Saturday, September 22, 2007
iPhone Carried Across Pond.★
Because things are so crazy hectic, all we've done on the MacTake are drafts for posts. That means we haven't actually posted anything, so I'm just going to post this overly pessimistic draft to try and pretend we've actually accomplished something here. Bear with us, university application stuff will be over soon.
The post below this one outlined the basics of the UK iPhone release, and we view them with mixed feelings here at the MacTake. We'll admit that the cost of the iPhone itself (£269) is on target, but we can't happily accept the cost of the contract for the phone (£35 per month entry level). To be fair, we always complain about the cost, it's just what we do.
An 18 month contract is far too long, especially since the features offered are definitely sub-standard. You get free access to all the 7500 Cloud wifi hotspots, but other than that you're limited to EDGE access instead of 3G. I don't want to pay £35 a month and only get EDGE access when I'm not near a cloud access point, as well as only getting 200 minutes a month.
When you go to pick up an iPhone in the UK (Assuming you even want to buy one), you'll have to fork up £269 for the phone, and then £630 for the contract. Altogether that's £899. The advanced technology is in the phone, the most advanced thing available in the contract is visual voicemail.
I have a feeling that phone unlocking shops will soon be handling iPhones on a daily basis.
The whining over, I'm happy to see that the iPhone made it across the pond at all. If the contract price drops, or even just includes more features, I'll pick an iPhone up. Till then, my RAZR is a lot smaller, a lot cheaper, and a lot easier to stick in my pocket. Plus all the assassins carried the exact model I have in the Bourne Ultimatum movie.
★ 0 Comments. | By Skippy, Saturday, September 22, 2007 8:57 AM
Saturday, July 7, 2007
App Pick: RCDefaultApp★
Ever had files that refused to open with your application of choice? I own Dreamweaver but much prefer TextMate so when I go to a folder and see all my files with Dreamweaver icons I have to drag each of them to TextMate on the dock before I can continue my development work.Control clicking, and setting always open with is far too tedious, and the whole process just bugs me. Dreamweaver won't let me say, "Hell, I don't like you, relinquish your grasp on my files and give them to TextMate", and TextMate won't take the offensive and snatch back what belongs to it.
So I found a great app called RCDefaultApp so cunningly named from Rubicode. It's good, it's very good indeed.
Install it, and it simply adds a preference pane to System Preferences. Open that pane and every option, preference and parameter related to the art of double clicking files is available to change as you see fit.
With a few clicks I had confirmed TextMate's position as Big Daddy. With a few more I could've given the title to TextEdit. Which would have been blaspheme, and then I would've been burned.
So check it out, its worth having around for when a filetype goes awol, or starts misbehaving.
RCDefaultApp
Happy Mac'ing!
★ 0 Comments. | By Skippy, Saturday, July 7, 2007 7:22 PM
Sunday, March 4, 2007
Flock.★
I was sure that Firefox and Safari were simply the best browsers out there, but I was wrong. Terribly wrong.Today, I met Flock 0.7.11 (catchy, but free). Its a 'sort of' port of Mozilla and retains all of what makes Mozilla shiny, tasty and vaguely web 2.0. I was familiar with this app back in its beta days, but simply lost contact with it after deleting the installer and its been great to rediscover it in its v0.7 glory.
It's really about the features in Flock. User friendly and aesthetic GUI, and a plethora of beautiful little features that make grown men drool, and young babies cry.
Flock is more than web 2.0 ready, its almost web 3.0 ready. It'll automatically detect that you have a blogger account (when u sign in), and after quickly giving it your login details, it'll present you with the option of being able to post to your blog from within the browser gui.
It'll do something similar with photo gallery accounts like flickr, although I haven't looked into to it yet.
Flock also has a bar at the bottom that you can drag snippets of text onto, to store and retrieve later.
Simply put, this app is dead handy, and has become the ultimate browser for me. For something in its pre version 1.0 development stages, this browser is just stunning.
Check it out at http://www.flock.com/
technorati tags:App_Pick
Blogged with Flock
★ 0 Comments. | By Skippy, Sunday, March 4, 2007 5:23 PM
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
All Mac Browser Showdown★
These days, the folks at Apple say that Safari is the best out there. The folks at Mozilla however, are pretty sure Firefox is simply the best. Of course on the mac we have the option of two mozilla browsers, both free and open source.Camino was developed a while back to better match the slick and polished GUI of Mac OS X, but overall both have the same basic functionality even if Camino is updated much less frequently and lacks a more polished plugin and add-on feature.
And of course Firefox, which enjoys a more regular update cycle and better polished extras.
