Acting Self Important
Dear Apple,
If you’re going to publish calendars for your iCal users and advertise them, keep them up to date. A movie release calendar that ends late October of last year is useless.
Your pal,
Derik
Archive for January, 2006
Sunday, January 29, 2006
Monday, January 23, 2006
Post Macworld Roundup
Back in December, I made some predictions.
The quick recap is, I was completely right about the Powerbook (though I didn’t see the moronic name change coming). I didn’t see the iMac coming. The Mac mini rumor was nice, but ultimately, it wasn’t in the cards. My hope clouded my judgment.
iLife ‘06 and iWork ‘06: Yawn. Again.
I’m surprised at the complete lack of information about Leopard. The prospect of getting surprised is actually exciting. Apple may just sit on the features until after Vista appears. That might slow Microsoft just a bit.
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Gmail Has Lost Its Focus
I use my Gmail account to manage several mailing lists I’m subscribed to. I also regularly re-evaluate it for use as my main email address. So far, no dice. I just like desktop email clients much more.
One of the more compelling things about Gmail is the amount of space allotted for each user (2686 MB at the moment). With most emails being only a few kilobytes big, users aren’t going to fill up that space (particularly because that allotment grows every day). There are exceptions, such as Adam Curry (who receives lots of audio files in his email), but other users aren’t going to have an issue.
It’s for this reason that Gmail didn’t make it easy to delete email. There was no point. It wasn’t that it was impossible either. All one needed to do was choose “Move to Trash” from the actions pop-up menu. Keeping it less accessible was a good thing because it trained users to stop trying to delete every piece of email. That was no longer part of the paradigm, save for extreme cases.
Google has finally given up on its “delete nothing” paradigm and put a delete button prominently in the toolbar. Well, it was a good idea while it lasted.
Friday, January 20, 2006
Rosetta is Not All That and a Bag of Chips
Macworld’s lab tests of the new intel iMac confirm what I’ve been telling people since the Intel transition was announced.
I can summarize the results pretty quickly. Considering that the Intel processor in the new iMac is a dual core, the speed isn’t really that much better. In fact, taking that into account, it’s slower. Also, Rosetta isn’t the panacea that everyone bought into. I knew it wouldn’t be. It doesn’t work with anything that requires precise timing and it’s slow. Slow.
This shouldn’t be surprising, but considering what all the pundits said, you’d think it would be. I don’t think that the Intel transition will break Apple, but let’s not pretend it’s all candy and roses. It ain’t.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Pushing Gmail to the limits
Over at Mike’s blog, he’s redirecting all mail from a domain that gets over 3000 pieces of spam a day. I’m really looking forward to his results because he usually puts together pretty visual results that are fun to look at.
I’m still waiting for an objective comparison of the various spam filters out there, particularly the ones built into the big webmail services like Yahoo and Hotmail. I’ve found those services perform pretty terribly. Despite trying to “train” their filter, I regularly get mail with similar subjects dropped right into my inbox. I’ve heard Google’s is better, but I’d rather not pollute my own account for experimentation.
