5 posts tagged “mac”

I've got an email from a friend in Dubai letting me know that the Mac User Group have organised an event there to demo the new Apple TV:

We're arranging an Apple TV Event on March 29, where an Apple engineer will demo Apple TV in Dubai. It's our first major event and we think it will be exciting!

For more information, please contact:
contact@emiratesmac.com
www.emiratesmac.com

Unfortunately I won't be able to attend as I shall be in Doha at the Al-Jazeera annual conference I have been invited to, but if you are in Dubai, check the event out, it should be great!

I got fed up of having to have to browsers running at the same time to visit some of my regular haunts on the Internet, and also got fed up of the sluggishness of FireFox, so I thought I would give Camino a go.

I installed it yesterday on my home computer and was impressed with its niftyness and of course the ability to do Vox as well as my regular blog, and the latter even displayed the formatting buttons (ala bbcode above textareas) that Safari could never render for some reason.

I've just finished installing it on my MacBook and am sure that it will be even a better experience for me. Time will tell though. There are quite a few extentions that need to be installed to get back to the glory of FireFox on Windoze as I have used for years, but am prepaired to put up with a little inconvenience if the speed of page rendering and other "feel" of the application is better.

The extentions I used to use on my Windoze installation of FireFox is a Spellchecker, Mouse Gestures, Bloglines notifier, Reminders, Gmail notifier, and a couple more probably I can't remember just now.

Let me know if you have any tips please.

The Mac Gods love me I guess. And I am grateful! I can initiate video chatting through the bundled Mac program iChat without a problem to my brother Hani who lives in the UK, however, he cannot, for the life of him do the same to me!

I thought that this must be a problem with my firewall setup, or my router or other gremlins in the system, but I am happy to report that this is not the case. Jamal can initiate an iChat session with me without too many problems, the picture on the right is Jamal's view of the session, which you can see for yourself that as this session was in-country, the line quality is crap! Jamal enjoys a 2MB connection, while I only have a 512kb in the office. The upload speeds are 256kb to 128kb, so in theory Jamal can also enjoy a 3-way chat, while I would only be able to muster a 2-way. Didn't try audio yet however, and as that requires less bandwidth, it might be able to accommodate a lot more.

This video chat is really fun! The first time I ever tried it is when I bought this MacBook, and I must confess that it was (almost) the first time I used TEXT chat as well! I know, I know, but I detest these chats at the best of times; however the video chat changed my mind about the usefulness of this technology, although it did not change my mind regading the text chat... yet.

Hani has been following up the MacWorld and Mac in general. It was through him that I got to know of new features for the new Macintosh operating system dubbed Leopard. Some of which are life savers, espcially for the office environment.

Today, he brings us news of more demonstrations in-depth of these forthcoming features. The one feature I am waiting for is Mail with its integrated notes and todos! That would be very sweet. What is actually sweeter is the integration of Spotlight, a thing I never used even while I was on the MacMini because I have no faith the in the Microsoft search function!

What does MS have to do with this? I guess before getting my MacBook, I used a Dell laptop as my "main machine", hence, I have always looked at the MacMini as a "plaything" for use to connect to the internet at home and nothing more, and I used it as such. I just ignored all the good features which I am actually discovering on a day-to-day basis. The one that I found invaluable actually is Spotlight, and when I had a customer on the phone asking for a review of his quotation, I couldn't believe how fast I found ALL the documents AND EMAILS related to the conversation we were having!

This single feature - Spotlight - convinced me to ditch Thunderbird for Mail, as the former does not integrate to Spotlight, hence it messages cannot be searched from that excellent interface. As I insist on using IMAP mail in the office, it was a very simple thing to switch as all my emails are saved on the server rather than the local computer.

I am so looking forward to the newer version of Mail when it is released, as it will help me organise my life and business a bit better.

I noticed it almost the first day it was annouced, and fell in love with it instantly. What's there not to love anyway? It's light, high resolution, black, fast, bags of disk space and memory, can run multiple operating systems, has a CD and DVD burder, and even the keyboard is sweet. Once you get used to it, you would ask yourself why didn't someone do something like this a long time ago... no more need for punching keys to type, just carressing them is enough! But even with all that I couldn't bring myself to buying one. The price I think was too much for what it is - but that's the usual thing with Apple, you pay for the name as well as quality, and as I intended at the time to write in Arabic, it was essential that I get a machine with an Arabic keyboard. Those were not available in the local Apple store.. so I just forgot about it. Until, that is, Hani came over to visit a couple of weeks ago, and then, my already crumbling defences were completely destroyed!

I called iMachines, gave them a bit of hassle to get me a better price, which they did, and I got my driver to pick it up and deliver it to me at home... the picture, I think, says it all doesn't it!

The machine hasn't been far away from me since. I even stopped using my MacMini since I got it and I think that my son Arif has taken that one over, but not officially I might add, the bugger wants me to buy him a proper gaming machine to play the latest series of online games on it. I don't mind doing that, but the agreement with him is that I'll only pay one half of the price if he saves the other half, which is more than fair I think.

So yes, I am very happy with my MacBook, except for a couple of niggly things: it runs very hot to be used as a laptop in the litteral sence, and the screen creeks when I move the laptop or open and close the machine, which is driving me nuts. Those and one other thing, it has far too many sharp edges.

I'll talk to iMachines on Saturday to see if they can replace it for me. This will be a real test of their customer service, especially since Sofyan (the owner) is away on holiday at the moment and I'm not going to tell him about this yet. Let's see how his staff take this..