Briefly About the Show

Apple's new Mac advertising campaign has recieved a ton of media attention lately. It's not surprising, everything Apple does seems to make the front page of tech news.

ZeroLogik even got a lot of shit for defending "some" of what the ads say in a recent rebuttal piece. We mostly set out to counter moronic points made against the ads, but same difference.

Well, we came across some spoof ads poking fun at the originals and they're hilarious. See? We're not one-sided zealots. By the way, Windows = Communism.

Posted by ZeroLogik at 4:45 PM | Permalink

I just got my full copy of Macromedia Studio 8 in the mail. I'm going to be evaluating the hell out of it in the coming weeks - especially Flash 8 because I'm in the middle of writing a University course that teaches it. I'll make some observations and let you know what I find.

I haven't seen any reviews of the product outside of the typical CNet and so on. But they say everything from the big software makers is good.

Posted by ZeroLogik at 7:32 AM | Permalink

Opera is one of the non-IE browsers that people love to preach about. It's lightweight, easy to install/update, fast and has a slew of features that even Firefox doesn't. All in all, it's a good browser, but it's never been my style.

Just the way it operates, where buttons are etc... doesn't appeal to me. However, if you love Opera then you'll love the news... today it went FREE.

In the past you could download it, but if you wanted to run the browser without little ads in the UI you had to pay for a license. Silly! This always annoyed me anyway, so the fact that they removed it is not that big a deal to me.

Besides, you could get an activation code online easily. So all I have to say is "So what?" My only question now is "How do they plan to make money?" I guess they have pay-support - but if that's their only revenue then I have to question how stable and solid future versions will be.

Posted by ZeroLogik at 8:34 AM | Permalink

Windows Vista is the next major release of the Windows operating system coming from Microsoft. Development began in 2001 and we "should" see a release by late 2006 according to Microsoft. In the mean time information about the OS has started to surface and in my opinion, it's fucking insane. Here's some of it, and YES it's all true...

In the Home category, Microsoft will create four product editions: Vista Starter Edition, Vista Home Basic Edition, Vista Home Premium Edition, and Vista Ultimate Edition (previously known as the "Uber" Edition). The Business category will feature three editions: Vista Small Business Edition, Vista Professional Edition, and Vista Enterprise Edition.

For those of you not counting, that's 7 editions of Windows Vista. And I love the fact that one of the editions used to be the "Uber" edition. That's just comedy. Now for the real juice...

Nigel Page is a strategist with Microsoft Australia. He told APC today that Vista would work best on a video card with more than 256MB RAM, 2GB of DDR3 memory and a S-ATA 2 hard drive.

Dear lord! If it requires this much hardware to run the OS optimally, then what software will be able to run on top of it? I mean you'd need dual-core, 64-bit processors running side-by-side, and 8GB of RAM to run your 3D software like MAX and Maya and then come to terms with the fact that a huge chunk of that is being eaten up by the OS itself.

This better change in a big way before Vista is released or Microsoft might just lose big-time to other OSes on the market.

Posted by ZeroLogik at 7:22 AM | Permalink

Well it's about damn time! There are all these blog search sites out there and they've been out there for months, if not longer. I know Google itself grabs some blog info, but it always seemed to miss a lot.

Now we can all relax because Google officially launched their blog search. I have to say my first try at using it (I searched for "grass apple") was great. It turned up 100% of my blog entries at The Grass Apple. Pretty cool.

Posted by ZeroLogik at 8:20 AM | Permalink

Apple released a new version of iTunes the other day (iTunes5). One of the things Jobs touted during the announcement was the new "cleaned up" interface. The problem is that this new cleaned up interfaces is 100% unique from any other UI for any other Apple app out there.

Which brings me to my point. Apple has several iLife apps or built in apps that come with your Mac purchase, but few of them look the same. Why is that?

Safari uses the old brushed metal look, iTunes has a newer grey plastic look, the new Mail has a kind of white plastic glassy hybrid look, and don't even get me started on Garage Band. Then you have their pro apps like Final Cut, Motion and so on.

Just take a look at the screen shot on the left. Why not just pick a couple standardized interfaces for particular types of apps and use them. Do we really need 5 or 6 different UIs for such standard apps as Mail, Safari, and iTunes? By the way, my favorite is iTunes 5 - let's have more of that.

Posted by ZeroLogik at 7:22 AM | Permalink

It seems to me that Google is the new Microsoft. They keep expanding into new markets and usually they can offer a new service or app for free, which gets them off to a great start. Recently they've decided to release an IM client called Google Talk.

I haven't tried it yet, because they don't have the Mac version out yet, but I look forward to checking it out. I mean, I've heard some pretty good things about it's voice chat abilities. Although I don't really understand Google's thinking in entering this fairly profitless market. Maybe I'm wrong about it being profitless.

Apparently Google Talk operates on top of the open source Jabber network which is also supported by Apple's iChat and AOL's ICQ clients. If nothing else, it brings attention to the open Jabber network. I'd say that's a good thing if nothing else.

