iTunes is an interesting beast. It already handles music, talking books and your podcasts, and more recently video. PDF handling has been provided for some time, but it is not a very heavily advertised feature. You can organize, classify, rate - you can even get PDFs as podcasts.
It's not quite perfect - you cannot flip through PDFs you already have and have added using Cover Flow (at least, none of mine work that like that).
OK, that was a weird moment just for a second. I was thinking about the testing I've been doing on the Ultra 20, and decided that running GeekBench on my iMac running Windows XP would be a good way to test, compared to the Ultra 20 running it natively.
Could I remember what the tool from Apple was called that would let me do that? No.
It took me a few minutes to find out, because without a name, it was difficult to find amid all the other stories on using Windows XP on your Mac. Why don't I use it? Because I have Parallels - and trust me, once you've used Parallels as a solution for most of your Windows XP tasks, using Boot Camp feels clumsy and restrictive.
I may have been critical of the iPhone, but the reality is that I'll probably still get one (depending on who in the UK Apple decides to partner with in terms of a mobile phone company).
You only have to look at these videos (iPhone Video Demo) just to see how cool the interface will be. Despite the flaws I've stated before, you cannot help but be impressed.
A couple of weeks ago I asked Is data sharing going to far?. I think I basically answered the question myself with the thought that, yes, it is, and worse it is doing so here in the UK in an inconsistent fashion.
I started off my review of the Sun Ultra 20M2 workstation (Sun Ultra 20M2 workstation - part 1) with a look at the history of workstations and what they used to mean in the market, and a brief overview of the hardware.
Before I go into more detail on how the workstation feels when you use it, I took a brief interlude to try the Geekbench performance measuring tool on the box - so far I've tried only native Solaris 10 and Windows XP. Both are the 64-bit versions of the respective operating system, updated with the latest patches and the latest driver disk (1.4) from Sun for the U20M2. For comparison, I also added in a 24" iMac (with the T7600, 2.33GHz CPU).
So the iPhone was announced last week, and while there's lots to like, there are many elements which for me either don't fit, or that I would have preferred to see in a separate device. Let's take a look at the detail.
The good:
The touch screen interface, and the UI in general, looks amazing. The integration with the desktop looks good too, if it really does handle everything they say it will. The widescreen, switchable, display, and the other sensors, will turn a comparatively stupid device into something that handles more instinctively. The display is gorgeous, from the perspective of the quality and clarity.
Lost Planet arrived on my desk from Amazon on Friday morning. In release terms, many people are calling it the closest thing to a stop gap between Gears of War and the forthcoming (and eagerly anticipated) Halo 3. Despite my sometimes serious demeanour, there's nothing I like more when unwinding than killing a few unrecognizable aliens on my XBox 360.
In many respects Lost Planet fits the bill. In others, you can see that there are some serious problems with the game. I should stress, however, that despite the issues, the game is incredibly good fun.
Lost Planet arrived on my desk from Amazon on Friday morning. In release terms, many people are calling it the closest thing to a stop gap between Gears of War and the forthcoming (and eagerly anticipated) Halo 3. Despite my sometimes serious demeanour, there's nothing I like more when unwinding than killing a few unrecognizable aliens on my XBox 360.
In many respects Lost Planet fits the bill. In others, you can see that there are some serious problems with the game. I should stress, however, that despite the issues, the game is incredibly good fun.
Back in August last I wrote about feeling like a Second class entertainment citizen. I was hoping for some improvement on that front today. Unfortunately, those of us outside of the US are still limited to music in our iTunes. We have not movies or TV to download.
This makes the appeal of the Apple TV somewhat limited. Ironically, despite the fact that only movies we've ripped ourselves, music and photos can be streamed to the Apple TV, it is on sale right now.
Some will point out that the fact that Apple are launching the Apple TV outside the US means that other terroritories must be getting TV/movie support at the iTuns store soon. I hope they're right, but I wont start holding my breath quite yet.
I've had on my desk for the last few months a Sun Ultra 20M2 workstation. Over the next few days I'll be reviewing/commenting on the box and my experiences with it.
Historically from a Unix vendor like Sun, the workstation was the desktop equivalent of the big server (or servers) you had in the server room. Workstations were typically of two types - the low-end workstation (a comparatively recent invention) provided support for the same CPU as used in the datacenter, but in a format that was useful for developers. The high-end workstation is more usually targeted to solving the high-end computing requirements for, say, 3D graphics.