I usually have at least three browsers open at any time. One will be a Mozilla Gecko app (Firefox, Camino, or SeaMonkey) and one an Apple WebKit based program (Stainless, Cruz, iCab, Shiira, OmniWeb, or especially since Safari 4 was released, Safari itself). Interestingly, I find […] Read more »
There are alternatives to Photoshop Elements, including a gaggle of online image editing programs offered either for free or a modest fee. None of them holds a candle to full-fledged bitmap image editors like Photoshop Elements, Pixelmator or Acorn in terms of power and sophistication, but depending on your needs, image editing “in the cloud” could be all you require. Read more »
MacNewsWorld’s Chris Maxcer addresses the abiding conundrum of whether to upgrade one’s existing system or buy a new Mac, noting that when you’ve had your Mac long enough, it’s only natural to start thinking about more speed and more memory. So the operative question is whether […] Read more »
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Writing on Fast Company, Farhad Manjoo says that not long ago, he got his hands on “one of the slowest, ugliest, and least-user-friendly Macintosh laptops the world has ever seen” — and he loves it, since it sports a couple of features that others can’t match. […] Read more »
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the original release of the Macintosh Portable — the first truly untethered Mac, thanks to its internal battery. There’s a quote attributed to Steve Jobs: “Do not trust a computer that you cannot lift.” The original compact desktop Macs were […] Read more »
Now that Snow Leopard is on the prowl, thoughts turn to what Mac OS 10.7 might be called. When it was announced that Mac OS 10.6 would be christened “Snow Leopard,” there was some speculation that Apple was running out of big cat names for its […] Read more »
Right on schedule, Opera released Opera 10 for download last week, and, as expected, it’s a solid and lively performer — no major visible changes from the late betas and release candidate builds I’ve been reporting regularly. Opera 10 has been my default browser on all […] Read more »
Do you disguise your MacBook as a security measure? A couple of computer case makers think it’s an effective strategy. Mitemite’s Newspaper MacBook Sleeve is a computer bag made from plasticized fabric and designed to thwart computer theft by camouflaging your MacBook Pro as a folded […] Read more »
iPhoto is OK, especially if you like lots of automation when managing your image files, but it’s not as likely to appeal to pros or serious amateurs. Some will use Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Lightroom, but there’s another photo management solution you may already have on […] Read more »
PC Mag’s Sascha Segan posed an intriguing question the other day: “If you put a smartphone in a dock, it could replace a netbook. So why hasn’t anyone succeeded at doing that?” Good question. Now that I’ve been thinking about it, the idea of a dock […] Read more »
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My friend and Low End Mac’s publisher, Dan Knight, posted a nearly 3000-word essay recently positing a “what’s the perfect Mac” conundrum: MacBook Pro or iMac. I share Dan’s enthusiasm for examining and debating such hypothetical questions, and I thoroughly enjoyed the piece, but for me, […] Read more »
There’s more evidence that Apple is missing the boat on a substantial market opportunity due to its stubborn stonewall of the small, inexpensive netbook phenomenon. Steve Jobs may have expressed his dismissal of the device category last fall, and acting Apple CEO Tim Cook took the […] Read more »
Techdirt’s Derek Kerton says “iPhone haters” are “stick-shifters in an automatic world” when they complain about the iPhone’s limited manual user control of function and configuration. Kerton analogizes iPhone critics’ attitudes to those of manual gearbox holdouts in the automotive world. He notes that the stick-shift […] Read more »
How long should a Mac last? Mac360′s Alexis Kayhill posed the question recently, and it got me thinking on the topic, especially since Alexis framed her column around the experience of a co-worker who had purchased a new unibody MacBook (on her recommendation) only to have […] Read more »
I’ve been looking for an up-to-date, Gecko-based browser to replace the discontinued Netscape Navigator 9 on my old G4 Pismo PowerBook running OS 10.4 Tiger. Navigato still works well, is based on the now-ancient Firefox 2 and probably has some security vulnerabilities. Firefox 3.5 and Camino […] Read more »
I have a love-hate relationship with Spotlight, OS X’s convenient and useful, but immensely frustrating search utility. Apple introduced Spotlight with OS X 10.4 Tiger, and tweaked it considerably in OS 10.5 Leopard. Having a search engine ready and waiting all the time is seductive, and […] Read more »
Microsoft Word was one of my favorite and most-used applications back in the early days. I started Mac word processing first with Word 4 and upgraded to Word 5.1 in 1993. Amazingly, that old application still starts up and works fine in Classic Mode on my […] Read more »
Computerworld’s Seth Weintraub thinks optical drives are going the way of the Dodo bird. He predicts the MacBook Air and white MacBook will get Secure Digital (SD) slots with their next updates (will the WhiteBook get another update?), and that SD may replace built-in DVD drives […] Read more »
Last month I commented that Apple’s substitution of Secure Digital Card (SD) slots for ExpressCard slots in the 15″ MacBook Pro made considerably good sense. It would be nice to have both, but the ExpressCard support wasn’t being heavily used, according to Apple, while SD was […] Read more »
What do you do with your old Macs when you upgrade to a new system? Many folks sell their old computer on eBay or locally, but that’s something I’ve rarely done. I mostly either keep them as “B-team” units, or hand them off to other family […] Read more »
