Why Windows 7 Libraries are BAD!

As we all know Windows 7 came out last October and brought with it the new idea of using Libraries instead of the old Special Shell Folders that we all know and love. In my opinion I think that these are a really bad idea and I will say why. Most Windows users have been for quite a while and know instinctively where to drop there files and they know that everything have there own place. Windows 7 brought with it the ambitious idea that you could just save all of your files in to the Documents library or Images library and Windows would save it to the right place. But, the main problem is that the Library is not actually a physical location it is a virtual place made up of different locations on the file system.

Mac OS X and Linux both still use the Special Shell Folders of old, i.e. Documents, Music and Pictures etc. But with these come the knowledge that you know where your files are being put in the file system. You can, of course, set up virtual folders or smart folders (depending on which system you are using) and use these as your main save points.

My main complaint is that unless you know where you files are being saved you do not have any confidence in the system. The only exception to this is smart phones where your files are saved within specific locations and are hidden from the end user. I am of course speaking more about the iPhone OS which Sand Boxes all of the Applications and save locations.

Something New

If you have been following my blog you will know that I have been looking at the new MacBook Pro, obviously by new I mean the 2009 model. I have now made the decision to not buy one until the start of December 2010. By then the new model should be out and actually perform a lot better than my current one which is still very fast and does everything that I want it to achieve.

So there, that is my decision and I am going to stick by it.

Do I Need a New MacBook Pro?

I have just been on the Apple website getting some ideas for Christmas 2010. My wife definitely needs a new laptop as her PowerBook G4 is now looking rather old and tired. So I am buying her a MacBook made out of aluminium not the polycarbonate one. The main question at the moment is, with the current generation of MacBook Pro Unibody give me a big enough upgrade to justify the £1780 price. My current MacBook Pro is an early 2008 model with a 2.4Ghz processor, 4Gb of RAM and 500Gb of hard drive space. Being a bit of a geek I have looked in to the differences and done a quick compare and basically the new top of the range MBP has a 2.8Ghz processor as standard with 4Gb of RAM which in itself isn’t a huge improvement, and yes I know that it can be upgrade to 3.06Ghz.

Now, the bus speeds are different 800Mhz (early 2008) and 1033Mhz (2009) with RAM to match it. During general use will this actually be a huge improvement. My last upgrade was going from the PowerBook G4 to my MBP and that upgrade was huge performance wise, this upgrade is going to be sedate, to the point of barely noticeable. The graphics card in my MBP is the 8600M GT with 256Mb compared to the card in the new one which is the 9600M GT with 512Mb, both have GDDR3 memory. The 9600M GT is essentially just an over clocked 8600 with more RAM so I don’t think that with the applications that I use the upgrade will be that big.

Well basically I think that I need to wait for the Core i7 MBP to come out this year and then buy the best one that I can afford, I would expect that these would come out in September which falls nicely in line with when I want to buy one. As for my wife the MacBook will be a huge upgrade when compared with the six year old PowerBook G4.

New Apple Kit

I have now decided that for Christmas in 2010 I will treat both my wife and I to new MacBooks and some other Apple goodies. However, the first thing that I am going to do is wait until at least November before I get either of them because Apple traditionally has released new mobile hardware in September or October so I will wait until then. I will be buy the wife the white MacBook as she only uses internet, email and You Tube. As such the MacBook is sufficient for what she will use it for. As for myself I will be buying either the 15 or 17 inch MacBook Pro. The reason I will wait until November is that I believe that Apple will be releasing an i5 or i7 version of the mobile computers.

I also think that by November we will need a new Time Capsule, I will keep the 500Gb one that I have and use that to back up the wife’s MacBook and the buy a 2Tb one to back up my MacBook Pro. I have also been contemplating for a while now to replace the Dell PC that we have with a Mac Mini and have an all Mac system. Although I think that I will need to upgrade the hard drive in my Apple TV as 160Gb is just not enough, it is filling up very quickly.

Do We Need An iPad?

Apple announced on Wednesday that it was releasing the iPad, basically a 9.7inch iPod Touch with limited 3G data access. But, is it more than that, is it actually the computer that you take with you when a laptop is overkill. Well lets look at the clues.

It has a reasonably large multi touch touch screen with a decent resolution, 1024×768 from what I have read, the processor inside it is an Apple own running at 1GHz, some have said that it is dual core based on the Cortex A9 with GPU. All the same pretty powerful stuff, the storage goes up to 64Gb at the moment and it has WiFi draft-N and, if you buy the correct version, a 3G data access option. It runs iPhone OS 3.2 (at the moment any way, a lot of people are claiming that it was designed for OS 4.0 and that the system that we are looking at now is pretty limited) which means that you can use all of the Apps from the App store which gives you games, utilities and productivity software. Not to mention Apples own iWork suite designed for the iPad which makes it the ideal platform to carry around when a laptop is overkill.

So, will it do well, of course it will it has the App Store, the iTunes Store and the eBook store what more could you want from a device. To my knowledge there is no other device around today that has that kind of infrastructure that the iPad has, so why do we have some of the PC critics and reviewers claiming that it is nothing more than a tablet PC with an Apple twist. Well my answer to that is, it is not just another tablet PC, it doesn’t run a desktop class operating system or have desktop level resources. But, it doesn’t need to, it is a handheld touch screen system that just needs to be easy to use and fast. In my opinion it delivers on that.

When Do You Need To Upgrade Your Computer?

