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Year-end software wrap up

30 Dec

In keeping with Alex Payne’s “Software I Paid For” post, I’m doing my own. While his focuses on software he no longer uses, I’m going to try and remember the apps I bought over the year, and if I regret the purchase.

Desktop:

Office 2008. Scrivener is still my heavy-lifting writing program, but Word 2008 gets a lot of use for academic writing. The built-in citation manager alone was worth the price. However, I paid $70 for it via academic pricing, so it was worth at least that. No regrets.

Spore. I bought it, and couldn’t get through the cell stage without wanting to poke myself in the eye. Deep regret.

Wrath of the Lich King. Fantastic job by Blizzard. Only regret is time lost to it.

Parallels Desktop Upgrade (3.0). At least, I think I got this in 2008. I don’t use my Mac for the day job anymore. I bought it due to their promise of better 3D support, which it failed to deliver. Moderate regret.

CrossOver Games. I bought this before they had their one-day free promo. It lets me run LOTRO and D&D Online on my Macbook, and does a good job at it. No regrets.

Delicious Library 2. I’m trying to get more organized with my media library. Delicious Library lets me throw an XLS file of my books on my iPhone, which is handy when I go into a used bookstore and can’t remember if I have that book or not. No regrets.

Pixelmator. I think I got this last year as part of Macheist. It’s pretty much been the Photoshop replacement I was hoping it would be. It gets less use now that I’m not fudging with graphics for WoW Insider/Massively. No regrets.

iPhone Apps

Bejeweled 2. Fantastic game that’s great for those moments where I’m parked on the couch waiting for my wife to get ready. Quick loading and mindless play. No regrets.

Chess Classics. I don’t play this as much as I’d like, but I have no regrets.

Cro-Mag Rally. Only played one race. Deep regret.

FileMagnet. Handy for  the infrequent times I need to get a file onto the phone. No regrets.

MLB At Bat. I’m not a big baseball fan, but this is the app I use to show off what the iPhone can do. Plus, it’s handy for those times I actually give a shit what the score of the Sox game is. No regrets.

Spore Origins. I’ve played it more than he OS X version. It’s not bad, and kinda fun. Moderate Regret.

Scrabble. My wife loves scrabble and this is great for when we’re waiting on food or for a movie to start. No regrets.

Texas Hold’em. Like Spore, I don’t play it much, but it’s pretty good. No regrets.

Twitterific Premium. I’m using Twinkle more now, and I don’t like how it doesn’t start at the top of the list. Deep regret.

X-Plane 9. Another one I don’t play much and the controls are a little hard to get used to, but I don’t have any regrets.

I have more regrets about my iPhone purchases than I do desktop purchases, but I think that’s due to the ease of impulse buying. On the desktop, I’m more likely to do serious research and try the demo before I feed in my credit card. Being able to grab a $1-5 app on the iTunes store is sometimes hard to resist. I’ve gotten better at resisting this siren’s call, though.

Time tests loading Word 2008 vs. Word 2007 via an emulator

20 Nov

Today at the day job, I was working on getting Word 2007 to connect to SharePoint on my Mac via Parallels, and it got me to wondering what the load time differences were between Word 2008 12.1.4, Word 2007 via Crossover, and Word 2007 via Parallels.

I ran three tests (four if one of the three tests generated a number out-of-whack from the other two): Three from a fresh startup of the OS, and three from just quitting the app and re-launching it. In the case of Parallels, I quit Word from within the VM and then quit Parallels. I did not do a fresh boot of Windows XP for the tests; I left the VM in a suspended state.

I’ve got the numbers at the end of this post, but from a cold boot time. Word 2007 from within Parallels won, with Word 2007 within Crossover coming in second and Word 2008 natively within OS X coming in third. Warm starts Word 2008 won, with Word 2007 in Parallels coming in second, and Word 2007 in Crossover coming in third.

I’ll admit: there are a lot of apples to hand grenades comparisons happening here. About the only valid point is two separate Microsoft Word Processor have drastically different start times between a native app and one running in a two different emulators. You also can run into some issues if the emulator doesn’t want to start up properly – not to mention in Parallels’ case running an entire OS on top of OS X.

I’m not really sure what to make of these numbers. If you told me Word 2007 running in two different emulators would actually start faster than Word 2008, I would have laughed my ass off. However, in none of the cold start time tests I performed did Word 2008′s fastest load time beat the fastest cold start time tests of an emulated Word 2007. If you rarely reboot your Mac, subsequent loads of Word 2008 are faster, but not dramatically so.

