Windows 7: My Experience

While my lust for a new 27inch iMac or 15inch Macbook Pro grows greater, i decided to upgrade the OS on my Toshiba P300-20H Media Laptop to finally break free from Vista, don’t get me wrong i loved Vista even though i am mainly a Mac Fan boy, it just worked, not as well as Snow Leopard obviously but i didn’t hate it like most others. Windows XP, although great, was just too boring for me, having a creative eye, i used to bore quickly looking at the plain Blue taskbar, But Vista was Modernised and had loads of stuff i liked.

But moving on, i ordered my student copy of Windows 7 Home Premium directly from Microsoft for a mere £30, yes more than Snow Leopard, but i was ok with it.

Before i started the Windows 7 installation i had a little clearout and deleted any old or unused files, then i ran CCleaner which gave me another 2GB space back, after all this i was left with 52GB left on my main partition and 108GB on my (D:) drive.

Installation of Windows took a ridiculous 2 hours, compared to Snow Leopards 45mins, i was still optimistic none-the-less as i was getting a new OS. The first boot took a little while as it set everything up properly but this is usual for OS installations, when i was finally on my Desktop i was welcomed with a burst of bright colours and the Windows logo.

Although its purely advertising i love the default Wallpaper that windows provide. 

The upgrade had recovered an extra 7GB, brilliant but not essential as i store most things on external Hard Drives or my iMac.

The main change from previous Windows version is the most important part of the OS, the part we use everyday and think nothing of it, Yes the Taskbar. They’ve ditched the description of each window and now provide a larger logo of the program that is running, as well as this, now every window of a program is combined into the single Logo, this allows you to hover over each programs icon to show all the windows that are running inside it. When you hover over one of these windows that pop-up it quickly renders the window in front of the other windows, this is as close as Windows user get to Expose in Mac OS unfortunately.

Another of the main feature upgrades in 7 is the windows “Snap”, when you drag the top of a window to either the left, right or top of the screen it “snaps” to different sizes, if you drag it to the sides it resizes it to exactly half the screen size to that side, and if you drag it to the top of the screen it effectively resizes the window to fit the screen. I really love this addition and it is something i would love to see in a version of Mac OS in the near future as it’s something i really use a lot.

Well that’s about it for now and i’ll let you find what else you love in the new OS, but if i find something else i really love about it you can be sure i’ll write a post about it.

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My Top 10 iPhone App’s

Ok i know there are millions of Blog posts that list the writers iPhone app faves, but i wanted to share my own for my readers.

I would just like to say before i start that my top 10 will not include the "essential" apps such as eBay or Facebook, and although i am a fan of mobile blogging, iPhone apps that offer this are rather poor in my eyes so they won’t be included.

1. Tweetie 2 [Link]: An obvious one because of all the recent buzz about this app, i wasn’t sure if i should purchase this as i really hated v1.x, but i decided to purchase it anyway, it was a fantastic decision too. It has some unique features and has a look that just "works" and is full of style and the developer didn’t cramp the app leaving it very clean. Another twitter app that i adore is Twittelator, used to be my favoroute because of all the features but after purchasing Tweetie 2, i realised i didnt need or use all those features and they were just slowing me and the app down, but none the less it’s still a brilliant app with an extremely helpful Developer.

2. Diggle [Link]: The absolute best Digg client available on the iPhone with probably one of the best developers out there. The original app was lacking a couple of features that i wanted so i contacted the Developer and he had made a beta and sent it to me for testing within 24 hours, and it was perfect. All that is missing now is the ability to digg and comment on a post, but this is not the Dev’s fault but is just missing from the digg API, hopefully with the coming release of the Digg supported app, they will open up the API a little more.

3. Newsstand [Link]: My choice in RSS readers for the iPhone, very intuitive interface with the ability to sync with Google reader. It has some stunning graphics in the app but does load a little slow on my now outdated iPhone 3G, but still possibly the best RSS reader out there.

4. Read It Later [Link]: I originally started out using Delicious, however, Twittelator didn’t support adding to this so i opted for Read it Later, it happened to be a brilliant decision as the Read it Later app is far superior to the offerings of Delicious. The PRO option is a must really, it allows super fast saving to it’s service from safari (which isn’t a must if using Diggle), a lock while in landscape mode and quicker scrolling. Read it later is also supported by Tweetie, Newsstand and Diggle.

5. IM+ [Link]: A multiple platform instant messenger client that supports twitter too, although it wasn’t my first choice, i wanted Bee Jive, it was on sale and much cheaper than the latter, so i went ahead an bought it, no complaints at all, excellent conversation management and very smooth to run. At the time of writing this both apps cost £5.99/$9.99 so a little more investigation may be required before you choose but i do highly recommend IM+.

6. Midomi Ultra [Link]: One of the original music recognition apps (along with Shazam). Midomi has proven to be far superior to Shazam, with more accurate results and much faster loading times on my 3G. Both apps are worth a try though and Shazam is good enough if you’d rather not pay for the app.

7. Touch To-do [Link]: My choice of To-do apps available on the iPhone, it’s main appeal to me is it’s ability to sync both ways with Google calendar, which is a must for me being a Snow Leopard user which is also capable of syncing with Google. I found it to be easier to use than Things and a little faster (definitely a lot cheaper).

8. Blogpress [Link]: Ok, i lied at the start, of course i had to include a Blogging app in my top 10 while i run my own blog, even if all the options are very limited. The best out of an average bunch is really Blogpress, it shows the pictures of a post along with the writing and is much easier to position everything, supports multiple blogging platforms and is very fast. iBlogger has a nicer interface but only allows you to upload square pictures and doesn’t show them with text, and the Wordpress app is generally poor apart from the option to add Categories.