My MacBook Pro is now a year and a half old, it is still as fast now as it ever was, guaranteed if I put it side by side with a 2009/2010 model it would probably be a bit slower. But, not as slow as my wife’s PowerBook G4 which has a 1.33GHz PowerPC G4 processor yet still chugs along. However, I’m not on about that machine specifically, I am on about in general when is it reasonable to upgrade your computer/laptop?

What Features Do We Actually Use?

I know that both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard, that were released last year, brought with them some minor and major improvements. With Snow Leopard it involved the final conversion to 64 bit, the death of the Carbon Finder and the optimisation for multicore and GPUs. For Windows 7 it was all about erasing the problem that was Vista, it wasn’t that Vista had that many problems after Service Pack 2, but the user interface was streamlined and optimisations were achieved everywhere.

Where Snow Leopard was mainly preparing for the future, Windows 7 added some features, which if you have seen the adverts was everyone else’s idea but Microsoft’s. It is these features that I am trying to decided whether or not they are needed, the first of which is the new Windows Taskbar, it now shows links to applications, files and folders. It shows them whether they are active or not, it is very much like the Dock from OS X, but the Microsoft implementation seems a little disjointed. The other features are Aero Snap and Aero Peek, Aero Snap allows you to move a folder or application to the top or edge of the screen and it maximises to that point, now the frustrating part of this is that it does it when you don’t want it to, there is no way (that I know of) to turn this feature off. Aero Peek just seems to be a cheap knock off of Expose from Mac OS X.

In my opinion both of these releases were nothing more than Service Pack updates and should have been provided free of charge. I know that Snow Leopard was only £29 which wasn’t so bad, but Windows 7 was almost four times as much for the upgrade, depending on version, for what isn’t a system which is four times as good.

Who Needs to Dual Boot?

My question of the day today is, who needs to dual boot? I suppose I’m talking about those people that buy Macs and then winge that they need to do something with software that doesn’t exist on the Mac and then go ahead and install Windows.The first thing that you do when you are looking to replace the desktop or laptop that you currently own is make a list of things you want to be able to achieve. If, on that list, you name something that is not available on the Mac then don’t get a Mac, although the list of things that you can’t do on a Mac is slowly coming down.

I have, in the past, had both dual boot, single boot systems on my MacBook Pro, both Mac OS X and Windows (Vista and 7). I think that only reason that I did it was because I am a Mac fan but just want to make sure that there wasn’t anything that I was missing on the other side, and, now that I have done it I can safely say that there is nothing that I can not do on my Mac that I actually need to do. I do not have a copy of AutoCAD installed at home for one main reason I do not work from home, ever. I have all of the software that I would ever need to get by in life and not miss out, earlier today in work I needed to scan a document so I went up to the printer plugged it in to my Mac and OS X promptly went away and installed all of the software and drivers that it needed and I was able to scan a document within 30 seconds of plugging in a device that I had never used before. I know that Windows 7 can now do that before anyone jumps at and says that Windows can do that also, but Vista cannot.

So I think that having the option to dual boot is nice but not essential, I don’t think that I would miss the option to run Windows on my Mac if they took it away tomorrow, nor would I necessarily miss OS X if I had to buy a Windows based laptop tomorrow, if it came with Windows 7.

Money!

The question I would like to pose this time is ‘do we need money to be happy?’ Well the answer to that I believe is no. Why you may ask, well I earn enough money to pay my bills, to buy the little luxuries in life that make life a little bit better and I can afford to replace something in the house if it goes wrong. Now does life get better if you have millions in your bank account instead of hundreds or thousands. I don’t think that it does, it might make your life a little bit better but unless you have actually earned that money through work anything that you buy would be a little bit hollow. Take this example, you work all year and save enough money to be able to buy a two week holiday abroad. The time of the holiday arrives and you start your time off, whilst you are on the holiday you will appreciate it so much more because you have earned the money. I’m not having a go at people who have worked hard and earned millions of pounds (or dollars) I think I am having a go at those who just win the money and waste it. They haven’t done anything to earn it and therefore do not appreciate the money that they have.

I know that a lot of people like to build up money and property so that they can leave it all to there kids, now firstly the kids do not appreciate the effort that you put in to build up that money and it just ends up cause family disputes if people don’t get what they think that they deserve. Also, it is your money by the time your kids inherit it they would be grown up and earning there own money so they don’t need it. By all means leave personal items to your kids but your money is yours, enjoy it whilst you’re alive because you can’t take it with you. When you die you can’t see the effect that it has on your family or those that are left behind I mean lets be blunt when you’re dead nothing that you owned in this world is of any use to you and therefore holds very little meaning to anyone.

iPhone OS 4.0

I will probably be the first to admit that I was wrong if Steve Jobs takes the stage on the 27th of this month and announces that the new iPhone OS version 4.0 supports full multitasking. However, as we all know Apple will only add something if it looks better than it actually is, look at the iPhone for instance. It has what is now pretty average hardware, a design that is almost two years old and a built in battery that cannot be user replaced. Whilst all of that sounds quite bad Apple knows that it isn’t just the hardware that makes the experience it is a combination of the software and hardware, and it’s the presentation of that software that makes the device special.

The iPhone OS makes a good show of looking good however, it is an extremely limited mobile phone. It is a combination of the App Store and hardware accelerated user interface that makes the iPhone really slick and a device that everyone wants. At the end of the day the sales results of the iPhone / iPod Touch software platform speaks for itself.