For the most part the Mac is a good platform, it’s not that disimilar to say Windows.  Both Mac and Windows have evolved leading with innovation as well as taking features from each other.  The big question that I had to ask like most people was, will most of the applications I use be available on the Mac, and if not, is there a suitable alternative?  For me, a good handful of apps were available (and of course being a different platform you have to purchase these again), for the ones that weren’t (like Jasc PaintShop Pro that I use a lot) there’s other applications like Pixelmator and other free alternatives.

For the most part I’m very happy with Mac OS X Lion (and Snow Leopard before that), it’s a good OS.  There’s a lot of good innovation like the gestures on the trackpad that Windows still doesn’t have, dashboard, mission control and more.  I use the Mac primarily for Blogging, Facebook, Google+, Gmail, internet Surfing, Photo Editing and it works extremely well.

What should you look at when buying a Mac?  Don’t go for the entry level model.  When you look at prices you’ll say “£1000+ for a laptop?  I can get a PC Laptop for £399!”.  Yes you can, but it’s an entry level laptop.  It might be a 15″ or 17″ laptop but it’s running a slower processor, less RAM and the build quality is probably pretty plastic.  MacBook Air’s and MacBook Pro’s are much more robust, build quality is superb in a single aluminium unibody (single block of metal hollowed out).  Take a look at a windows based laptop for around £1000-£1300 and then compare those specs to the Mac’s.  If you’re not looking to pay £1000 then quite simply you’re not looking at a high-end laptop, so the Mac’s may not be for you (likewise the better higher-end Windows laptops aren’t for you either).  If you’re okay with paying this amount of money for a laptop then you’re going to get a good laptop.  Get the best processor and RAM you can afford, ensure you get a laptop with an SSD (Solid State Drive) and one that’s the largest your an afford (yes you will need it).

The Mac’s with Snow Leopard have the AppStore as a download, Lion now has the Mac AppStore integrated fully into the Operating System. The Mac AppStore is similar to what you would see on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, which offers a lot of inexpensive applications (and games), and is a good first check to kitting out your Mac’s.  Apple do take 30% cut from developers through the AppStore, so you some developers still prefer to do a slightly cheaper version outside of the AppStore and to make a little more revenue per sale. However then you have to know how to install DMG files (which the Mac AppStore is just plug and play), tap on something, purchase it, it downloads and installs automatically without having to do anything else).

So if you think you’re ready, there’s no better time to make the switch or to at least try out a Mac with the Mac AppStore making it so easy.

Hard Disk drives you may not know have been around since 1956 and introduced by IBM.  Hard Drives have grown in both strength and size.  They now have shock protection, parking of heads all built-in but also incorporate imminent failure warning systems.  The sizes have grown massively over the years, and we’re now into terrabytes for some users or gigabytes for most users.

SSD’s are the newt way forward, they’re Solid State Drives, e.g. no moving parts.  No latency on having to spin the disk up to speed, e.g. 7200 rpm (revs per minute) and then having to have a head (needle) touch the disk (which can sometimes scratch the surface and damage it under movement/shock).

Think of SSD’s like a memory chip in terms of Solid State, they’re efficient, their quick, there’s no need to spin up a disc, there’s no need to have a head touch the surface.  If you try to access it, it’s there and ready.  When you take an average laptop that can take easily 45 seconds to 1 minute to boot up to the Operating System, be it Mac OS X or Windows 7, swap the Hard Disk Drive out with a Solid State Drive, and you’ll then see speeds of around 13 seconds boot time to the Operating System.  That’s about 3x times faster than a manual Hard Disk Drive.

The speed gain isn’t only seen on boot up, try to run any large weight application like Word, Excel, PowerPoint on Windows and you’ll find that it loads in <1 second.  If you try to do anything that does very heavy Hard Disk Drive access then this is really where you will see great improvements in reduced wait times.

SSD’s aren’t all that rosy though.  They’re still new for one thing, there’s still no average as they’re new on how long they’ll last.  Most manufacturers of SSD’s claim that they will most likely last less than a regular Hard Disk Drive.  Likewise if they start to die, the suggestion is they will die quickly as opposed to a spinning Hard Disk Drive, although I’m not too sure of that.  On average I find my hard drives in laptops last around 2 years or less, so if an SSD were to last 18 months, then I would still be happy if I could get the speed gain that I really crave as a power user.

The other problem with SSD’s is both price and size.  As they’re new, prices are still high although SSD costs are coming down.  Likewise 256gb SSD’s are within the grasp of most end users but if you want something larger than that, they start to get really expensive.

