mac

A few days ago, Walter Mossberg, writing in the Wall Street Journal, offered a verbal peek at the Mac user interface (see Some General Tips for Switch to Mac From Windows) intended as heads-up for Windows XP users thinking of switching.

I'm not a Mac user, but from reading the article, it seems that the initial learning curve for switching from Windows XP to Linux, is less than that for switching to Macs. Both Macs and Linux are immune to the vast majority of malicious software, so from a Defensive Computing standpoint, each is good choice.

One advantage Mac … Read more

I've been a proponent of the Cloud and hosted applications for quite some time but today I am dramatically feeling the effects of having zero control over my infrastructure and the inability to get anything when a Cloud provider has issues.

My MacBook Air is clearly in it's death-throes just six months after purchase and today Google Docs was down for over an hour. I basically have no way to do any real work at this point as I can't use most of my applications and can't get to my documents on Google. I'm a … Read more

The Register spots an error in Google's Gears documentation, which suggests that Google Gears will run on OSX 14 and ""Mac OSX 13.9 and below."

Google may be the future, but it's not that far into the future just yet. :-)

Nice to see Googlers can make mistakes, too. I mean, besides Froogle.

Mark Shuttleworth addresses a range of interesting things in a recent interview, but there are two, in particular, that strike me. First, Mark acknowledges the obvious: The Mac is a superior usability experience. Second, however, while placating his upstream developer communities, he also notes that improving on their work is going to be critical to beating the Mac:

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has historically been very, very deferential to what we call our upstream communities - GNOME, KDE, and so on - in the definition of the desktop experience. Our view, very strongly, is that they hold the real … Read more

Update at 10:08 a.m. PDT, with clarification on how users' e-mail will be handled.

Apple's MobileMe service is primed to be relaunched this week, ahead of the Friday launch of the iPhone 3G. That means subscribers to .Mac will find the service taken offline for a six-hour stretch as Apple makes the transition, according to a post in MacRumors.com.

The www.mac.com site will go down on Wednesday from 6 p.m. to 12 a.m. PDT, leaving .Mac subscribers unable to access the site or use .Mac services, except for .MacMail via their desktop … Read more

Remember back in the day when we went nuts and compared a Samsung Q1 Ultra to an Apple Newton? We've been eating the crazy pills again. Today, we woke up and decided we'd do another mental comparison--the MSI Wind versus the similarly gusty MacBook Air.

Despite the price disparity, they're both laptops, they're both ultraportable, they both have keyboards and screens, and they're both so gorgeous they cause random strangers to accost you in the street, demanding to know where you got them from. So which is best? The great silver hope from Apple, or … Read more

OK. I can't actually call it "Firefox" due to trademark concerns, but a colleague sent me this link to "Minefield," which is a version of Firefox optimized for the Mac.

Is it any good? Well, according to one user, "Starts up faster, scrolls smoother, resizes windows smoother...It's like it's Safari." In other words, a bit like the new launcher icons for OpenOffice.org Aqua, but probably better.

Does this mean it will close the gap with Safari as the world's fastest browser? (Mind you, the gap wasn't very … Read more

The Apple MacBook Air has been a ground-breaking first-generation product (in my opinion). So, what will Apple do to top it when an update comes later this year? There are some telling indicators already. This is what I expect--and hope for--as a user.

First, a disclaimer. I am not an Apple fanatic. The MacBook Air is the first Apple product I have ever used for more than a few days. For well over a decade, I have been wedded to Wintel (Windows-Intel) laptops.

Before I dive into upcoming features, I should also mention that I have been extremely pleased with … Read more

Here in the Asay home we have a growing problem: Each year we add a Mac to the fold, making it increasingly more difficult to tell them apart. My wife, eldest daughter, and I each have MacBook Pros. Soon, no doubt, my nine-year old son will get one. I love the way the Macs look, but it becomes a problem when they all look the same.

That's at home. Imagine what it's like at work, where we have scads of MacBook Pros.

Yes, we could litter the laptops with stickers, but that's a bit like sacrilege (though some disagree).… Read more