Born in the early-middle of the Baby Boomer generation (1951), I’m one of the folks O’Reilly Radar’s Mark Sigall is talking about in a recent essay contending that an Apple assault on the tablet computer market is “inevitable,” since such a device would be so symbiotic […] Read more »
Back in March, I reviewed the Opera Turbo Labs preview version of the Opera 10 alpha browser incorporating server-side optimization and compression technology that Opera claims can speed throughput over slow connections by reducing the amount of data needed to display Web pages by up to […] Read more »
Apple first began shipping notebooks with glossy displays in May 2006 with the release of the first-generation MacBooks, which were only available with glossy, and as a no-cost option on MacBook Pros. In mid-2007, glossy “behind glass” displays were also made standard on the aluminum iMac […] Read more »
Two abiding challenges of laptop computer engineering are the antagonistically complimentary objectives of packing more and more computing and graphics power, memory, speed, and storage capacity into thinner and smaller form factors, all while keeping power consumption, heat generation and heat dispersal to tolerable levels. In […] Read more »
Apple’s new/refreshed MacBook Pro 13″ and 15″ models each come equipped with an SD Media Card reader slot, but in the case of the 15-incher, this has required elimination of the ExpressCard/34 expansion slot that had been in every 15-inch MacBook Pro since the get-go, back […] Read more »
A Mac laptop question I’ve been getting asked over the past few months is which 13-inch MacBook is the better value — the posh aluminum unibody model, or the $300 cheaper carryover white polycarbonate unit, which, after two substantial updates in 2009, had been upgraded to […] Read more »
Last week Apple quietly upgraded the entry-level white MacBook’s Core 2 Duo processor clock speed from 2.0 GHz to 2.13 GHz, added an additional 40GB of standard hard disk capacity, and upgraded its RAM specification to 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM. Obviously, additional speed and capacity is a […] Read more »
I use a bunch of different Web browsers — Opera, Camino, Firefox (or lately the Shiretoko Intel-optimized build of Firefox), Safari, Netscape 9 on my OS 10.4 machines, and iCab — but my favorite continues to be Opera. I’m specifically using the Alpha Turbo 10 version, […] Read more »
Addressing what evidently is a common defect in the NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT graphics processor units used in the May 2007 and Early 2008 revisions of the original MacBook Pro (remediation of which involves replacing the entire logic board), Apple has announced that it will lengthen coverage […] Read more »
Among the things I love about my unibody MacBook is the barely audible whisper of its 160 GB, 5400 RPM Hitachi HDD shrouded in solid carved aluminum, which makes it the most blessedly silent personal computer I’ve ever owned. It easily beats the previous high-water mark […] Read more »
Apple must feel besieged by an attack of the clones these days, with Mac OS knockoff makers popping up in the U.S. (Psystar and OpenTech), Germany (PearC), Argentina (OpeniMac) the U.K. (FreedomPC). Now a Russian startup calling itself RussianMac is offering a comprehensive line of desktop […] Read more »
Quite a few folks are reporting problems in getting the Mac OS X 10.5.7 Update installed and working properly on their officially supported Macs, while “hackintosh” netbook users are finding they’re getting dramatically improved battery runtime with 10.5.7 — one of those ironies. I’m still waiting […] Read more »
The brushfire popularity of small, inexpensive laptop computers, aka netbooks, shows no sign of losing steam, with a reported growth rate for the category of 80 percent so far in 2009 (vs. a general laptop growth of around 13 percent), putting netbooks on track for sales […] Read more »
Last week I posted a Beta Watch mini-review of Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, Mozilla’s sixth development milestone and fourth beta release of what will become Firefox 3.5. Unfortunately I found that, like earlier beta releases of FireFox 3.1/3.5, beta 4 was a perplexingly sluggish performer on […] Read more »
Last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 as a public preview, and I duly downloaded it for a look-see. I had tried earlier beta builds of Firefox 3.1 and 3.5, but hadn’t been favorably impressed, and soon reverted to using either the latest final update […] Read more »
Apple arguably could do a better job of educating their non–tech oriented customers about the advisability and desirability of periodic software — especially OS version — upgrades. That epiphany dawned on me during a telephone conversation last weekend with a friend I don’t see or talk […] Read more »
Many enterprise IT departments are exercising false economy by extending the service life of notebook computers from the traditionally recommended 3-5 years in an effort to keep a lid on replacement cost, according to a new research report (PDF) released by Northborough, Mass.-based market research firm […] Read more »
A relative of mine recently got a fairly sophisticated digital camera and sought my counsel on what sort of photo correction and image editing software to use. He’s been getting along with the version of iPhoto that OS 10.4 installed on his G5 iMac, but he’s […] Read more »
For the most part, I remain very satisfied with the performance of most tasks I perform on my middle-aged 1.33 GHz 17-inch PowerBook G4, which I bought back in 2006. But not when it comes to dictation. Interestingly, the most dramatic performance boost I’ve realized transitioning […] Read more »
After two months of getting configured and acquainted, I’m pretty much comfortably settled in with my first Intel Mac — a little jewel of a 13″ unibody MacBook — and thus far it’s pretty much all good. It’s been an adjustment going down from the 17″ […] Read more »
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