Apple User Podcast

Over the last six months (someone tipped me off about fakesteve.blogspot.com in August) this blog has provided great insight, hilarious wit and a few great Apple stock buying tips.
This blog is one of the funniest and most entertaing sites I’ve seen in recent months, heres a good post from November, depicting IT managers cheering over Vista’s increased footprint and higher complexity:

“Allah bless you, O wondrous Microsoft! How do you perform these miraculous feats? You have reproduced the Mac OS X desktop with none of its reliability and a far greater hardware requirement. All this plus hundreds of as-yet-undiscovered security holes, and for only $400 a seat, plus $500 for extra memory and another $500 for our IT drones to install it and patch it? Thank you, thank you, thank you, for always putting the customer first! Oh we are so grateful that we never adopted those attractive, easy-to-use, super-reliable iMacs”

FakeStevs is Finally shutting down though, a quote from the latest post:

“For now, dear friends, let me leave you with a message of hope and peace and love. Follow your dreams. Do what you love. Dance like nobody’s watching, sing like nobody’s listening.”

We’ll miss you FSJ.

“Windows Vista Premium upgrade: $160.

New graphics card: $60.

New hard drive: $130.

1 gigabyte RAM: $100.

Microsoft XP ain’t broke, so I don’t need this stuff: priceless.”

An excerpt from this article by the Kansas City Star.

Wow, I found this on Digg, We all knew that our Macs would run Vista really well, but seeing these presenters running Vista on an iMac really makes you feel like you’ve got the best of both worlds. As stated by Kevin Rose and illustrated in this cartoon:

OS X is a superior system to Vista, but if we need to try it out we can, can PC’s try out OS X? No.

read more | digg story

Switching from Linux meant I left behind lots of free open source software, here’s the silver lining:
The best Linux open source packages make it to OS X, its easy to port, as Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD, and my top pics from Linux, The GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, LinCity, Mplayer, Netpanzer and Armegatron

Those applications were literally my top ten used applications when I used debian, and they’re all on OS X too. Did I know that before switching to Mac? No! I switched with faith that things would be easier and better on the Mac, they sure are!

For more great Open Source software, visit Open Source Mac

The Macbook is my favorite computer of the last year, nay, five years. Its lightweight, widescreen (I can’t bear non Widescreens since using the iMac anc Macbook), lights up the room, attracts oohs and aahs, and much more.

I recommend the Base Configuration to almost everybody, Its very powerful, a Core 2 Duo 1.83Ghz Chip is quite incredible, 60gb Hard Drive is lots when your iPod carries all your movies and music, and a Dvd burner is not an essential in my eyes (if you need to, you can FULLY author your DVD in iDVD, and drop the image onto a Mac at your home or office that has a DVD Burner)
I’ve discovered that as well as the really fun Board games that come preinstalled with your Mac (Backgammon, Chess, Four in a Row) we can grab a Great absolutely free cross platform game called Sauerbraten here
Here Follows Screenshots:

This game is great and reminds me of Doom and Quake, its multiplayer, single player, nice AI, good weapons and great graphics. Its great to fire this up and see your Macbook tearing through these great levels, colors, textures all look super, and you can go online and play with your friends or at a Lan Party(Ugh)
Try it out to have some fun.

While recuperating, I recently considered perhaps grabbing a game for my Macbook.
Browsing the shelves at the Apple Store San Francisco reveals lots of good looking and interesting games,

Civilization 4 is a game that allows you to develop a civilization from the stone age to the space age, sounds like fun and most importantly, is a universal binary(meaning it runs at full speed(natively) on older macs(pre 2006) and brand new macs).
Another good looking Mac Game is

X-Plane looks to be the most advanced Flight simulator available on any platform, After mastering every kind of flying machine in every environment around the world, you’re able to create your own scenarios and Aeroplanes.
The sequel to the best selling game of all time ‘The Sims’ is
The Sims 2 is a Dollhouse taken to the computer, a player creates, controls every detail of their character down to personality. The player then builds them a house, gets them a job, helps them get promoted (by educating, amusing and finding love) for them. This formula worked incredibly in the first Sims and the Sims 2 essentially adds superior graphics, extra features and most importantly, the ability to procreate and see the parents genes come to life in the kids and grandkids.

