This change breaks the URL completion feature in Safari where if you type "cnn", Safari automatically displays "cnn.com". If you type a URL that is in your browser history, then of course Safari will auto complete it before submitting the http request, but if it's a domain you haven't visited before, you now get the useless Bell page instead of the page you really wanted.
Does Bell just use Internet Explorer? If they were Mac users, they wouldn't have done this.
Canada's paper and pencil system works not because of the lower numbers of people but because voters make only one mark on the ballot. We place an X next to the name of the person we want to elect as our Member of Parliament in our riding. The party with the most members wins and thus their leader becomes the Prime Minister. With only one choice per ballot, the boxes of votes can be dumped onto a table at the end of the day and counted while observers from the parties watch.
This would be impossible in the US, where you also have to choose members of congress, state reps, attorney generals, governors, judges, etc. Using the Canadian counting method would take many hours.
The real problem is the US voting system. If you didn't have to vote for positions such as state attorney general and Lt Governor and just relied on the governor to fill these positions, as the President does at the federal level, and then separated federal and state voting, then the system might be as simple as Canada's and thus paper and pencil might be a suitable technology. But given that the US will never change from its complex system, an electronic voting system is all but inevitable.
Is what Fox-style journalism has done to the news world? CNN no longer does its own reporting and relies on rumors posted on the web site of a university student?
Granted, Think Secret has been amazing accurate, so much so that Apple has sued them, but it is after all a rumor site run by a university student. CNN pays reporters to investigate stories, they shouldn't be reporting them from rumor sites without additional facts to corroborate them.
Please. ZXCVB shortcuts pre-date MacOS, the PC World didn't steal them. Everybody borrowed from everybody else in defining standard shortcuts.
Apple did contribute P for Print. There's a section in one of Tog's books discussing the evolution of shortcuts in MacOS.
FM receivers on these devices are popular at gyms.
I was tired of watching the TV mutely at my gym while others enjoyed sound on their non-Ipod players. I solved the problem by switching to an Apple compatible gym, one without TVs above the stairclimbers. Now my iPod doesn't need to suffer from FM radio envy.
On complex Word documents with certain types of images and text formatting, compatability is terrible to the point where the documents cannot be moved without hours of fixing on the target platform.
I have the latest version, I like it, it's frustratingly slow. I'll use Pages if released for everything except some documents which I'm required to use Word for at work.
It would be interesting if it had an iPod dock built in given the target market. I know you can connect a dock via a Firewire cable, but with a built-in dock, Apple could market this baby Mac as an iPod accessory.
I'm a geek and own Photoshop, but I love iPhoto. It does just a few things but it does them extremely well. I take some snapshots, synch with iPhoto, upload them online with a pleasing layout, share the link with friends, and order prints directly from iPhoto. I laughed when it came out, but I'm not too proud to admit how much I midjudged it. Apple figured out their audience on this one.
You do realize that in Canada we allow you to copy but then we tax the media to death to protect the people who might be hurt if you were to copy. So enjoy copying onto your tapes and discs and enjoy paying the taxes to subsidize Canadian artists.
I'll probably flamed for this, but I don't need the right to make backup copies of my DVDs. On the off chance that a DVD or CD breaks, it's cheaper and less work to just buy another than to make copies of hundreds of discs. I'd rather have copy protection built in than subsidize artists. I have the worst of both worlds. I refuse to copy something I don't own and I have to pay extra taxes for thsoe who do.
I didn't need any more features in iPhoto. It did everything I wanted, but it was slow once I had a lot of photos in it. I'm happy to plunk down by $50 ($80Cnd) to get iPhoto 4 with faster speeds.
Why should paid upgrades only be for new features. I'd gladly pay $200-300 for a new version of MS Office that had zero new features but was faster.
The photos I've seen of the HP-branded iPod are small, but as far as I can tell, the colour is rather ugly. I think the iPod would look great in certain colours, but the HP blue prototype shown in the video looks so gray that it's just flat.
I think this is an excellent point. Why is it just music? Why not give software companies a levy. Say another 10%. And don't forget pirated movies, a small but growing segments. Add 10% to blank dvds. Maybe somebody will pirate the yellow pages and put them on their ipod. Add 5% to ipods for that. Then there are downloaded bookes. 5% for them, too.
