News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
Way back in January we decided to do something a little bit rash: give away a MacBook Air to any AMW reader who could demonstrate their ability to review it. Little did we know then that the competition would end up being massively popular, and turn into one of the hardest (and at the same time most enjoyable) competitions to judge in the history of the magazine. Almost every day for the past two months I've read through new entries in the competition, and almost every day I've been struck by the creativity and skill of AMW's readers.
Matthew JC. Powell | Apr 11, 2008
What does the contents of your Dock say about you? Perhaps it's just a collection of the tools you use a lot. Or maybe you don't bother. A friend of mine still has the dock as it came with her Mac. She opens everything else from the Applications folder. Old habits die hard. Just like the emergence of Playlistism — where you are judged as a person by the contents of your iPod playlist — could we have Dockism? In the interests of research, I have decided to share the contents of my Dock with you dear readers for you to judge my Macworth or otherwise. Perhaps what I haven't Docked is as revealing as the colorful strip of icons that stretches almost the width of my 24-inch iMac. Maybe the way I have them organised says something . . .
Keith White | Apr 10, 2008
What does the contents of your Dock say about you? Perhaps it's just a collection of the tools you use a lot. Or maybe you don't bother. A friend of mine still has the dock as it came with her Mac. She opens everything else from the Applications folder. Old habits die hard.
Just like the emergence of Playlistism - where you are judged as a person by the contents of your iPod playlist - could we have Dockism? In the interests of research, I have decided to share the contents of my Dock with you dear readers for you to judge my Macworth or otherwise. Perhaps what I haven't Docked is as revealing as the colorful strip of icons that stretches almost the width of my 24-inch iMac. Maybe the way I have them organised says something . . .
I received a fascinating URL the other day for The Food Lifeboat . It’s a site that lists the basic food requirements you’ll need to live at home if a pandemic like bird flu hit Australia. Aside from my sometimes obsessive interest in contingency planning (yes, I filled my bath full of water just in case for Y2K), it got me thinking about music technology and surviving on the bare basics. Like most musicians who use their computer as a central part of the creative process, I’m damn effective at accumulating gear.
David Holloway | Apr 7, 2008
I've had one of "those" weeks as we upgrade our network to fully integrate Leopard and, in the process, discovered some things that may assist others who are moving the same way. As has been mentioned many times elsewhere, you wouldn't have considered moving to Leopard on the server side before 10.5.2, but there are still problems even with this release. First, a little background on what we were trying to achieve. We'd upgraded student laptops, but left Open Directory at OS X 10.4.11 — preferring stability over the improved parental controls ...
Martin Levins | Apr 7, 2008
No Starch Press is trying a bold experiment to discover whether distribution of copyright content via peer-to-peer networks is harmful to sales or helpful. It's releasing two of its (well worth having) books in BitTorrent form, with no digital-rights management protection whatsoever. Either it will boost legitimate sales or it will kill them off. Either way, the implications of the experiment are huge for anyone who publishes content and needs to know how to make it profitable in the era of "information wants to be free".
Matthew JC. Powell | Apr 4, 2008
I’m finding it difficult to be a Mac gamer in a fundamental area: controls. Mac games can only ever be as good as the controls that developers can reasonably expect the player base to have, and in the case of Macs, the picture is … well … it’s not very good, really. First off, there’s the classic keyboard and mouse combination. Beloved of both the first-person shooter fan and the RTS obsessive, a good mouse and keyboard can be the difference between successfully leading a raid on the evil Horde and coming away with the glory, or being slaughtered in the first five seconds because you can’t, for example, press both mouse buttons simultaneously.
Alex Kidman | Apr 2, 2008
Nearly eleven years ago, Steve Jobs casually killed off pen-based computing initiatives at Apple. Now, it seems, he's bringing them back to life. If a job posting at apple.com is any indication (and it probably is), the company is looking to invest pretty heavily in pen-based computing sometime in the not-too-distant future, and it's looking to find some pretty high-powered talent to run it.
Matthew JC. Powell | Apr 2, 2008
There was a minor blip on the web a couple of weeks back but you may not have noticed it. David Pogue — Mac reviewer extraordinaire for The New York Times — reviewed a small video camera called the Flip. It's funny, the camera has been around for a while already, but it seems that since its release in May last year everybody missed it in some sort of HD-induced rage. The easiest way to think of the Flip is as a digital camera that only takes those dinky web-style movies and doesn't take still photos at all. And so you ask the question, why wouldn't I just use a point-and-shoot digital camera instead? Well, because unlike a point-and-shoot camera, you don't need a manual. All you do to use the Flip is turn it on, start filming (by hitting the red button), and then, you guessed it, hit the red button when you're done. If you don't like that bit of footage you just captured hit the Trash button to delete it. And that's all there is to it. Literally. No mucking around with resolutions, white balance, focus, fade-ins or anything else that makes $1K-plus video cameras so complex.
Danny Gorog | Apr 1, 2008
There are two superb applications for Mac that make taking the plunge and doing e-mail and calendaring online vastly easier. I’ve finally decided to rid my e-mail and calendar of this earthly life — I decided after a recent MacBook Pro upgrade that it was time for them to go and live in the cloud. I’m talking, of course, about Google’s “cloud” — thousands of computers sitting somewhere in the middle of a desert, powering the web applications in my browser. Until a few days ago, there was no way I’d have been prepared to make this switch.
Dan Warne | Mar 31, 2008
Yet again this morning the blogosphere is alight with the news that a Mac has been hacked. Those safe-as-houses, indestructible, impregnable, unsinkable Macs have been shown yet again to be riddled with holes so big and so obvious a child could drive a truck through them. Yet again the long-suffering Windows apologists take heart, poke their tongues and say "nyeah" while they download today's patches for their systems. The cause of this derision? A hacking contest in Canada.
Matthew JC. Powell | Mar 28, 2008
The CEO of Mozilla, John Lilly, has had some choice words to say about Apple's methods for increasing the market penetration of Safari on Windows. It's an undesirable user experience, he says. It's a security flaw, he says. It undermines the trust between users and developers, he says. Does he have a point, or is there something else on his mind?
Matthew JC. Powell | Mar 26, 2008
Yeah, your iPhone has access to that high-speed cellular data network. But admit it: you use Wi-Fi whenever you can, right? Why, these days I’m tempted to walk into every McDonalds I pass and log in for free Wi-Fi just because I can! 3G may beat EDGE, but Wi-Fi beats both.