So its fairly safe to say that the choice can be reduced to just Safari and Firefox, and if you swing the Firefox way, whether or not you use Camino is down to personal preference.
Safari VS Firefox.
Lets start with Safari. Bundled right with OS X, but thankfully not integrated entirely into the OS (such as Internet Explorer being not much more than an add on to Windows Explorer, and integral part of the functioning OS).
Safari looks like its been designed from the ground up to visually please and match its slick OS X environment. The browser defaults to apple.com/startpage and load-time is only one or two seconds at the very most (normally less than a second).
Safari supports tabs, RSS, and has a handy little option to do ‘Private Browsing’. When activated this ensures Safari doesn’t record or remember any temporary data concerning your session, very useful if you’re at a friend’s house and want to access sensitive data such as your gmail accounts on their mac.
And now, to introduce Firefox. Firefox was one of the first really, really good free browsers. For a windows buff I wouldn’t recommend anything else, but unfortunately thats where it falls a little short on the mac. Its clearly a windows port, and is almost uncomfortable running in OS X.
Firefox supports tabs, RSS and has an unlimited number of extra handy options available via plug in downloads.
The Comparison.
RSS
Both browsers do a nifty RSS, although I have to say Safari’s RSS reader is much more visually impacting, and has a few more advanced features like searching feeds and limiting their size.
Safari:
Firefox:
Form Memory, remembered passwords and commonly searched terms.
This is an area where Safari miserably falls short of the competition. Firefox has a handy little memory feature that kicks in whenever you’ve logged in to a website. It’ll generally ask you if you want your user details saved, so that next time you go to the site you won’t even have to type them in again. Just because sometimes that might be a security issue, doesn’t mean a user shouldn’t have the option to implement it or not!
Firefox automatically logs me in to most sites:
Where as Safari really, just has no clue:
*Update: Safari does actually have functionality built in to remember usernames and passwords, its Preferences> Autofill. But as default, this turned off.
Spellchecker:
Safari doesn’t even have one, and Firefox clearly (and most usefully) does. Really big slip up there, having a spell checker in your browser is just bliss, Camino also has one built in.
Firefox spellchecker:
Camino spellchecker:
Cross-browser compatibility:
On installation, Firefox can automatically import your Safari preferences, bookmarks, passwords etc. Useful.
Also, dragging a link from safari to firefox is easy, allowing users to freely swap in and out of browser windows:
Web CompatibilityOne interesting thing ( and annoying ) is that Safari doesn’t support most online WYSIWYG editors. For instance, to post on blogger I really have to use Firefox.
The winner:
I rarely ever do this but I’m afraid to say that I can declare no clear winner. Yes, I am guilty of writing a lengthy review to determine the better browser and have arrived to an inconclusive dead end.
During everyday browsing, you’ll find my dock looking a little like this:
Its easy enough to switch in and out of browsers, and having both apps running is often very useful. Sometimes I have safari on Private Browsing farming information off the net I don’t want records kept of, while I browse freely with Firefox.Happing Mac’ing!
Labels: Reviews
★ 0 Comments. | By Skippy, Wednesday, February 21, 2007 7:06 PM
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
MainMenu (Nifty App!)★
Every now and then one comes across a very nifty app and feels a desire to spread the love. Well, I stumbled across MainMenu ( http://www.santasw.com/ ) a while ago but being an emotional chunk of granite and well, you know, qu'est-que c'est? L'amour? C'est quoi?Information you need to know first: MainMenu is made by the folks at santasw.com, its free, beautiful, and completely essential (for me anyway).
MainMenu will perform things like health checks, restart the dock, restart finder, clean caches, clean log files, repair permissions, and much (oh so much) more.
After installing, a little icon will appear up by the nether-nether land of the airport and bluetooth menu, and of course, spotlight. MainMenu allows you to choose what icon you want to appear (and since i've changed mine i have no idea what the default one actually was) It should all look something like this:
The icon to the left of the bluetooth icon is my MainMenu icon.Clicking the icon reveals the great looking gui.
From here everything is at your finger tips. Dock acting up? - Restart it:
Same goes for toggling showing of invisible files in finder.
Check out the options under 'Other Tasks':
Advanced users might create maintenance scripts to run say, a log clean out every Friday afternoon. MainMenu can hide or show its log window ( it remembers your settings ) which looks something like this during a permissions check:
There is no aspect of this app that disappoints me, aside from its decided inability to make me a turkey sandwich. ( Please add this at some point Devs. )Though roughly recommend using this app, check it out at
http://www.santasw.com/
Happy Mac'ing.
★ 6 Comments. | By Skippy, Tuesday, February 20, 2007 7:44 PM
