Maybe it’s because we’re nearing the end of the season for Lost, or perhaps it’s because I’ve just gotten through (re)watching the first season of the syndicated action series Robinson Crusoe, but I’ve been thinking lately: If I were trapped on a desert island, what’s the one third-party app I couldn’t live without?
Apple sells a pretty robust machine straight out of the box. Regardless of which system you buy, you get the tools needed for e- mail and Web access and a suite of cool applications for creative pursuits—iPhoto for photo cataloging and light editing, iWeb for Web page creation, iMovie for movie editing, iDVD to burn the stuff to disc, GarageBand for music. And you also get a relative host of useful utilities and other software that handle your day-to-day maintenance needs.
But what third-party application would you be hard-pressed to live without at all?
OS X users are blessed (or is it cursed?) with a plethora of choices for our Web browsing needs. Safari, of course, is the dominant browser, followed by Firefox, and then any of a number of others, including OmniWeb, Camino, Opera, and the venerable iCab (not listed in any sort of order).
In the course of my job over the last few years, I’ve had the opportunity to use all of these browsers, and many more—too many to count, in fact. While they are all excellent browsers, over time I’ve settled on Firefox as my personal favorite (with Safari as a close second).
However, when people would ask me why I preferred Firefox to Safari, I never really had a good answer. The biggest apparent reason is Firefox’s support for add-ons that can greatly extend the browser’s power, and that’s certainly something.
The GeForce GTX 285 blows away the 4870 if you compare tests on PC benchmarking sites; in fact, it can also mostly keep pace with the Radeon 4870 X2, a variant of the ATI card that sports two Radeon 4870 chips working in parallel.
Why wait until June? My bet is that Nvidia is holding off until Snow Leopard, the next major update to Mac OS X, drops. (Apple hasn’t announced a release date for Snow Leopard, but it has scheduled its annual developers conference for June 8). Maybe Nvidia couldn’t get the drivers to work the card into an interim Mac OS X update between now and then, or maybe the performance of the card will lend itself more to OpenCL, the parallel processing technology in Mac OS X 10.6 that will enable “regular” applications to tap into the processing capability of a GPU.
Monday was an exciting day for me. Tweetie for Mac was released, bringing atebits' popular iPhone Twitter app to the Mac. It may seem a little silly to be excited about the release of a Twitter app, but if you're on a Mac and using Twitter, you were probably excited too.
I haven't been on Twitter since the beginning like some of my friends, but I do enjoy following people and interacting with them. It's a very interesting phenomenon—people post about whatever they happen to be doing or thinking to those who follow them, and you respond if you want to.
According to Point Topic (a UK-based market-research company), there were 79 million broadband subscribers in the U.S. at the end of 2008—that’s 19 percent of the world’s total, second only to China’s 83 million. (The report defines broadband as anything faster than 256Kbps.) However, at roughly 26 percent, the U.S. ranked 22nd out of 113 countries in terms of broadband penetration by population.
There is a big difference between the price of purchasing a computer and the cost of owning one. That's a distinction that Microsoft carefully dodges in its latest round of commercials, but I don't think Microsoft is fooling many people (except maybe analyst Roger Kay, but that's another story). Apple has even seen fit to respond to the rather silly points Microsoft tries to make.
"Millions of people have switched to Mac because they love the security, stability and power that comes with world-class hardware and amazing software that just works, right out of the box," Apple spokesman Bill Evans told Macworld, breaking Apple's silence on the matter to this point.
Apple executives must have been giggling like school girls when the ad featuring Lauren De Long debuted. "I'm just not cool enough to be a Mac person," says Lauren after entering an Apple retail store.
While wandering around Paris recently with my husband and infant, I passed by the sweetest little ceramics shop you’ve ever seen. It was exactly the kind of place my husband hates going into, and the kind of place that would have me exported if I brought in a seven-month-old who has only recently discovered the joy of dropping things on the floor. Worried I wouldn’t remember where it was when I came back on my own, I did the first thing I thought of: I grabbed my iPhone and took a picture of the nearest street signs.
In fact, these days I probably use my iPhone’s camera more for remembering small details than for taking photos of the people I love. (I usually carry around a small point-and-shoot camera for that task.) And I happen to know I’m not the only one. So I asked my fellow editors to share some of the less typical ways they use their camera. I thought I’d share a few of them with you.
Comparison Shopper: Looking for the perfect lamp? Shoot photos of lamps you like as you shop around—along with each lamp’s price tag and details. It makes comparing products from different stores much easier. If you forget which store you were at, look up the photo’s location in iPhoto. (The iPhone embeds location data in your shots—assuming it can get a signal). While you’re at it, take a photo of the space it’s intended for to serve as a reference while you’re shopping.
