office:mac 2008

The new version of Office is great.  It works well with office 2007,  2003 and 2004 documents and the improved integration with Exchange within Entourage is great.  I use Sync services to synchronise contacts and calendar with the Blackberry (as I operate it on a BIS and not a BES - work wouldn’t pay the mean so and so’s). The only quirk I have found is that sometimes Sync Services turns itself off and calendars don’t get updated - very annoying.  I haven’t found out why it’s doing this, so if anyone has any ideas PLEASE post a comment or direct me to a forum or something to help me out here.  I have tried searching to no avail . . . .

Nokia N73 Woes

After a while with the N73 it started locking up - going to sleep and not being able to wake, usually after a calendar notification or mail notification, and the only way to recover was to pull the battery.  Eventually this deteriorated and the phone would power down for no apparent reason.  I therefore contacted T-Mobile and arranged for it to go for repair.When it returned it was totally wiped (to be expected I suppose) so I put Mail for Exchange on it again and it started locking up again.  I decided I’d have to do without mail on this phone - my main reason for going for this model, so now it was just a phone . . . bummer!!A few weeks later the battery started discharging rapidly - less than 24 hours - with minimal use.  I got a new battery, which did the same.Another call to T-Mobile - phone went for repair and arrived back again.  Picked it up from thepost office - Sim Card went in, memory card went in, battery went in, back on, power up and shove the thing in my pocket and drive to work. Now I didn’t remember hearing the Nokia chime and the T-Mobile noise that usually announced the startup of the phone and when I parked up I got the thing out of my pocket and looked and it had hung during boot at the Nokia screen - strange.Battery pulled out and back in again.  Same thing - no boot up.  Now I was getting very annoyed.  I was ready to accept defeat and would have been happy to pay a little more and get the phone returned, upgrade to a Blackberry.  I phoned T-Mobile.The  person I spoke to said he would arrange for it to go back for repair.  When I said I was not happy for that to happen as the thing had just been repaired he was not interested.  I was refused an upgrade to a higher tariff and a different device as I’d only had the thing about 6 months on an 18 month contract.  Bummer . . .So, after a little more playing with the phone I removed the memory card, battery and SIM.  Thinking I’d give it one last go I put in the SIM and battery and it worked!  I put in the memory card again and it didn’t.  So, memory card and phone?I tried the memory cared in a number of other devices and they all read it fine.  I reformatted it and still the same - caused the phone to hang.  Conclusion - memory card socket or circuitry is damaged.  Since the phone can’t be used for what I wanted to use it for I thought I’d just forget about it, use it just as a phone and wait until the contract ended.  I went to O2 and got the Blackberry so now I’m back to 2 devices .  One good thing though - the Blackberry seems to be rock solid stable and great for e-mail (I got the Curve).  When it comes to contract renewal I’ll certainly be thinking about going for another Blackberry and I’m resolved never to get another Nokia phone.

OK, so I needed to look at it some more. . .

Quick view works great for all the file types I have, I just hadn’t found that yu needed to hit the spacebar . . . sorry Mr Jobs.

I’m more and more impressed with Leopard the more I use it.  It seems faster than Tiger on my MacBook (2GHz Core2Duo with 2GB RAM) and I don’t think I’ve found anything important that doesn’t work.

Having just got myself a Blackberry Curve I’m also playing with syncing calendar and contacts with Entourage.  If anyone has had experience of this I’d welcome any comments on the subject.

Upgrade to Leopard

Well I upgraded to Leopard.

I backed up my hard drive to another drive using Carbon Copy Cloner and then just ran the install.  Everything went well and it was all complete in about an hour and a half.  No issues found yet.

I’ve just installed the keychain patch, which went well as well.

I like the interface changes.  Spaces is great and better than Virtue Desktops that I had been using (and which I uninstalled before upgrading to Leopard).  The interface changes to Mail is great too. Stacks is the coolest feature yet, and one I’ve been waiting for especially, as I like to organise things in this kind of way leaving the desktop free from clutter.

Coverflow I can take or leave - in some areas it’s really annoying and other areas good.

Quickview is a bit quirky - if I have a .ppt file it does not allow quickview, so it looks like to only quickviews things that the native OS X can read.  Presumably it would work with keynote . . .

I’ve not found any applications that have problems - yet . . .

Please post your experiences and comments so we can share thoughts.

New Mac OS X Leopard release

I’m very pleased to hear about the forthcoming release of Leopard on October 26th.  I’m planing on being at the Apple Store in Sheffield to get my copy as soon as I can - hopefully on the night itself.

Once I have had a chance to play a bit I’ll post some notes here.  Anyone else planning on doing the same?  Please post comments and share experiences.

Interesting note on the use of Wikis for projects.

I came across this site tonight and thought it was worth posting the link to it so that I and others can go through some of the concepts and exemplar pages at some point.

Interesting Applications for OS X

I found a few nice applications recently, either heard about through RSS feeds or Podcasts I listen to.

Joost, currently in beta, is great for gathering together lots of media channels on the web and allowing you to browse by category or search for content.  Definitely worth a look at.

Radioshift from Rogue Amoeba is also good if you like to listen to web radio and want to record programs and drop the recorded programs into iTunes.  Good search capability too.

For those of you who get PDF documents and want some way to read them and comment on them in the “margin” then Skim is for you.  There is also integration with other document types - see the web page and online documentation for more information.

If, like me, you regularly take your Mac Laptop between different networks each with their own settings needed, then you meed to handle that in a smart way.  MarcPolo is an application that allows you to switch locations by setting rules based on a number of different criteria.  I’ve been using this for some time and find it works great for me.

More application information soon . . .

iPhone unlocking debacle

Although there is little doubt that the iPhone represents a breakthrough in device evolution, interface design and application integration, there is also little doubt that Apple has created a big problem for itself in the closed nature of the device, its release through single carriers and the stance they have taken over the whole unlocking issue, not to mention the bad press they are getting as a result!  The saying that “there is no such thing as bad publicicty” may well be proved wrong in this case.   I can’t help feeling that they have killed a large number of sales for the coming holiday period.

With such a high end device it was inevitable that people would want to add applications to it in the same way they did with other smart phones.  Also, with a percentage of  business users wanting to have such a great combined device but also wanting to use other carriers when travelling, again, as they did with their previous phones, it was always going to be unlocked.

I wonder how many sales  Apple will lose as a result of bricking these devices?  I for one will not be buying one any time soon.  I want to be able to have an unlocked device that I can load applications onto if I wish without running the risk of having my expensive device rendered useless when I apply an update.

Apple need to think carefully about the users requirements and the dynamics of a new market before they enter.

I think they have a lot riding on how this issue is handled from now on - the world is watching them!

UK Web Survey Results

It was great to read the survey results on Brians Blog today.  Very encouraging and inspiring for us all to speak out more and make use of the great resources that are there.

If you haven’t seen this site yet then please follow the link - it’s certainly worth reading!!!

iPod and Podcast information

To those of you who know me or see me about, you will probably have noticed I nearly always have ny iPod around my neck.  I bet you wonder what I listen to . . . well, as well as some music (mainly involving Clarinets), I listen mainly to techy podcasts.

Here is a list of some of the podcasts that I listen to regularly - all available on iTunes:

Security Now
43 Folders
GeekBrief.TV
Linux News Log
Mac OS Ken
MacBreak Weekly
MacCast (including MacCast loop)
Mobile Computing Authority
net@nite
Stuff Mag’s podcast
this WEEK in TECH
Typical Mac User Podcast
Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott

They are all informative and entertaining.