Posted by ZeroLogik at 7:11 AM | Permalink

For those of you who know me, you know that I switched to Macintosh about 9 months ago and I haven't looked back since. Mac OS X is stable, secure, fast, useful, and beautiful.

So far everything about the Mac has exceeded my skeptical expectations. With one exception. The web browsers. It's not that they're bad (they're all better than IE on Windows) - it's just that there are tradeoffs to choosing one over another and none of them really stand out. Here's what I mean...

Safari: Integrates with all Mac features, slick looking OS X interface - However, it's slow. Bitch if you want, but using it feels slow. Sites load noticeably slower than when using Firefox or Camino on the same sites. Also, some sites still don't quite render right with it. I'm talking big popular sites like Cingular.com and so on.

Firefox: Great browser. Fast, stable, renders pages well. The only problem is that because it's cross-platform, you don't get any OS integration or any cool interface tweaks or Spotlight integration available with the latest Mac applications.

Camino: This one's built on the Gecko engine like Firefox, but is always at least 2 steps behind Firefox and is rarely stable enough to rely on. Sure it's fast and you get all the cool GUI things and some Mac integration, but still unpolished. I'm not complaining - it's still on 0.92a at the time of this post and I'm sure it'll improve, but it's not there yet.

So the net result is that any browser I choose has tradeoffs. There's no clear winner and no easy decision. I use all the good features I mentioned above and no browser has them all. I thought about trying Opera for Mac, but just can't deal with the advertisements.

On Windows, at least you can install Firefox and (in my opinion) feel comfortable in knowing that you're using the best browser available for the OS. Let's face it, IE has a long way to go if it wants to compete again.

I'm pulling for Apple to really get it together and refine the shit out of Safari so it's fast and useful. Oh, and what's with it being pretty much the only native OS X app now that uses the metallic interface elements? I like it okay, but either make it skinnable or consistent!

Posted by ZeroLogik at 2:00 AM | Permalink

For all you Windows users out there, a new day is just around the corner. And by around the corner I mean about a year or two away. Since Windows XP was released (10/25/2001) Microsoft has been working on their next generation OS to follow it up. It was supposed to be released in 2004, but since Microsoft is known for delays it had to be pushed back... 2 years back. Now the next version of Windows is due out in late 2006 to early 2007.

Until now, the OS was going by its code name (Longhorn). But a few days ago Microsoft announced the official name for the next version of Windows. It's to be called Windows Vista.

There are a lot of theories on what the name means and why they chose it, but I like this theory from Tony Martin

VISTA is believed to be an acronym...

Viruses
Infections
Spyware
Trojans
Adware

Posted by ZeroLogik at 11:31 AM | Permalink

I'm getting kind of tired of the never-ending debate between Windows users and Mac users. My problem is that no one really seems to be objective about the thing. If they were, they'd see Macs are much more appealing :)

There's really only 1 subjective topic when comparing the two systems. You either like the Windows UI better or the Mac UI better and that's completely up to you. I won't argue that point at all cause it's a matter of taste. Albeit bad taste if you like Windows, but taste nonetheless.

People I work with accuse me of being a Microsoft hater and call Macs toys. Yeah, like it's that simple. I loved Windows for years - especially when the alternative was Mac OS 9 or prior (yuck). The basic problem is this... Windows = viruses, worms, malware that you sometimes "cannot" protect yourself against if you're an end user. Mac = ZERO viruses in the wild for OS X, no need to run virus scanners, spyware detectors, etc...

All of my other reasons for switching fall into the subjective realm - and I'm okay with that.

This is just a quick high-level post - not getting into the nitty gritty of the detailed debate. Regardless, my advice to all is to switch to Mac as soon as you can!

Posted by ZeroLogik at 7:19 AM | Permalink

The news started reporting that Apple was planning on switching over from its current PowerPC (IBM) chips to Intel processors on Friday evening. At first I thought it was another rumor circulating, but then CNet reported the story and they reported it as fact, not rumor. Needless to say, that kicked off a slew of articles around the web.

This morning Steve Jobs announced at the WWDC that Apple will in fact make a transition over to Intel chips over the next year.

To me this is nothing short of earth-shattering news. I'm still not quite sure of how this will or could effect overall Apple business or performance, but I know one thing for sure. I'm not going to go out and buy a new Mac until the one I want has been updated with the new Intel chip. That may be a huge problem for Apple. Why would you go out and buy what they have on the market now when it's all going to be outdated in 18 months?

I can't wait to read the hundreds of articles that are sure to come out today. Maybe then I can understand more about implications.

Posted by ZeroLogik at 12:30 PM | Permalink

So I've been using the newest OS X released from Apple in April and it's simply amazing. It never ceases to amaze me how Apple makes just the right tweaks and fixes and keeps improving the UI and overall user experience. You can check out all the new features here: Mac OS X Tiger

If you're not a Mac user then I highly suggest you make the switch now. It's true what you've been hearing. They're easier to use (if that's your thing) and powerful (if you want to configure your OS). They're beautiful, stable, long-lasting and yes, virus-free. Take it or leave it, but I'm getting my family to switch with their next purchase!

That's all the shit in my head right now.

Posted by ZeroLogik at 12:05 AM | Permalink