iPhone in UK

Well, right after having written my previous post about iPhone, I came across an article in The Times, saying that O2 has supposedly received the rights to sell IPhone in UK.

It will be interesting to see how users in UK will react to the iPhone, seeing that over here (in UK) users are generally more sophisticated and demanding when it comes to cell-phones than in the US.

Hmm, I happen to be an O2 customer, and I love gadgets - so even if I really can’t see the point of the iPhone … you never know

iPhone Hysteria

Seeing that I am a Mac switcher, you’d have thought that I’d be over the iPhone like a rash. However, I’m not! I just can’t see the point!! From everything I’ve seen and heard it is a gadget with a beautiful UI, and very limited phone capabilities. It sounds like an iPod (admittedly a wide-screen iPod) with a phone thrown in as an afterthought. Can someone please enlighten me?!!!

I wouldn’t mind though having the iPhone as a (like I mentioned before) wide-screen iPod, without the phone stuff, but including the other features, WiFi, etc, etc. … IF it would have a bigger hard-disk than its paltry 8 gig. Heck, my IPod Nano has 8 gig. Well I can dream, can’t I?!

VMWare Releases RC1 of Fusion

VMWare released yesterday RC1 of Fusion (their virtualization app for MacIntel’s). I’ve installed it and it looks OK. One major feature is that they now have Unity support for Windows 2003 Server and Vista.

Other new stuff can be found in the release notes here.

Finally, Happy 4:th of july to you who celebrates that, the rest of us .. (well we can have a drink as well).

Where’s the Beef

I don’t know if you remember (I’m probably showing my age) an old advert for one hamburger chain or another, where the catch-phrase was: “Where’s the Beef”.

Well, that’s how I feel after having briefly sifted through the reports from the Apple WWDC keynote earlier today. It very much looks that my predictions were right from my post a couple of days ago. The “top secret” features that were promised during last year’s keynote was just a cop-out, empty promises. I don’t think that anything that was presented today can be classified as a top secret feature; heck most of it was presented last year anyway.

Don’t get me wrong Leopard looks great, and I certainly want to get my hands on it, but top secret features; no effing way!

Time for Apple’s WWDC

Next week one of the biggest events for Mac users comes around; the World Wide Developers Conference. As usual for the Mac World a lot of blogs, etc has started speculating what “his greatness” Jobs will reveal.

I guess one thing all agrees on is that it will be a lot of Leopard coverage. However, what it will entail is not that clear. Don’t forget that Steve Jobs at last years WWDC said that Leopard had certain top secrets features that he didn’t want to reveal at that time. Call me a cynical, but I don’t think we’ll see any new features that can be considered top secrets, and Jobs mentioning these “top secrets” was just a cop-out. My personal opinion is that Apple is moving away more and more from the core OS business, just look at the move earlier this year to drop Computers from the name, and that OS development won’t be that important anymore.

Anyway, I certainly hope I’m wrong and that Jobs pulls something really, really cool from his hat. But if he doesn’t, don’t forget I said so :-).

By the way, I really, really want one of the new MacBook Pro’s to replace my MacBook.

VMWare Fusion Beta 4 Released

Yesterday I posted about a new feature - Unity - in VMWare’s virtualizaton product for Mac; Fusion, and how I wanted to get my “grubby” little hands on it ASAP. Well, lo and behold - VMWare must have heard me, because they released Beta 4 last night!

I have just installed it, I haven’t had time to do anything much apart from checking that my VM’s run in this release; they do. This is good as I am on my way to Boston to teach (writing this on a train, going down to London). It looks though that I won’t be able to use the Unity feature, as - at the moment - it is only available for XP VM’s and all my VM’s are either Win 2003 Server or LongHorn Server. I guess I better set up an XP VM just to check it out.

VMWare and Unity

Back in December 2006 I posted how both Parallels and VMWare had released betas of their respective virtualization products for Mac OSX. At that time I used Parallels almost exclusively, and I’ve been doing that up until quite recently (actually until VMWare Fusion Beta 3). I have now switched (more or less wholesale) to VMWare Fusion.  Some of the reasons for this:

• Feels more polished
• Support for 64-bit guests
• Support for multi-core on guests

One thing that Parallels has however, that VMWare doesn’t is what they call Coherence. It is the concept of being able to run Windows apps on the Mac desktop as if they are “native” Mac apps. I.e. you don’t run the app inside the VM window, but on the Mac desktop.

Well, VMWare doesn’t have it - yet. Yesterday they released a demo video on YouTube showing off what they call Unity, which is their implementation of the same concept. It is awesome. Have a look:

I so hope VMWare will release a new version with this feature ASAP!!

Christmas Presents in the Virtualization World

Last week saw early Christmas for us interested in Virtualization (especially for Mac’s on Intel). Both Parallels and VMWare released betas of their repective products for Mac’s.

