Yesterday Apple announced their latest device, the iPad. The anticipation for this event was great, but the let down was even greater.
It’s basically an over sized iPod. In short, it’s a device without a place. The iPad is too big to easily carry around with you. At 9.7 inches, it won’t fit in your pocket. Since it runs iPhone OS and not full blown OS X, its quite limited. For me this just doesn’t fit in my life anywhere. If I’m on my couch and want to check my email or surf the web, I can simply reach into my pocket for my iPhone. It’s small enough that I almost always have it on me (except when its on the charger, because it needs serious battery life improvement, hopefully in the next generation) If I need more than that, I’ll get up and grab my laptop. I don’t see an in between, where I’ll feel the need to use a device that is somewhere in the middle.
The ipad:
won’t support multitasking
doesn’t have a camera
is on AT&T’s crappy network
there is already a Kindle app for iphone
can’t even make phone calls (however may be VOIP capable)
has no flash support
This is great for gadget junkies, where more=more, but my moto is less=more.
Maybe I’m wrong, and the iPad will show me a spot in my life that has been severely lacking, but somehow I doubt that.
To set it up, go to System Preferences, Desktop & Screen Saver. Under the list of available screen savers, click the plus icon and select “add RSS feed”.
Paste in your RSS feed and click OK.
The pictures at that RSS feed should now show up as your screen saver (provided you gave a valid picture RSS feed).
NOTE: I have had a few problems with this process. Sometimes when you paste the RSS feed in, and click ok, it gets stuck validating the feed. I tried again, and it worked, so I’m not really sure what the problem is.
The transition to Apples newest operating system, Snow Leopard has been mostly good, but there has been a few bumps along the way.
My first problem is that the contextual menus sometimes disappear without clicking. At first I thought it was a botched upgrade, so I did a clean install with a newly formatted hard drive, but the problem was still there. I posted on the apple forums, and found that others were having the same or similar problems. So far there is no solution.
Finally, the RSS screensaver that I LOVED is missing in Snow Leopard. Here is a picture of it in Leopard, but if you go to screensavers in Snow Leopard, its just not there. It was great because I had a subscription to my online photo gallery on all my machines. Whenever the screensaver would fire up, I would see all of our latest pictures around the house. I can’t figure out why Apple would remove such functionality.
With all of these problems, I’m still quite happy with the upgrade.
Just like the saying says, 3rd time is a charm. I tried switching to Mac two times before the final time. I am now a full fledged mac user, and am quite happy. Here is a list of things I like and dis-like:
Likes:
OS is very stable and smooth and does not slow down between reboots
faster reboots, shutdowns, sleep and wake
iPhoto is great for managing all of our digital photos
iMovie is great for making home movies from all of our video clips
terminal with a familiar set of linux commands (ssh, rsync, etc)
disk utility for managing disks (partitions, formatting, re-sizing, etc)
time machine is GREAT for no brainer backups
AdiumX is much better than Gaim or Pidgin
preferences are all stored in files instead of a registry
spotlight and quicksilver
VNC is built into the OS
File sharing is easy and make sense in P2P networks
switching computers is no longer an all day affair. Either use migration assistant or restore from a time machine backup.
switching hard drives is simply done by using disk utility to copy all files to the new drive.
expose is great way to view all your open windows, desktop , or just a particular applications windows.
The mac can be on multiple subnets simultaneously with just one NIC (Windows can have multiple IP’s on a NIC, but they have to be on the same subnet).
software installs are often times as simple as copying the application to your applications folder
playing music from remote itunes libraries is easy (unfortunately, this does NOT mean copying music, ONLY playing it).
growl is a great 3rd party notification system
Dis-Likes:
inconsistent user interface. Example: Sometimes closing a window closes the app. Other times when closing a window the app remains running.
wireless seems slower than on pc’s
mac file droppings left all over (solution for network shares: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1629) (solution for local drives: http://www.zeroonetwenty.com/blueharvest/)
not able to cut and paste files to move them around the file system, must have two windows open and drag files/folders between them.
pressing enter when something is selected changes the name, it does not open it
no GUI application like putty to manage ssh sessions
no notepad++ like application for editing text files
no Chrome browser for Mac yet…
when looking for wireless networks to connect to, Leopard does NOT display signal strength, just network name (solved in snow leopard).
NO. Email is similar to sending a postcard. Anyone along its route can read it with ease. While it’s not likely that anyone is reading your email, you should never send anything such as your social security number, credit card numbers, or passwords, etc.
