mac

MacWorld 2008 and an interesting stock trading tie-in promotion

Another exciting keynote from Steve Jobs today at MacWorld 2008 – in case you missed it you can catch-up on live.gizmodo.com. Just like the last MacWorld, Gizmodo’s live blog was hosted on WordPress.com as part of our VIP hosting program. ( you can read a “rating the livebloggers” review here)
update: watch the keynote & details on how other sites covering the event faired: Crunchgear, Engadget, and Twitter )

From a Mac product standpoint, I’m not totally convinced about the MacBook Air but definitely will check it out, and the Apple TV “take 2” is a huge improvement.

Shortly after the keynote this curious email offer arrived in my inbox:
trading.png

I definitely give them credit for linking their campaign to the millions of people out there with an urge to buy some new Apple gear !

Useful Mac apps: Play WMVs, Google Analytics Widget, and Quinn

Some helpful ( and fun ) OS X apps that I’ve been using recently:

– id Software released HD footage of Rage (trailer & developer walk-through), the new internally developed game, at QuakeCon 2007 (Shacknews coverage). It’s in WMV format, so if you are on a Mac and not running some kind of virtualization/windows combo, you should grab the WMV Quicktime component. While I haven’t played PC games in years, this one is looking pretty solid.

– Using Google Analytics to track your site’s traffic and running OS X ? Dashalytics is a new OS X widget that shows a snapshot from your Google Analytics account in your OS X Dashboard. On the subject of traffic stats, if you are running WordPress, make sure to check out our WordPress.com Stats plugin.

– Must be something about playing Tetris for hours on end back in the day (aka “Tetris Effect“) that caused me to seek out Tetris clones. A really good one that a few people have emailed me about (and just saw that Jamie wrote about recently) is called Quinn. Really clean interface, and even includes “extensive online highscore database” 🙂 Definitely worth checking out.

– (UPDATE #1) Forgot to also mention the excellent OS X port of Open Office called NeoOffice. It even handles MS Word tracking changes which is something Google Docs does not currently support. (thanks Matt for the tip)

Hit by the OS X 10.4.10 update problems – having flashbacks to BSOD

os x crash I’m speechless ! Just had my mac crash and require a restart (panic) for the third time in about 20 minutes.

Looks like it’s related to a 10.4.10 update that has caused problems with wifi when running on battery power. Plugging the power cord back in seems to have stabilized the situation.

For a few minutes I thought it was Firefox related, since that’s what I was using when the crashes occurred.  I tried out Camino for a bit ( it has been a while since I last used it ) — and it’s really a slick browser. Only thing holding me back from using it full time is the lack of plugin support.
Back to this buggy OS X update. As one user, tele_player, on the apple support forum put it:

 > …and this is better then Windows? Somehow I am
> starting to feel like I bought into the marketing
> hype of Apple products… =(
Right now, it doesn’t look better than Windows, but a screwup like this is actually VERY unusual.

Let’s hope we see a quick fix soon.