"While I don't long for the past, I sometimes wonder if golden oldies like AmigaDOS or HP openview are any less productive or reliable than what we have now."
I loved AmigaDOS at the time, too, but I had to reboot my computer at least once per day then. I think it's been a couple of months since I rebooted my 10.2 Mac now. Although my Amiga 3000 was one of my favourite computers ever, I wouldn't go back for anything.
Have you looked into ConceptDraw? It's a Visio style drawing and flowcharting program. There are a couple of versions at different pricepoints. I've used it for flowcharting, site mapping, wireframing, org charting, and, well, designing my new kitchen.:-)
Here's a link to the libraries. I think even the cheap version supports floor plans.
I've used ConceptDraw a lot in a work setting. I don't think it's quite as good as Visio, but it is the most full featured program of its type for MacOS. I found it very stable but with quite a few UI quirks. (Not as polished as an Adobe or Macromedia product.)
I got AppleCare for my Nov 2001 iBook. It has since paid for:
- 1 dying battery
- 1 corrupted hard drive
- 1 dead airport card (after the airport card warranty expired, the iBook's AppleCare covered it.)
It was definitely worth it and I will buy AppleCare with every future purchase.
Well, no offense, but Canada's not exactly a huge market, you know? It's got fewer people and a smaller GDP than California, for crying out loud
But it's a good test market for an international rollout. It has similar licensing rules to the US so it won't be has hard as Europe but it requires multiple languages and a different currency. If you want to test international support before an international rollout, Canada is 10% of the size of the US and an easy option.
I was in SF once on business and my iBook died. It was within warranty. I called this store and asked for help. They said no. I was very polite, asking for help. They refused. Either because I was not a customer or because they were busy. I went to Palo Alto to the Apple Store. They fixed it immediately. I spent a ton of money in the store while they fixed my iBook free. This is the way to get a customer. You tell the customer "bring it in and we'll look at it", and while you fix it, the potential customer becomes a real customer.
I used a Mailboxes Etc clone when I moved my small business to a new city. I got envelopes printed, business cards printed, sent out change of address notices to all of my customers, etc. Within a month, the PMB went out of business. Not only did I have to spend thousands on printing and mailing address change notices again, it took me forever to get the mail that was trapped in their office.
For the iBook yes, but they didn't adjust their pricing across the board. The PB is still 1.6 x the US price while the iBook is now just 1.5 x the US price. I wish they'd adjust the Cnd pricing on other hardware.
Most people I know would be delighted to chuck MS Office, even though it is cheap (by academic pricing). It is slow, buggy, and awkward.
And StarOffice isn't slow, buggy, and awkward, too?
I agree that Office v.X needs serious competition and more work. I would love to see a polished version of StarOffice compete with it. I would not like to see MS drop Office Mac because I wouldn't switch.
Try moving long documents with really complex formatting between MS Office and StarOffice. It doesn't really work. The formatting fixes take more time than it's worth. If I have to give a document to somebody using StarOffice, I give them a PDF.
"you sir, are wrong. as are the rest of the apple community. more buttons really does mean more options."
I hate to defend this person's post, especially since I strongly prefer my 2-button Microsoft mouse to Apple's 1-button mouse, but there is one thread of truth here.
For expert users, 2-button mice allow faster access to commands in context menus than either 1-button mice with the Ctrl key or the use of the main menus. Duh. The speed of 2 buttons on laptops is debatable. For novice users, it's not that using 2 buttons is slower, it's that the 2nd button confuses them. Since Apple sells a lot of computers to schools with young children, they should probably keep 1-button mice as standard on iMacs and eMacs but sell 2-button mice for expert PowerMac users.
The real issue isn't that Apple doesn't offer a 2-button mouse, but that a 2-button mouse isn't ideal anyway. There are other gestures that could be supported by a new mouse such as squeezing, rubbing, etc. There's lots of room for innovation. A limited set of unique gestures is faster than context menus because there is no time to acquire the target. Context menus are modal and they require you to move the mouse and then choose a command.
