Grant mentions purchasing a Marathon Deskmount for his G4. I downloaded the Deskmount installation instructions (PDF), and had a good chuckle. These guys have a great sense of humor, and this has to be the funniest product manual I’ve read in a while. Give it a read, it’s only 8 pages and 2 of those are the cover and the legalese.
We had a similar product in use in our graphics lab, but it’s not nearly as elegant as the Marathon Deskmount, though it doesn’t require modification to the G3/G4 case. I decided that I bang my knees into the G4s we do have mounted this way too much for my liking.
Tag: Mac
A developer known as “mathew” has released SnowSaver, a freeware snowflake screen saver for OS X. SnowSaver is “modeled on the pretty falling snowflakes animation that Apple has been running on an iMac in the window of the local Apple store. (Theirs is actually a QuickTime movie, and not available to customers. People have asked.)”
Pretty nifty, and despite mathew’s development pains, really shows the power of OpenGL. Well worth the effort, mathew!
Dan was asking if I had any experience yet utilizing IP over FireWire. I still haven’t set it up to play with it, but Ric Ford has posted a Reader Report on the issue, and it includes user experience.
At 400 megabits per second, FireWire is 40 times faster than 10Base-T Ethernet, and 4 times faster than 100Base-T. The only Ethernet spec faster than FireWire is Gigabit Ethernet (1000Base-T), now standard on all Macs, but still an option for many PCs (like FireWire).
Today, Apple released a preview version of IP over FireWire, useful for networking and clustering solutions. It can even be used for temporary connections to the internet using Internet Sharing. It’s interesting if for no other reason than that of future possibilities in networking.
The December issue of About This Particular Macintosh is out. Nothing in there from me this month <head hung in shame>, but Robert Lewis has what I think is the most comprehensive Mac game gift guide seen in a while. New-to-the-staff Kirk McElhearn reviews a book I keep near my Mac, and publisher/friend Michael Tsai reviews the latest rev of one of our mutual favorite applications, BBEdit.
More and more PC users are learning how easy it is to switch from Windoze to Macintosh, and OS X is a big reason. For Shoshana Berger of Business 2.0, the new PowerBook G4/1 GHz proved to be a big selling point in her move to Mac, helped along by Detto Technologies’ Move2Mac software.
Command-line developer Tom Yager made a voluntary switch as part of his research for an article in InfoWorld, shelving his ThinkPad for a PowerBook G4/800. After a two-week business trip with only the PowerBook, he’s realized that he switched without even really thinking about it, since most of the work he did under Linux or BSD can be accomplished under OS X.
Infoworld also has an interview with C.J. Rayhill, Chief Operating Office and Excecutive Vice-President of Technology for O’Reilly & Associates, wherein she reveals: “I will share with you that we’re currently in talks with Apple to possibly do a corporate switching program.” C.J. cites that many of O’Reilly’s “heavy technical folks” have moved from having two systems on their desks–some sort of Unix box plus a Windows PC for productivity apps–to using an iBook or PowerBook as their only system. (Anyone notice a trend here with regard to the popularity of the portable Mac?)
I can’t believe I forgot to make mention of the new PowerBooks and iBooks that Apple released last week. The new PowerBooks go up to 1 GHz and contain a SuperDrive! Not to mention that with the 60 GB hard drive, it’s actually cheaper than the TiBook/500 I use when that machine was brand new.
And Apple has broken the one-grand barrier with a new entry-level iBook at $999.
Steven Frank, co-founder of Panic Software, has an early analysis on why Microsoft’s new TabletPC initiative is really nothing new, and in many ways, like the Palm OS, is still inferior to the discontinued Newton platform from Apple.
Steven’s point, and one I concur with: since you’re not really getting anything new or innovative, go buy a Newton on eBay and save about three grand.
The latest stable version of Chimera was released a couple of days ago, and I am falling further in love with this browser. Powered by the Gecko rendering engine (of Mozilla fame), it is a Cocoa-based web browser, only for OS X.
It is fast. Wicked fast. Scary fast. It blows IE away in rendering pretty much all of the sites I visit. MacUpdate.com loads blindingly fast. MacMinute appeared instantly. Did I mention it’s fast?
It shares some of my favorite features with its Mozilla brethren, as well. Tabbed browsing is just one of the coolest things to hit web browsers since standards compliance. No more multiple browser windows littering the desktop! And built-in pop-up ad blocking is a godsend.
If you’re running OS X, you owe it to yourself to give Chimera a try.
The fine folks at Panic Software released version 2.1 of their fine FTP client, Transmit today. Hey, Michael, guess what feature got implemented? 🙂