9. Ego [Link]: Ego allows me to keep track of all the stats that everyone cares about, Twitter followers, Website hits, Feedburner Subscribers and loads more. A great way of combining everything into one application. A must for all blogger and Twitter users like myself.

10. Boxcar [Link] / PushGmail [Link]: A dead heat between my two favourite Push apps. Boxcar, originally a twitter push app has expanded and now adds support for more services such as Facebook, General Email and Gmail. PushGmail is purely for Gmail push but is easier to use than boxcar because you don’t have to set your account to forward your messages to a new address to be registered by the app.

Well that’s all for now, My next post will hopefully be about My Top 5 apps that are a waste of money.

Again i will have to apologize for my lack of posts but having just started a BTEC National Diploma in Photography i have had little time to do the things i love, but i will try to fit as much in as possible. Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter for much more frequent updates, Thanks.

Apple’s September event: “It’s Only Rock and Roll, But I Didn’t Like It”

A few days on from Apple’s special september event which is dedicated to their iPod line and i have had a chance to watch the Keynote and reflect on their releases.

First, iTunes 9.

Apple’s 9th generation music management and iTunes store is an absolute killer in my eyes, they’ve added a few really nice features to enhance their users experience.

Here’s a quick look at some of the latest and greatest iTunes features:

1. iPhone and iPod Touch app management, lovely inclusion and very clean to use, i find it much easier than messing around with app arrangement on the smaller iPhone screen as you can also see all of your app pages at once.

2. Home sharing, an enhanced version of the old way that we used to play our libraries from multiple computers, however, this time you can copy any music into your own library that is being played from any another PC or Mac, this works very well as i use 3 Macs and a PC so it’s very easy to copy music around that selection of Computers.

3. Facebook and Twitter integration, although very minimal implementation it is nice to have if you are a social network fanatic who loves to share absolutley everything you do, but i think they could have done a little more than just allow users to share what they are looking at in the store.

4. iTunes LP, although not really a feature of iTunes but instead downloadable content, apple link this with iTunes 9 hence why it is in this list.

5. Genius mixes, an automated version of the original Genius however iTunes does it all by itself and no user interaction is required.

iPhone OS 3.1 release

Another minor update to keep their touch interface devices up-to date with the new iTunes.

Get recommendations for apps you might like based on apps you’ve already downloaded.

Have iTunes create up to 12 playlists based on what’s already in your library. You don’t even have to choose a sample song.

Edit video and save it as a new clip so you don’t lose your original footage.

Along with a small list of other minor upgrades.

iPod Classic

Just another incramental update for the iPod classic which bumps the one size fits all hard drive from 120Gb to 160Gb, an update for me that signals the deat of this outdated iPod while most would prefer flash memory or a touch interface rather than an old HDD iPod.

iPod Touch

Yet another update that Apple chose to update rather than innovate, this reall dissappoints me with Apple, they will release a market changing product and then sit back for the next 2 or 3 years feeling smug and trying to get by whith storage increases and minor performance upgrades, and there’s also rumors that Apple dropped the camera in the final month of testing, but i reall doubt that a VGA or 2.0mp camera in a Touch is revolutionary. This product needs a total redisign and it should be built from iPhone OS 3.1 rather than from scratch.

and Finally the iPod NANO

The iPod nano now includes a VGA Video camera for those times when you don’t want to take a larger camcorder but don’t mind taging a wafer thin iPod, pretty nice but the VGA looks terrible after using the 3Gs camera with its macro and intelligent autofocus, white balance and exposure, this is the sort of feature that is put in just because they can, or they’ve finally run out of ideas.

Then they chucked in an FM tuner, really useful on the iPod nano as you cant get applications like the Touch or Phone, this is especially good if you are an iPhone user as this probably means that we’ll see an FM tuner in the phone next June.

Finally the nano now has a slightly larger screen, not entirely sure why but none the less a good inclusion.

Snow Leopard: My Experience

So I ordered snow leopard the day after it’s initial release from Apple’s official online store for £25 which I was not overly pleased about conidoring it was just $29, but still £25 is extremely cheap compared to all of their previous OS releases that were £75/$129 so I shouldn’t really complain.

A little information about my system before I proceed.

I use a 24inch Aluminum iMac 2.4ghz 4Gb RAM with ATI RADEON HD2600 Pro, before I started the installation I had 141.6Gb remaining on my boot drive.

I inserted the installation disk and was greeted with the new snow leopRd installer logo, very sleek and modern, I ran the installer and chose to do Apple’s reccomended install, the upgrade ranther than the clean install. After reaching the end of the extremely intuitive options of the installer, I was told it would take about 1 hour to install, great much faster than my leopard installations.

While the installation process was doing it’s thing the timer was decreasing rapidly initially jumping straight to 45 minutes. All in all the process took just 35 minutes so was extremely zippy.

The first boot was blazingl fast compared to that of the leopard boot time, instantly worth £25 to me, then I had a look to see how much hard disk space I had remaining, I was amazed to find that I had 162.4Gb left, Snow leopered had given revived over 20Gb which is more than 2 times the 7Gb that Apple advertise, again this is very important to me as I have a relatively small Hard Drive. Every application that I load and use seems to be just that little bit quicker bar iTunes, which loads quick but is unrespomsive for about 15 seconds after launch, not terrible but a little annoying at times.

Overall I am extremely pleased with Snow Leopard, it’s fast and reliable install along with faster use easily make it worth the £25 asking price in my eyes.

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