The only reason we need context menus is that programs have so many menu options that it's hard to find the relevant commands. Over the years, toolbars and palettes were invented to let us avoid the menus but then they got so cluttered that we needed context menus. Now context menus are so cluttered in programs like MS Word that MS has to drop some commands in some situations, ruining the predicitability of what's going to be in the menu. A better interface would be to design programs and computers so that you didn't really need context menus.
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This change breaks the URL completion feature in Safari where if you type "cnn", Safari automatically displays "cnn.com". If you type a URL that is in your browser history, then of course Safari will auto complete it before submitting the http request, but if it's a domain you haven't visited before, you now get the useless Bell page instead of the page you really wanted. Does Bell just use Internet Explorer? If they were Mac users, they wouldn't have done this.
Canada's paper and pencil system works not because of the lower numbers of people but because voters make only one mark on the ballot. We place an X next to the name of the person we want to elect as our Member of Parliament in our riding. The party with the most members wins and thus their leader becomes the Prime Minister. With only one choice per ballot, the boxes of votes can be dumped onto a table at the end of the day and counted while observers from the parties watch. This would be impossible in the US, where you also have to choose members of congress, state reps, attorney generals, governors, judges, etc. Using the Canadian counting method would take many hours. The real problem is the US voting system. If you didn't have to vote for positions such as state attorney general and Lt Governor and just relied on the governor to fill these positions, as the President does at the federal level, and then separated federal and state voting, then the system might be as simple as Canada's and thus paper and pencil might be a suitable technology. But given that the US will never change from its complex system, an electronic voting system is all but inevitable.
Is what Fox-style journalism has done to the news world? CNN no longer does its own reporting and relies on rumors posted on the web site of a university student? Granted, Think Secret has been amazing accurate, so much so that Apple has sued them, but it is after all a rumor site run by a university student. CNN pays reporters to investigate stories, they shouldn't be reporting them from rumor sites without additional facts to corroborate them.
Please. ZXCVB shortcuts pre-date MacOS, the PC World didn't steal them. Everybody borrowed from everybody else in defining standard shortcuts. Apple did contribute P for Print. There's a section in one of Tog's books discussing the evolution of shortcuts in MacOS.
On complex Word documents with certain types of images and text formatting, compatability is terrible to the point where the documents cannot be moved without hours of fixing on the target platform. I have the latest version, I like it, it's frustratingly slow. I'll use Pages if released for everything except some documents which I'm required to use Word for at work.
It would be interesting if it had an iPod dock built in given the target market. I know you can connect a dock via a Firewire cable, but with a built-in dock, Apple could market this baby Mac as an iPod accessory.
#1: IE #2: Firefox #3: Netscape #4: Safari #5: Opera
I'm a geek and own Photoshop, but I love iPhoto. It does just a few things but it does them extremely well. I take some snapshots, synch with iPhoto, upload them online with a pleasing layout, share the link with friends, and order prints directly from iPhoto. I laughed when it came out, but I'm not too proud to admit how much I midjudged it. Apple figured out their audience on this one.
Why gecko for gmail? I use the latest public release of Safari, khtml, and it works just fine with gmail. Is there a problem with Konqueror and gmail?
You do realize that in Canada we allow you to copy but then we tax the media to death to protect the people who might be hurt if you were to copy. So enjoy copying onto your tapes and discs and enjoy paying the taxes to subsidize Canadian artists. I'll probably flamed for this, but I don't need the right to make backup copies of my DVDs. On the off chance that a DVD or CD breaks, it's cheaper and less work to just buy another than to make copies of hundreds of discs. I'd rather have copy protection built in than subsidize artists. I have the worst of both worlds. I refuse to copy something I don't own and I have to pay extra taxes for thsoe who do.
I didn't need any more features in iPhoto. It did everything I wanted, but it was slow once I had a lot of photos in it. I'm happy to plunk down by $50 ($80Cnd) to get iPhoto 4 with faster speeds.
Why should paid upgrades only be for new features. I'd gladly pay $200-300 for a new version of MS Office that had zero new features but was faster.
