising that is less intrusive so watch out for that.

Within hours mac users all over the world will all have their chance to purchase Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. I am eagerly awaiting my copy in the post; and a 500GB Hard Drive for use with Time Machine. I have also received my iPod Touch and it looks like a keyboard will be arriving soon

I am going to be writing about Leopard over the next month or so and I wanted to give you a preview of what is to come!

I will be going through nearly all of the major new features in Leopard, such as Time Machine, Spaces and Quick Look and as I mentioned earlier I got a new iPod Touch,which, of course a review and a couple of other posts and soon some initial thoughts about it.

And as a preview - there are some things that I really don’t like.

I will also be writing about my new phone - A Sony Ericsson K800i and asking you for some advice! I am also pleased to announce that I am going to be starting a new podcast in the near future; but for now I am going to have to keep you waiting. November is going to be a busy month with lots of new and cool stuff to discuss, so much that I am sure it will go on into the new year.

What are you going to be doing at the time of the Leopard launch? Leave a comment or use the contact form! 

Skype is great; here is why. I just got of Skype after having a lengthy conversation with my dad. He is currently in the US. How much did that whole conversation cost us - nothing. This is one of the many reasons that I love Skype.

I’m going to go a bit deeper into the pros and cons with this really cool app.

Pros

It’s Free!:

You can’t get much better than that, I use Skype to talk with my friends and family, even those who live in the UK

It Holds No Bounds:

You can talk for as long as you like to whoever you like; granted they have to have an internet connection and a computer but who doesn’t nowadays?

Simple Interface:

I hate those small buttons that you get on mobile phones. With Skype you can see exactly what you want and all the buttons make sense to their purpose. Something I am unsure of for most companies.

When it’s no free… It’s cheap:

One of the great features of Skype is to phone landline's for local or cheaper then average rates. For instance: If I wanted to phone Japan I would put in the Japanese number and skype would send it overseas via the internet and then offload it as a local call.

Cons

Both People Need it:

If you want to do a free call to each other then yes, the person you are calling does need to have Skype installed. And when they don’t understand quite how it works you have to go through it over the phone

Feedback:

Unfortunately some people find it hard to understand the sheer anguish I get when I get feedback from what I am saying in Skype. The normal cause for this is when they have their speakers on and that is going back into their mic. I know, this is a problem with the computer, not Skype but it still really bugs me.

Initial Investment:

Yay Skype is free! After go go get that $60 uncomfortable headset and buy all those nifty accessories that you are offered when signing up.

Conclusion

As I started this post - Skype is great and I think that it is very hard to improve on it. All they can really do is work on increasing the quality of the calls. I didn’t mention this but Skype sounds way better than your average phone. I recommend Skype to everyone, it works on Mac, PC and Linux, so give it a go, I wouldn’t be surprised if half of your friend already used it.

Do you use Skype? What is your favourite feature and why? Either leave a comment or use the contact form!

With all the hype about Leopard it seems that everyone (or nearly everyone) has forgotten that yesterday was the sixth birthday of the original iPod. Lets take a look down memory lane and look at some of those revolutionary features

- 5GB of storage, that’s 1000 songs in your pocket
Ultra thin hard drive
10 hours of battery life
Firewire (which is still revolutionary as they don’t have it anymore)

The iPod has certainly come a long way; but it has also lost some great things that you no longer get a dock and power supply and of course as I mentioned earlier - Firewire. There were many reports when it was launched that the price was too high, but if you were to put in all those extras now I wouldn’t be surprised if it amounted to a similar price.

The iPod has certainly had a big effect on my life. If I hadn’t originally bought an iPod Nano in 2005 I don’t think I would have this Mac or blog. I believe that it is known as the “iPod halo effect”. As I am now (or at least when it arrives) on my third iPod, Apple have managed to scrounge (open the calculator) about £520 on the iPods alone plus my MacBook Pro.

So this leads me on to my questions for you; what was your first iPod and how much money have you handed over to Apple? Leave a comment or use the contact form!

 Yet another episode of Tech Today (number 7) has been released! 

DOWNLOAD

Running Time: 34:25

 SHOW NOTES

Leopard is coming out on the 26th of October -

Joy of Tech Comic about Leopard - 

There are over 300 new features in Leopard -

Jonathan’s blog post about his favourite 3 Leopard Features -

For you guys and gals in the UK

Skype are making a phone with 3 -

Make your own shows with Kyte TV -

Yet another Playstation 3! -

Finally! Apple is going to be giving 3rd party developers a go -

My Blog Post about Apps on the iPhone -

The Orange Box -

I remember when I first said that I was going to buy a Might Mouse many people tried to stop me, they told me of all the problems and how hard it is to use. But there were a couple of things that kept me coming back the the Mighty Mouse:

Bluetooth, as I have mentioned several times, I only have two USB ports and I really need them, so I had to get a mouse which had bluetooth capabilities
The design, it looks great next to my MacBook Pro and when you compare it to the only other bluetooth mice, both from Logitech, it beat them design wise hands down.

SO after having the mouse for a few days, here are a few thoughts:

It takes ages to sync

I am forever turning my notebook to stand-by as a I carry it from lesson to lesson or arond the house. It take about 40 seconds, way too long for my liking. I want to be able to open the lid and go from there.

It fits in my hand very well

I quite often see Microsoft or Logitech releasing new mice with a weird shape to fit to your hand, I have never found them very conformable in the first place. I just have to rest my hand on the mouse and it fit I know where everything is - easy

What’s the problem with the right click?

This is the number one complaint I hear about the Mighty Mouse - Half the time my right click doesn’t work. I have found out the reason, but I can’t say under any other circumstances I would have. If you have you finger over the area that you do a left click and you press to do a right, it thinks you mean to do a left click. Simple, and I don’t have a problem. I guess that I always did that instinctively.

Conclusions:

I am very happy with the Might Mouse, I haven’t used it long enough to know the battery life but I will update the post when it does run out of batteries. My advice, go use it in the store and see if you like it yourself. Because in the end it comes down to personal preference.

I thought that I would start a new series of blog posts entailing what I would do if I were Steve Jobs and what would go and so on, I thought I would start by writing about what many people seem to think is the missing link between the iMac and the Mac Pro.

What I would be looking for in this Mac would be:

A single 2.66GHz - 2.8GHz Xeon Processor
4 RAM slots so up to 8GB of RAM
An NVidia 8600GT
2 Hard Drive Bays

With this sort of machine Apple could offer the expandability of the Mac Pro and the affordability of the iMac. This would be a great machine for people like me who maybe don’t want the high price tag of the Mac Pro.

I could see this machine priced at the £700 - £2000 mark with all the possible configurations but wouldn’t expect a monitor to come as standard.

I don’t think that it is out of the realms of possibility for them to make the missing mac, as to what they would call it I don’t know.

What would you call the missing Mac and what sort of specifications would you give it? Leave a comment or use the contact form!