One other difference is looks. I’ve attached screen captures of the three versions below, but I found Word 2007 in Parallels to read clearer because it uses Clear Type. Word 2007 in CrossOver looked the worse since it was bolder than the other two. Word 2007 also interacts with SharePoint and Blogs better; this entire post was written and posted in Word 2007. I’m also enjoying the ribbon interface a little better in Word 2007.

That said, I think it’s unlikely I’ll be doing a lot of work in Word 2007 – mainly because it’s not a native OS X and running Windows XP on top of OS X is too resource intensive. I did find it amazing that it loads faster than Word 2008.

 

Time Tests

Word 2008:

Cold Start 1: 1:03.11

Cold Start 2: 34.7

Cold Start 3: 1:09.4

Cold Start 4: 1:22.3

Warm Start 1 7.3

Warm Start 2: 6.9

Warm Start 3: 8.4

 

Word 2007: Parallels

Cold Start 1: 32.7

Cold Start 2: 46.5

Cold Start 3: 43.5

Cold Start 4″ 1:29.8

Warm Start 1: 10.7

Warm Start 2 : 1:36.4

Warm Start 3: 11.6

Warm Start 4; 10.3

 

Word 2007: Codeweavers

Cold Start 1: 40.8

Cold Start 2: 41.0

Cold Start 3: 38.5

Warm Start 1: 12.8

Warm Start 2 :13.8

Warm Start 3: 11.8

 

 

 

 

Looking forward to podcast downloads in iPhone 2.2

7 Nov

According to this Apple Insider post, podcast downloads are coming to the iPhone.

I’m thrilled for this. Very rarely do I sync my iPhone to my iTunes library — usually when I’ve just bought new music. I only subscribe to a handful of podcasts, but because of how infrequently I sync, I’m usually too far behind to make an effort to catch up.

It’s unknown right now if it will support EDGE, but my feeling is it will. According to that post, we’re under the same 10mb limit for for App Store and that works just fine over EDGE.

I can’t wait for this to be released.

My predictions for today's "Let's Rock" Event

9 Sep

Obviously, we are going to see new iPods, but I’m going out on a limb and think the Classic form might be retired in favor of the Touch model. The Touch will go to 64g. New Nanos with a larger screen too.

I also think we’ll see a new iLife with improvements to Garageband. I’m 50/50 on a new iWork; a part of me thinks we’ll see that at Macworld, but since the 08 version got rolled out at last September’s showcase, it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw an update today.

What I’m hoping for is firmware 2.1 for the iPhone.

Follow up to yesterday's battery test

20 Aug

Last night when I went to bed I was at 50% battery — this was with two GMail accounts fetching every 15 minutes. I’ve turned NuevaSync back on as a fetch service to test battery life today.

I think something is wonky with push. My yahoo account was set to fetch, but I think the push setting was overriding it . If  I’m not alone on this, it might explain why the APIs for push on non-Apple apps was yanked from the latest beta.

Since I don’t need my calender updating constantly, if it saves on battery life fetch is fine.

I’ll report back tommorow.

Push, NuevaSync, and iPhone battery life

19 Aug

I’ve been having some procedural issues with managing my calendars. The big problem is, I’m not a big fan of iCal, and entering calendar info on the iPhone is a bit of a pain in the ass because I can’t set the event name and its time all in the same screen. I much prefer Google’s calendar, where I can just click where the event occurs and type in its name.

The problem is, getting the Google Calendar to the iPhone with a minimum of hops. NuevaSync is beta testing a service that will sync your iPhone and Google calendars via push. I signed up for it, and it works great. However, starting late last week I noticed my battery life went to hell in a hand basket. In the “I can’t make it through the work day” bad. Last Friday my battery died around 8pm. Sunday wasn’t much better. Yesterday it died at 5pm. While that sucks, it’s not difficult for me to work around. I can keep it charged at work, and my truck has a charger for it, too. However, next week at Dragon*Con, poor battery life is going to be a big, big problem.

I saw this thread over at Arstechnica, where someone was complaining about poor battery life with push via Exchange. There was a key line in there:

So, I asked one of our IS guys to have a look at our Exchange HTTP logs, and here’s where it gets interesting. My phone was hitting the web server every five seconds. Now, we have about a dozen staff with iPhones, and mine is the only one exhibiting this behaviour.