The photos I've seen of the HP-branded iPod are small, but as far as I can tell, the colour is rather ugly. I think the iPod would look great in certain colours, but the HP blue prototype shown in the video looks so gray that it's just flat.
I think this is an excellent point. Why is it just music? Why not give software companies a levy. Say another 10%. And don't forget pirated movies, a small but growing segments. Add 10% to blank dvds. Maybe somebody will pirate the yellow pages and put them on their ipod. Add 5% to ipods for that. Then there are downloaded bookes. 5% for them, too.
Have you looked into ConceptDraw? It's a Visio style drawing and flowcharting program. There are a couple of versions at different pricepoints. I've used it for flowcharting, site mapping, wireframing, org charting, and, well, designing my new kitchen. :-)
Here's a link to the libraries. I think even the cheap version supports floor plans.
http://www.conceptdraw.com.ua/en/tours/libtour/cdt ours.php
I've used ConceptDraw a lot in a work setting. I don't think it's quite as good as Visio, but it is the most full featured program of its type for MacOS. I found it very stable but with quite a few UI quirks. (Not as polished as an Adobe or Macromedia product.)
I got AppleCare for my Nov 2001 iBook. It has since paid for: - 1 dying battery - 1 corrupted hard drive - 1 dead airport card (after the airport card warranty expired, the iBook's AppleCare covered it.) It was definitely worth it and I will buy AppleCare with every future purchase.
I was in SF once on business and my iBook died. It was within warranty. I called this store and asked for help. They said no. I was very polite, asking for help. They refused. Either because I was not a customer or because they were busy. I went to Palo Alto to the Apple Store. They fixed it immediately. I spent a ton of money in the store while they fixed my iBook free. This is the way to get a customer. You tell the customer "bring it in and we'll look at it", and while you fix it, the potential customer becomes a real customer.
I used a Mailboxes Etc clone when I moved my small business to a new city. I got envelopes printed, business cards printed, sent out change of address notices to all of my customers, etc. Within a month, the PMB went out of business. Not only did I have to spend thousands on printing and mailing address change notices again, it took me forever to get the mail that was trapped in their office.
For the iBook yes, but they didn't adjust their pricing across the board. The PB is still 1.6 x the US price while the iBook is now just 1.5 x the US price. I wish they'd adjust the Cnd pricing on other hardware.
Okay, I'll admit this is pretty cool. But a Celeron in an A1000? Why not a 2 gig P4?
And StarOffice isn't slow, buggy, and awkward, too?
I agree that Office v.X needs serious competition and more work. I would love to see a polished version of StarOffice compete with it. I would not like to see MS drop Office Mac because I wouldn't switch.
Try moving long documents with really complex formatting between MS Office and StarOffice. It doesn't really work. The formatting fixes take more time than it's worth. If I have to give a document to somebody using StarOffice, I give them a PDF.
I hate to defend this person's post, especially since I strongly prefer my 2-button Microsoft mouse to Apple's 1-button mouse, but there is one thread of truth here.
For expert users, 2-button mice allow faster access to commands in context menus than either 1-button mice with the Ctrl key or the use of the main menus. Duh. The speed of 2 buttons on laptops is debatable. For novice users, it's not that using 2 buttons is slower, it's that the 2nd button confuses them. Since Apple sells a lot of computers to schools with young children, they should probably keep 1-button mice as standard on iMacs and eMacs but sell 2-button mice for expert PowerMac users.
The real issue isn't that Apple doesn't offer a 2-button mouse, but that a 2-button mouse isn't ideal anyway. There are other gestures that could be supported by a new mouse such as squeezing, rubbing, etc. There's lots of room for innovation. A limited set of unique gestures is faster than context menus because there is no time to acquire the target. Context menus are modal and they require you to move the mouse and then choose a command.
The only reason we need context menus is that programs have so many menu options that it's hard to find the relevant commands. Over the years, toolbars and palettes were invented to let us avoid the menus but then they got so cluttered that we needed context menus. Now context menus are so cluttered in programs like MS Word that MS has to drop some commands in some situations, ruining the predicitability of what's going to be in the menu. A better interface would be to design programs and computers so that you didn't really need context menus.