Which manufacturers make Solid State Drives?  Well there’s a good article over at WikiPedia that shows a comparison of which manufacturers make Hard Disk Drives vs Solid State Drives.

Now both my MacBook Air run an SSD and my Toshiba Windows 7 based SSD laptop, and I’m seeing huge amounts of speed enhancement over regular Hard Disk Drives.  I’ve been running the Macbook Air for around 9 months and the Toshiba for about 1 month.  I simply couldn’t go back to a conventional spinning Hard Disk Drive.  The only problem with costs still being high is that both the MacBook Air and the Toshiba both only have 128gb SSD’s and not 256gb SSD’s.  This really isn’t enough and for a lot of my ‘other’ documents that I tend to have in archive as well as mail PST backups, I tend to still have to plug in a removable 512gb Removable USB Hard Disk Drive, but at least most of my programs are running directly from the SSD speeding up the disk access times.

Multi-touch Gestures

• Tons more multi-touch gestures available in Lion

If you try to update some of your Mac apps then you might receive the following error message…

Unfortunately App updates don’t appear to be fully working for some apps and the message that Apple are providing definitely is the wrong message. Am I sure I didn’t purchase Clarity with another Mac AppStore account? Yes, quite simply I only have ONE AppStore account, so the error message Apple are displaying is definitely incorrect.

Just to verify I pulled up my purchase history for the same account and it shows I purchased Clarity on 1st February 2011…

Let’s hope it’s not a wide spread problem and Apple sees it and fixes it soon!

I’ve just purchased it for the Mac, I’ve resisted all this time to put Angry Birds onto my MacBook Air as I have it on the iPhone and iPad, but decided finally to succumb to the pressure.

The story for Angry Birds Rio is that birds are kidnapped and caged by evil smugglers and are even angrier! Once the angry birds are released from their captors, they are on a mission to save Blu and Jewel – two rare macaws and stars of the upcoming Fox motion picture, Rio.

Features include:-

• Two fantastic episodes with 60 exciting levels!
• Completely new achievements!
• Special Hidden fruits – discover them all!

There are three version available, Angry Birds Rio for iPhone and iPod touch, Angry Birds Rio HD for iPad and Angry Birds Rio for Mac.

Still no app/game support for iOS for Apple TV, but if/when that is made available by Apple, playing Angry Birds on a large LCD TV screen would be awesome.

Unfortunately last weekend Zinio had just under a 48 hour outage and 3 days later they’re into another 12+ hour outage of service.

The service outages means that customers who have paid for their magazines cannot access the Zinio service to download the paid content.

The email from Zinio in the first outage to customers…

I wanted to reach out to you personally to thank you for your patience this past weekend and check to make sure your Zinio access was working properly. As you noticed, Zinio experienced some systems problems that impacted your ability to shop and read your magazines. These have now been fully resolved. On behalf of the entire Zinio team, I wanted to apologize for any inconvenience this unfortunate outage caused.

Zinio was able to restore service on the first outage approx 48 hrs later. However, Zinio’s down again 3 days later and has not been able to provide it’s service for over 12 hours.  It seems like there’s no out of hours coverage at Zinio for it’s service due to the downtime over the weekend and overnight all being outside of core business hours which doesn’t bode well for Zinio. Zinio has been around for a number of years (since 2001) but there are more companies coming onto the scene to compete with Zinio. Apple more recently started selling Magazine subscriptions for the iPad through iBooks and a number of magazine companies have already started offering their magazines through iBooks or through their own apps on the iPad.

I’m an avid Zinio supporter and have spent well over £1000 on magazine subscriptions with Zinio so hopefully that shows my level of commitment to Zinio! However, Zinio being down twice in 4 days for a serious amount of time has now put me off making two further magazine subscriptions with Zinio and I’ve just given Apple the money for these. After the first 48hr outage I purchased some additional magazine subscriptions and I haven’t been able to download these new magazines because Zinio’s service has gone down a second time. Zinio also offered me some complimentary free magazine subscriptions on top of this due to the last outage, but again they weren’t showing in my account just prior to the second service outage.

It’s one thing being bad for Zinio’s customers seriously making them look elsewhere for magazine subscriptions but it’s more serious for the magazine companies that partner with Zinio because new customers can’t purchase magazine subscriptions resulting in loss of sales.

I really sincerely hope Zinio can rectify these outages and improve the level of service to it’s customers and magazine partners and pull through this.