All these games were noticable to me for one reason, they all have the “Universal symbol”

on their box, the fact that these are Top games and are some of the first to become Universal is not a coincidence, being top selling games, their parent companies have the funds to develop Universal editions of their games relatively quickly.
If buying games for my Macs, I’ll only buy Universal games, I’m a huge fan of Rosetta(the software in Intel Macs) that allows older games(Non Universal) to run, I’d simply prefer to grab software thats designed for the Intel Mac.

“In other news, one blogger believes that Vista is the first Microsoft OS since Windows 3.1 to have regressed in usability from its predecessor (he kindly forgives and dismisses Windows ME). And there’s a battle raging over the top 10 reasons to get Vista or not to get Vista.”

Last week Ballmer gained infamy when his nervous laughter at Apples iPhone made it to youtube.com, today on slashdot I saw this quote in relation to the fact that Microsoft has announced it needs testers quickly for its Service Pack 1, how often are Service Packs being prepared before OS’s Ship?

Betsy Schiffman in her article “Apple: Computers Are Sooo Last Year” made some good points about Apples focus on consumer Electronics but downplays how the iPod and Mac revolution have helped Apple’s stock when she states “Since Apple first launched the iPod, on Oct. 23, 2001, the stock has climbed nearly 375 percent.”
A quick search on Google Finance reveals that Apple stock has risen 863.8% since Oct. 19th 2001.

The Apple Comment by Denny Grabowski

The last year was for Apple and Steve Jobs a fantastic time. Apple switches to Intel Chips and all Apple Computer own those feature. Apple showed us a Leopard preview, brought a new iPod generation and finished with the presentation of the iTV, now called AppleTV. It seems that one highlight comes after the next. And yeah, it is true we Apple addicts feel like in heaven. A couple of days ago San Francisco was again the city of the newest Apple’s developments and products.
Ones again Apple shows us their technological revolution, the new way to communicate with an Apple phone, the iPhone. And what is behind the revolutionary way of Apple products? Well, the answer is very simple and also the answer of Apples success. The using of Apple products is easy and this is the way to develop these things that make our life liveable. Few samples are: 30 years ago Apple presented the first Mouse to get an easy access to our computers. So far every user had to type any commands as a very complicated text command. But not with a mouse, one double click and your file or folder shows you what you are locking for. And that was one of the greatest progresses in the computer history!
Another successful story shows us the iPod. No one else sells so many mp3 player than Apple. And once again presents Apple the newest iPod with the revolutionary Click wheel. It is so easy to get the access to your music, photos, videos and podcast and all to make everything as much easily as possible. Steve Jobs continued the Apple way of life. In San Francisco he introduced the iPhone and says very assured Apple reinvents the phone. Everybody who saw the presentation can say: “That’s right”. The whole phone comes with only one button. How revolutionary! The phone comes with a multi touch display. Wow, how revolutionary! This phone comes also with a full Internet browser, with Safari, what means that this phone opens every Website. That phone comes also with widgets, with Google Maps, an Email program, a 2 mega pixel inbuilt camera and with an inbuilt iPod and last but not least this phone is for phone calls developed.
The best feature is the multi touch display that makes the handling so easy than never before. There is no other phone on the market like this one. Those multi touch display allows us to zoom in and out, to scroll down in our music and photos libraries and to control and type on a digital touchable keyboard for emails, our contact files and short messages.
To everyone who hasn’t seen the presentation of the iPhone shouldn’t miss that! It is impossible to describe that new thing with words. Watch it and be welcome in the future right now! The Apple Revolution goes on.

Related to the prior post about GIMPshop and keeping with open source software discussion, I’m posting a link to Inkscape’s web site where you’ll find a Universal (i.e. Runs on Older Macs like G3’s & G5’s and newer Macs like Quad Core Mac Pros) version of Inkscape under the download section that is a Free Vector Drawing program along the lines of Adobe’s illustrator.

These thumbnails illustrate what beautiful art you can create with Inkscape, and as with GIMPshop, you’re getting a version of Adobe’s Illustrator that runs at FULL SPEED on your new Mac, and is legally free.

Remember that by donating to these projects, you give these open source developers the opportunity to quit their day jobs and become full time developers of this great software, being Mac users we can of course influence them to develop Mac friendly software utilizing Core Animation and the other great features of OS X.

As you can see in these thumbnails, Inkscape can create great art and yet is a free universal application, so don’t hesitate, make sure you have X11 installed (its on your discs that came with the Mac and also at apple.com, then download and install Inkscape and discover how good it is!