Category: Mac

Email, Mac, Microsoft, Vista, Windows

Switching from OS X to Vista (kinda)

Microsoft gave me a Sony Vaio laptop with Vista Ultimate and Office Ultimate installed to try out. I have been toying with the Vaio but not using it heavily. To be fair to Microsoft, I’m going to try to switch as much as possible of my work from my MacBook Pro to the Vaio to see how I get on over the next few weeks.

A lot of my work is done online so that part shouldn’t be too difficult (I installed Firefox on the laptop last night!). However, for presentations I will continue to use the Mac as there is no comparison in the quality of presentations created in Keynote versus those done in  PowerPoint.

Oh, and for my photos I will continue to use iPhoto because that is where my current extensive library of photos resides.

The most difficult move will be my email I suspect. I love Apple’s Mail app. It will take a lot to win me back to Outlook.

Wish me luck!

Mac, Microsoft

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition running on my Mac!

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition on a Mac

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition is Microsoft’s free version of Visual Studio (Visual Studio Lite, if you will).

I installed it on my Mac to see if it would install and run ok – as you can see above, it runs fine!

I now have the lite/free versions of Visual Studio and SQL Server installed and running on this machine. If I were a web developer, why would I want any other machine?

Mac, Microsoft

Apple capitalising on Microsoft's failings

AppleInsider is reporting that Apple’s sales of Mac computers in January is up over 100% on January ’06.

The article goes on to say:

sales of Mac notebooks grew 194 percent year-over-year in January with a rising ASP that drove 221 percent revenue growth in the segment.

“January was the third-largest revenue month for Mac notebooks ever,” he added.

The analyst noted that over the past eight quarters, the first month of NPD data has been between 7 percent and 9 percent of Apple’s quarterly Mac unit sales.

“If this relationship holds in fiscal Q2 (March), Mac sales would significantly exceed our Q2 estimate of 1.495 million units,”

With Microsoft Vista’s well publicised problems.
With Microsoft’s top executives having to spin wildly and even lie about Vista’s capabilities publicly.
With Microsoft’s most outspoken fans promoting OS X as being preferable to Vista.
With Vista’s (unhackable) Activation having been hacked.

It is no wonder that Apple’s sales are on the up and up.

And with all the investment they have tied up in Vista, it isn’t easy to see how Microsoft can turn this around any time soon.

Browsers, Mac

Time to stop using Safari?

Oh dear, Dr. Macenstein is reporting that Safari is a resource hog – using up to 76% more resources than Firefox.

According to Dr. Macenstien Safari grabs resources from the system even when idle in the background:

It seems to me that a background application, especially one that should not really be doing anything all that processor-intensive even when in the foreground, should not hog system resources the way Safari apparently does. If Firefox can play nice, why not Safari?

My default browser on the Mac is Flock and my next most used browser is Firefox (with typically 35+ tabs open). After that I use Camino and Safari in that order so this doesn’t affect me to much.

Anyone who is a heavy Safari user might want to look closely at this article and think about using an alternative browser.

Mac, Windows

New version of Parallels too popular!

I have written about Parallels previously and how it makes running Windows applications on a Mac seamless.

Arstechnica are reporting that the latest version of Parallels is now available to download. For anyone who already owns a copy of Parallels, this is a free upgrade (wohoo!).

Demand for the upgrade appears to be extreme though, the link on the download page is timing out or the download dies after about 5mb 🙁

Mac

SQL Server 2005 Express Edition on a Mac!

Having read Rob’s post about the release of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition sp2 (could they not have come up with a snappier name – think mySQL, for example!), I decided to go ahead and see if it would install and run on my Mac!

The install was uneventful and I documented it as a series of screenshots on Flickr.

Having installed SQL Server 2005 Express Edition on my Mac, I fired it up and created a database and a table using the SQL Server Management Studio Express (again, snappy name?) which ships with it. The process was very straightforward, as you would expect.

SQL Server 2005 Express Edition on Mac

Well, now that I have that up and running, what good is it? Any suggestions for what I could use it for? Rob?

Mac, Windows

Parallels on Mac

Parallels on Mac

I upgraded my copy of Parallels to the RC3 version released today. I did this to take advantage of the Coherence mode which allows you to run Windows and Mac apps on the one screen transparently (see above).

The upgrade wasn’t without its scary moments. At one point the upgrade of drivers caused XP to BSOD (bluescreen) and restart! After that I lost all video in Parallels. I had to boot into Safe Mode in Windows, re-install the drivers and re-start Windows to get it to work once more.

I still seem to have intermittant issues with Expose and my cmd-tab for switching between applications but other than that, this seems like a cool update.

With Apple now getting into the sub-notebook market, a Mac with Parallels loaded on it is an attractive and supremely versatile machine.

UPDATE: I found the solution to the intermittant Expose and keyboard issue here.

Mac, Windows

How to annoy people when you launch

Via Bernie and Robert Scoble I heard about Sharpcast.
SharpCast

Sharpcast has one product, called Sharpcast Photos which does:

Automatic backup, effortless sharing and anywhere-access for your photo collection. Your PC, the web and optionally your mobile phone working as one.

It sounded like a cool idea until I saw the requirements to get it to work – “Windows XP only”

Wtf? As a Mac user, I’m used to being disenfranchised but not even Vista or Windows 2000?

Now that’s how to annoy people when you launch!