New mac:about Podcast now live!

Me, Saul Kropman, Gary Meyer and Marc Forrest decided to start up a Apple orientated podcast catering for South Africa. This week we take a look at locally developed iPhone apps, buying a new Mac, the relevancy of the Mac mini and Apple TV in South Africa as well as a few hints and tips for your Mac. We hope you enjoy it, and look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions.

 You can listen to it here,or you can subscribe to it in iTunes here.

Some of the tips and tricks we speak about in this episode is RadioPod, Perian, easy removal of icons in menu bar, a great free virtual machine software package called Virtual Box and the best iPhone Apps of the week.

- mac:about Team.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard in SA…

It seems South Africans wont have to wait for Snow Leopard after all, it will be released on Friday 28 August at premier resellers. The good news is that the price is not too bad – R329. Compare that to $29 in the US and 29 pounds in the UK, and I guess we are OK.

The official reviews by the typical Apple bigshots have started to trickle in, and the opinions are universally positive. The major plus for Snow Leopard is the performance boost – many built apps launch much quicker, and there is big potential for speed improvements once third party apps start taking advantage of Grand Central Dispatch – Apple typically fancy name for its service that enables better handling of applications in multiple core environments.

The other major advantage is that the built in apps have been rewritten in 64 bit which gives great performance boosts in environments where the machine has large amounts of RAM. OpenCL will enable Macs to use their graphics card (anything from a Nvidia 8600 and up) to contribute processing power to everyday applications. While many of these new technologies are not necessarily going to be used immediately, it does show that performance in the future on Snow Leopard might improve more once third party developers harness these tools.

Only minus is that support for PowerPC macs has been pulled – it is Intel only, which is just about any Mac after 2006. However, you can still run older PowerPC apps as with Leopard, but Rosetta is now an optional component. The install is much smaller because of this – you will have about 7Gig more space than with Leopard. (This is also because the giant printer driver database has been removed, it will by default rather download the driver)

Personally I cannot wait to load up Snow Leopard on my mac – not that I have noticed it was slow. Its almost like the iPhone 3G – I did not notice it was slow until I used a 3GS. Guess thats what technology companies should do – convince you to get something new, when you did not realize you needed it. Evil.

At R329 it is a must have upgrade though.

Now if Microsoft could have only followed suit with this pricing – but luckily they are bringing out a “family pack” of Windows 7, which is great for multiple PC households.

Review Round Up:
Engadget
Gizmodo
CNET
Walt Mossberg (you can even upgrade from Tiger for $29 – whoops!)
PC World
Slashgear

One more thing:
If you want to see if all your apps can run on Snow Leopard, go to http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/ – thanks @neio

Pick of the week: Mac edition

One of the biggest problems with Apple is the persuasive but untrue marketing – “every Mac just works”, you can “use MS Office” (even though MS Office for Mac is a disaster) – Apple would make you believe that every Mac comes with the software you need. True, iLife is a very high quality package to bundle with a new computer. I enjoy iWeb – nothing comes close in terms of ease of use. The rest of the apps are great as well. But once you used Picasa, iPhoto is not that great. And its free…

Picasa has always been a great app for Windows and still is possibly one of the best simple photo editing tools. Honestly, I would pay for it if they started charging for it tomorrow. For simple editing nothing comes close in terms of ease of use. Simple things like cropping, straightening and colour adjustment is push button easy. But the biggest advantage compared to iPhoto is that Picasa doesnt create a big unnecessary library file. With iPhoto, the original files is duplicated into a proprietary iphoto library file which can quickly grow massive in size. File adjustments are kept as layers which can be undone, but the original file is not affected, unless you choose to do so. Users can then keep their photos in a well organized folder scheme.

Newer features include the ability to create simple movies and post directly to online services. Users can also quickly generate collages, and great filtering abilities are available. Want to see only photos with people on it (no landscapes etc) then just click the head filter. Want to see photos with a greenish colour – just type color:green in the search box.

Of course Picasa does not yet have the new facial recognition features of iPhoto ’09, but the web service does have it. I really hope it is built in to the next version as well.

Give it a shot (even if you are a big iPhoto fan). The mac version can easily view all your iPhoto albums automatically in the source list, so you can hit the ground running.

Naughty Step

Got to love this marketing campaign – even though I find the British version of Get a Mac a complete fake, this little snippet is actually unique. But the mac guy just somehow cant pull it off.

Anyway check this:

UAC and me

Vista’s much touted UAC feature is certainly once of those great examples of a feature that is well meant but is terrible in execution. The fact that I have to authenticate whether a certain action should occur on the computer is a great preventative measure yet somehow I cant help but see its flaws.

I am really impressed by the way Vista proactively tries to help you out if you have a compatibility error – for example, the first time I ran VLC it bombed out. Now on XP, I would have had to figure that out myself. Vista does that for you, connecting to some troubleshooting database or something, and there you go. The very next time I started up VLC, it automatically disabled the desktop composition engine. Great.

Now why cant they utilize this with UAC? I mean, if a executed code could be declared safe on some well administrated database, why cant they help me out?

You are coming to sad realization: Cancel or Allow?