I began to wonder if I was having a similar issue. For now, I’ve turned off NuevaSync entirely — for the record, I don’t think this problem is on their end, but some wonkiness in the iPhone software. If I can get through the day with amazing battery life I’ll know at least where the problem is.

However, that poses a problem with calendaring. Given my dislike of iCal and iPhone’s calendar, getting my Google calendar to the iPhone is going to take some monkeying around. I tried using the CalDav Google linkup, but I can’t edit the calendar on the iPhone. There’s a few things I’m going to need to test:

  • Do more testing and see if it’s just the push technology hosing things up, and set NuevaSync to fetch and not push — right now, push is completely disabled on my iPhone. However, that’s going to end up being a problem when they come out of beta and announce their pricing scheme — it may be too damn expensive.
  • Look into a solution like SpanningSync to sync iCal to Google. While I’ve spent $25 on worse things, it’s another process running and another point of failure.
  • Look into MobileMe. Given how crappy that’s running, and paying $100/year to just sync my calendars seems a little much.

It’s probably going to be either the first or third options. I just know as soon as I drop the money on SpanningSync, Google is going to announce some sort of push technology.

Test from iphone

28 Jul

Testing 123. Not sure how viable this will be for real posting, but I wanted to check it out.

My predictions for next week's Jobsnote

4 Jun

iPhone

  • The 3g iPhone will be announced, going on sale at the end of the month
  • The App Store will be demoed, going live the same time as the 3g iPhone
  • The 3g iPhone will also have a camera that can take movies, and will upload directly to YouTube. This functionality may be part of a software upgrade for the first-gen iPhone
  • Most of the Jobsnote will be about the iPhone and the App Store.
  • iPhone 2.0 will allow syncing of tasks, finally. I hope

Macintosh

  • We will not see a consumer-class headless desktop
  • Weill not see iLife or iWork upgrades; those will be during Macworld or a special event later this year.
  • We will see a preview of 10.6, but I disagree with this TUAW report. OS X 10.6 will have new features, but I don’t know what they are

Mobile Mac

  • Mobile Mac will be announced and will bring Enterprise-level syncing to the iPhone. I’m going to go out on a limb and say you can also sync over the cloud with Google calendars
  • I’m going further on a limb and will predict Mobile Mac to be free for iPhone users

How I fared with 10.5.3

28 May

Ok, back in February I bitched out 10.5.3 for not fixing issues I had, and introducing new ones. Here’s the report card for 10.5.3

Old issues:
Mail Bugs fixed: Zero. Mailbox behavior is the same.
System Preferences Bugs fixed: 0/1
New Bugs introduced: Macbook drops Wireless connection frequently when on battery. Now, I didn’t have this problem before, but a lot of people did. Now, I’ve got it.

Ok, I applied the 10.5.3 upgrade and here goes:

Mail Bugs fixed: Zero. Mailbox behavior is the same. However, the two Gmail accounts Mail.app also sync with don’t exhibit this issue; only my main e-mail account hosted on Dreamhost does.
System Preferences Bugs fixed: Expose forgetting key assignments mysteriously went away a while back. Dunno if some security fix patched it or what.
Macbook Wifi This problem seemed to only affect my Linksys router. Replacing the router solved it

Notable Fixes:

Improved Graphics Support: Second Life is a lot snappier.

Office 2008 SP1: Just how badly can MS screw up an install?

20 May

Pretty damn badly, actually.

Against my gut instinct, I loaded SP1 for Office 2008 on my Mac today. I’d heard of wonkyness with the install, but really, those kinda problems only happen to other people, right? Wrong.

After installing the SP and loading Word, I got prompted with the Setup Assistant. I clicked through the defaults and the Assistant quit. I then load Word, got prompted with the Setup Assistant. I clicked through the defaults and the Assistant quit. I lean loaded Word and got prompted with… well, you get the idea.

Googling the problem, I find this thread on the Macfixit site. I deleted the two files, re-launched Word, got the real Setup Assistant and was prompted to re-key in my serial number. Which, naturally, it refused to accept.

I had to uninstall Office and reinstall it to get base functionality back. Good job, Microsoft. Give yourself a cookie.

[Update 7/8: After the reinstall (with my valid, individual serial number) the update worked fine. Not sure what exactly happened]

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