As many of you may already know, Apple released a new mouse called “Magic Mouse” which replaces the “Mighty Mouse”. Although I was happy with the Mighty Mouse I had to get one of this new ones last weekend and I’m really happy so far. It comes in a fancy box (see below). The whole mouse basically acts like a touchpad and you can use gestures for scrolling up and down, left and right etc. The gestures work really great and I’m happy that they have removed this little roller ball that tended to get dirty and stop working once in a while. Overall the Magic Mouse is slicker and lighter and comfy to use. The only thing I’m missing a little bit are the additional buttons that you could use to bring up the dashboard or show an overview of your windows but I’m hoping that they will add gestures to the mouse for that with a future firmware upgrade.
Archive for the ‘apple’ Category
Apple’s Magic Mouse
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
What’s wrong with AT&T?
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009I bought my iPhone over a year ago and I was never really happy about the fact that Apple made a exclusive deal with ATT in the US to be their only service provide for the iPhone. To be quite honest: If I would have had an option to go with someone else I would not be an ATT customer anymore. Until now the quality service was never great but it was at least working most of the time. But the issues I’m experiencing right now are close to unacceptable. In downtown Manhattan the data service is not working at all. ATT claims that they are experiencing an outage from 3 different towers there which they also said already last week when I complained. How long does it take to fix that? Almost every single call I make drops after a while. According to iLounge and Appleinsider, a Genius bar employee at the Soho Apple store claimed that it’s around 30 percent dropped calls in average which I doubt. But I seriously hope they are not proud of that percentage. Problems really started when they release the 3.1 firmware when I was forced to upgrade by ATT because I wasn’t able to receive any calls anymore using 3.0. Currently my iPhone seems to be more an expensive iPod instead of a phone and if the quality continues like that I will consider to cancel my contract. Fair enough, Manhattan has the highest density of iPhones of all the metropolitan areas and it might not be that bad outside of Manhattan but why are they not willing to spend more on increasing their quality of service?
Snow Leopard
Saturday, August 29th, 2009
Apple released their new Mac OS X Version 10.6 codename “Snow Leopard” and promised more stability and performance. 2 major improvements that most other software companies always trying to achieve but usually trade it on their roadmap for new or updated features. I have to say that I got a little bit frustrated with Safari 4 recently since it crashed at least once a day for me. That was one of the reasons why I was really looking forward to installing this new version. The install went – as expected from Apple – pretty smooth and my Macbook Pro was updated within an hour. The first impression is very good. Safari seems to be more stable and faster, all my applications (with one exception but the developer is already aware of this problem) are working fine and overall the system appears to be more responsive.
my first iPhone application
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009Just wrote and deployed my first iPhone application. I was following the apple tutorial to write the ‘Hello World’ example and I have to say it’s kind of fun to see it actually working on your device.
Sometimes haste makes waste
Sunday, March 15th, 2009…and I usually appreciate that Apple always releases stuff when it’s really working. But why did it take them until release 3.0 of their iPhone software to add a copy/paste function???
I just hope it doesn’t take until release 6.0 to get a proper search on emails on the iPhone.
UPDATE: As you can see in this video, they already got spotlight (their universal search) in this 3.0 release. Was about time I would say 
Some geeky stuff
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009Had to upgrade the memory from 256MB to 1GB on my Netgear ReadyNas NV+. I thought the out-of-the-box memory of 256 MB would be enough but since I’m running a couple of add-ons on it I was running out of memory on operations like chown -R on big directory structures. The memory upgrade was quite easy (just unscrew a couple of screws) and I have to say that the response time of the web-interface is faster now. So it was definitely worth the money.
The other thing I discovered this week was that CiscoVPN client on Mac OS is writing some files under /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN which means that those files are not recovered from time capsule when you are changing from one Mac to the other. Usually you have self-contained applications under Mac OS (.app) but this one is just an example that not all of them are obviously entirely self-contained…
It’s been a while…
Thursday, March 5th, 2009…since I wrote my last post. First of all thanks to all of you who were complaining about me being lazy and not posting anything. This is very encouraging since it shows me that someone is really interested in reading(which I can of coz also see looking at the comments). Anyways, a lot has happened since my last entry as you can imagine so here we go:
As you all could read here I was in Los Angeles for business for a couple of weeks but since my health condition got bad again and after being at the emergency room twice in LA, I decided to take some time off and go back to NY to see my doctor and get better. This week I started to go to the office again and feel already much better. Regarding my doctor the only thing I’m really missing right now is Vitamin D which means I could use some sun light Speaking about that we had some snowstorms here on Monday morning and it has been quite cold (around -10 Celsius) the last days so there is still snow in the city.
One other thing that is worth reporting is that I got the new Macbook Pro 15inch last week and I’m quite happy with it. I was worried about the glossy screen since I had the matt option on my old one but I have to say you don’t really recognize it since the display is quite bright. I also really don’t like the design of the new keys but I have to say that the keyboard in general improved. And also, after getting used to the new keyless touchpad I really like it.
I tried to move my blog and some other websites I’m hosting to my new NAS the past week. Since it has Linux running on it and has the same capabilities of my current server back in Austria and is running 24/7 anyways, it would be a good alternative. However I had to discover that the upload speed of my provider here in New York isn’t enough to provide proper speed for my websites. Yeah, I know that I could just go to one of the webspace providers out there and get my sites hosted but I somehow like to host my own stuff
Last but not least I got a couple of spam comments on my blog and surprisingly all of them were going to this picture. Don’t know why especially on that picture but this site must be on the list of some spammers out there…
Battery in MacBook Pro
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008As most of you know, I bought a 15″ MacBook Pro 1.5 years ago and I’m really happy with it so far. If there wouldn’t be that battery problem….The batterylife is now down to 1.5 hrs when fully charged which is not really overwhelming. IStatPro reports that my battery health is only 56 % after 264 cycles, which isn’t good either. I guess I should have followed the instruction in this knowledge base article that explains how the “cycle” the battery every week. Next time I know…
Microsoft ads created using a Mac
Thursday, September 25th, 2008First entry written on my iPhone
Friday, August 8th, 2008As I have my new boys toy now and I managed to get it connected to the wireless internet here in the hotel, I would like to try out how the wordpress application works on the iPhone. I originally thought that I would never get used to the keyboard on the touchscreen of the iPhone but I have to say that you really get used to it.