Apple sold 4.13 million Macs during the quarter, a 23 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 16.24 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 86 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 19.45 million iPods during the quarter, representing a seven percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. The Company also sold 7.33 million iPads during the quarter.

I’ve been finding Dropbox a very good system until today, and I’d like to explain why suddenly I’m reconsidering cloud computing.

Last week I received a new credit card and I did what usually do and that’s update the information into my secure eWallet. The eWallet file is now on Dropbox and when I save this, it should then replicate it to my MacBook Air, which in turn when I sync eWallet to my MacBook Air from the iPhone and iPad, then transfers to these devices and all should be great. A perfect experience! Well I updated the credit card details including my PIN as it’s a new pin and I couldn’t remember what it was, synced my iPhone and iPad to the MacBook Air this morning then went out to do some shopping.

I did my shopping and reached the checkout and was ready to pay for the products I was buying, whipped out my iPhone and opened up my secure eWallet and……CRAP! The Credit Card isn’t showing in eWallet! What happened?! I know it was there because I checked it over several days on my PC. Thankfully I had another Credit Card I could use and was able to remember that PIN but it seriously made me think about how I synchronise between computers to the cloud.

I remember I made a whole host of other changes last week to my eWallet and needless to say these changes aren’t there either. Unfortunately I can’t remember what all the changes were, so now I’m in trouble. I checked Time Machine and these changes weren’t on the Mac, so it looks like either:-

1. The PC didn’t write the eWallet file to Dropbox
2. The PC did write the eWallet file to Dropbox but at some point when I opened it on the Mac it took that as a newer file and overwrote it without downloading the update to the Mac

Either way it’s not good. Looking at the Dropbox Events I see that the eWallet file was modified but unfortunately unlike Windows Live Sync, DropBox doesn’t have detailed logs on which computer modified the file.

I’m going to have to scrutinise Dropbox more carefully now when saving files as it looks like it isn’t synchronising as I would have hoped between devices.

UltraEdit is a favorite app for many Windows developers and HTML website developers and was first released in 1994 as the main alternative to Notepad on Windows.

I for many years have spend countless hours manually editing HTML code and developer code in UltraEdit and although there are equally a lot of apps on the Mac already like TextMate, BBEdit, TextWrangler and TextEdit, it’s a refreshing site to see a hardcore text editor like UltraEdit make it over the battlefield to the Mac.

It took a massive fifteen years but it’s finally here.

UltraEdit offers advanced find and replace functionality such as column-based find and replace, both inside and across files. Unlike most editors that support searching only open files, UltraEdit will search directories and subdirectories, with support for regular expressions (Perl and Unix flavors).

UltraEdit for Mac has been released as version 2.0, with most of the same features as the Windows version 16.x.

UltraEdit for Mac runs on all OS X systems 10.5 and later (Leopard and Snow Leopard), with support for Intel-based processors only. You can buy the Mac version for $79 or a multi-platform license for $99.95, switch from a Windows version to Mac for $49.95, or upgrade the Windows version to multi-platform for $79.95.

I stumbled across an advert in a magazine for a piece of software called Spector Pro for the Mac which I thought thought demonstrated a great representation of what can happen and to be careful.

Sometimes it’s all to easy to get caught up in the digital world, see a picture of someone, maybe an avatar and think that’s actually who the person is. The problem is you don’t know the person, other than what they’ve typed, and they might not be 100% truthful in what they’re telling you. With most of the new technology like Skype, MSN Messenger, Facebook, Yahoo, Gtalk and other chat clients, it’s all too easy to get caught up and lower your guard.

More information on Spectra Pro can be found here.

I like the iPhone, I’m just still not sure on the Mac. If someone lent me a Mac book pro then maybe it might sway my mind a little, but the one thing that really sways my mind is a tablet. If we could have something almost equivalent of an iPhone with HSDPA/3G/WiFi and running Mac OS on a tablet then this I think would be pretty awesome.

Likewise an iPhone with a 5″ or 7″ display would equally be as good.

According to http://www.9to5mac.com/tablet-rumor-wintek-300000-month there could be a Mac Tablet out next year. “The tablet PC features a 9.6-inch screen, finger-touch function and built-in HSPDA (high speed download packet access) module, and adopts a P.A. SEMI processor chip and long lasting battery pack, selling for between US$799 and US$999. DynaPack International Technology Corp. has been exclusively contracted to supply up to 300,000 units of long lasting battery packs a month for Apple`s newest tablet PCs.”