I have used Parallels for a while, and their new beta looks very promising. I just installed the VMWare VM, but haven’t had chance to take it for a spin yet. What is interesting with the VMWare beta is support - on the guest - for multi cpu/core machines, as well as 64 bit guest support.

Other than that - Merry Christmas to you all!!!

CrossOver for Mac (or: Run Windows apps Inside OSX)

In previous posts I have written how I have changed over from Windows to Mac OSX, and how I am running OSX as my main OS. I also wrote that I used Parallels as my virtualization environment, so I can run Windows in a Virtual Machine. That works extremely well and I’m doing all my teaching, playing with research of technologies from the VM. The VM is still a bit of an overkill if you just want to run a particular Windows application - say PowerPoint (it is still miles better than having a dual boot system using BootCamp and dual-booting into XP).

Anyway, I no longer have to spin up my VM if I just want to check a slide deck, open a Word document, run some Windows app. Two days ago CodeWeavers launched a beta of their CrossOver for Mac application. This is an application that allows you to run Windows applications from (what looks like) inside OSX. In reality you are running the Windows apps in a sub system using Wine.

I installed it yesterday and promptly installed Office 2003, and it works! I then tried to install other Windows apps - with various degrees of success. This is still a beta and it can only get better - I am really impressed, and if you are on OSX and want to run some Windows app, this is something you should take a look at.

Apps for a Windows User on OSX

No, I have not slipped back into bad old habits and stopped blogging. I’ve been out of the country and have not had access to the ‘Net except from my mobile. That’s how I saw that Joe in a comment to one of my posts, asked me if I knew any news readers for OSX. I thought that would be a good topic to blog about, not news readers per se, but what applications do I use on my MacBook coming from a Windows environment.

First of all, news readers; when I switched over I searched for a news reader for OSX. On the Windows platform I used XNews and I searched for one with the same capabilities. I found a couple, but all were fairly crappy, no, let’s re-phrase that and say they left room for improvement. So I ended up using the built-in news reader in Thunderbird. It’s not XNews by any means, but it works OK.

So what am I using:

• Adium - IM client with MSN support. The rumor has it that next version of iChat will support MSN. That would be so cool, I could then use the built-in iSight web cam.
• Adobe DNG - I’m doing quite a lot of phot work as a hobby, and I shoot in RAW. This is an app to convert from RAW to Adbes DNG standard.
• Adobe Lightroom - my workflow app for photo. Absolutely fantastic, still in beta - but will be worth whatever it’ll cost at release.
• Adobe Reader - for PDF’s.
• Chicken of the VNC - VNC client against my Windows servers.
• CyberDuck - FTP client.
• ecto - blog client.
• Emacs Tiger - Emacs, need I say more?!
• Firefox - No Safari here, my browser.
• Google Earth - To see where I am.
• iCal - Calendar and scheduling app. Comes as part of OSX. I initially used Google Calendar and Sunbird from Mozilla, but as the Google calendar app doesn’t allow to update the calendar from other apps than Google Calendar itself, it didn’t work for me. I could have stayed with Sunbird, but I need to print my calendar’s now and then and the print support in Sunbird is almost non existent.
• JAlbum - Even though Lightroom has a web module, at the moment I use JAlbum to create web albums of my photos.
• KeyNote - Apple’s slide presentation app, PowerPoint ++.
• Neo Office - Office productivity. I use it for word doc’s and spreadsheet’s. Built based on OpenOffice and understands MS Word and Excel doc formats.
• Paralells - The Virtual Machine app, so I can run Windows as virtual machines. Absolutely excellent. The only major drawback is that it doesn’t support Vista yet; i.e. I can not have a Vista guest VM.
• PathFinder - What Finder (OSX file explorer) should have been.
• QuickSilver - Application launcher tool and so much more.
• SharePoints - One of the things where OSX has major room for improvement is mounting shares. SharePoint takes a lot of the hassle out of the work, and allows you to do more than Apple’s tools without having to resort to command line.
• SmartSVN - Subversion client
• Subversion - Version control, easier than CVS and miles better than VSS.
• SuperDuper - Invaluable app which allows you to back-up your system to an image, which you then can restore from. Saves you tons of time if you are doing frequent re-paves.
• Thunderbird - My email and news-reader client.
• Vienna - RSS reader.
• VLC - Media player
• Whitch - allows me to ALT - Tab between applications and individual windows of a given app.

After each re-pave I also install the latest release of Mono, beta release of X-Develop (a great development IDE) and Apple’s XCode. As can be seen from the above I use very few Apple “native” apps (actually only iCal), and I try and stick with open source applications as much as possible. That’s nothing religious however, I choose the apps that works for me.

So what do I miss from Windows? First and foremost (and probably the only big thing) is a desktop mapping application. I used MapPoint a lot for various reasons, and I haven’t found anything equivalent in the Mac world (I need offline capabilities). However, it is not a really big deal - I have it installed on a VM so i can pretty easy get to it if I need.

That’s me guys (and girls). For you that have made the switch (or are “native” Mac users) what are you using, what are you missing??