Saturday, November 28, 2009

More to come.

Hello, I haven't posted in a while as I've been busy. A couple of days ago I got the Office 2010 beta from microsoft, free of charge (By the way, if you want office other than open office use the beta, it's incredibly stable and fast, it expires in oct 2010, which gives you a pretty long time to try out the beta). Note that it does transfer your outlook files if you use outlook 2007 or a previous version of outlook, but as I don't use outlook, in fact I didn't have office installed in the first place, it was not a problem. I installed it in my VMware Fusion virtual machine and I'll be giving a review of it soon, hopefully by the end of december.

Also, I've gotten an invitation for google wave, I'm very excited about that too and I'm going to try it out and see what some of the pros and cons of the online app are, stay tuned!

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Microsoft Office: Mac 2008 Update 12.2.3

I just read a Macworld Article saying that office 2008 12.2.3 update was out so I downloaded and installed. After doing so I was amazed at how fast word, excel, and powerpoint 08 took to boot from a warm start. I'm going to restart my computer later and test cold start times. I'm VERY impressed at the boot up speed, if this trend continues hats off to you MacBU. I might try to count the bounces it takes for office to boot up from a cold start later on.

Edit: Cold boot test, Word: 7 bounces, Excel/Powerpoint: 2 bounces. Such a huge discrepancy between word and excel/powerpoint, I always wonder why, one example of difference is where on excel/powerpoint when you resize the window it only gives you the outline while on word it shows you the whole window resizing, which I personally find very odd. It appears that excel and powerpoint just load faster than word for some reason, hopefully the gap will be minimized in office: mac 2010. Just to note this is on my 2008 mbp with 2.4 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2 GB of RAM running 10.6.2.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Snow Leopard Lagginess

Ok, so I recently installed snow leopard 10.6.2, the newest update, and I must say the update process was seamless (even though there was a part where it said it would take 1 GB of hard drive space to install this update, which got me kind of annoyed). It restarted the computer, I was just logging in etc. until I started up iTunes. And this is iTunes 9.0.2 we're talking about, the newest version of iTunes. I opened up the podcast section because I saw that there were a number of new podcasts and I double clicked on a video to play. To my dismay, my computer utterly clogged up and the whole system became laggy. Wohoo, go iTunes 9... Speaking of iTunes 9 I don't like the new GUI, and it does not look the part when compared to quicktime X, with the supposed "marble" interface, the GUI of 10.6 is getting more and more diverse, or shall we just say, random.

Edit: Now that I look at activity monitor again it might have more to do with quicktime, but I'm not sure what is causing the problem as of yet.

Edit 2: I went to the apple support forums and I looked through a couple of threads and it looks like some other people are also having the same problem as I have. Link for discussion board thread Now that I've used 10.6.2 for a bit longer, the mouse problem seems to be gone, but the iTunes problem remains. Other than that, no big changes, I hope 10.6.3 comes out soon.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Starting points.

Just now I thought about making a blog. For me it is vastly easier to express my opinions and ideas with words than in videos on youtube. My hope is to type out more app reviews and tech opinions here and enhance my views with youtube videos. For instantaneous thoughts about tech news or apps see me on twitter. We'll see how this goes...

Edit: Never knew you could embed a twitter feed into this blog, now you see it.