Saturday, May 6, 2006

I am hearing from friends that the new MacBook Pro is at its best when 2 Gigs of RAM are installed. This is really true if you are an Adobe product user. Rosetta is the problem and all Adobe products will be using it until they are updated sometime next spring. It[base ']s not just Adobe, there are lots of little products, and for that matter plug-ins, that will not work until they are updated with the Universal binaries which in some cases will be never. Each time we go from one chip to another we lose certain programmers who decide that updating a freeware or cheap shareware program is not worth their time and effort. In fact, even some of the expensive programs are lost due to the hundreds of thousands of lines of code that would have to be rewritten. However, we get hundreds of new programs written in the new code from people who think the new code is easy to produce. So in the end it[base ']s a trade off[^] we lose some, we gain some. 9:34:39 PM    comment []

Those of you that bought a Mac Mini thinking you were going to get a cheap Final Cut Pro machine are going to be disappointed due to the fact that the Intel Mac Mini does not have a video card that will support Final Cut so it will not install on your machine. 9:33:06 PM    comment []

Another month, another update to OS 10.4. Apple has just released 10.4.6. One of the best new features is if you change your login password at the Login window, you will now be given an opportunity to apply the same change to your default keychain. This comes in real handy if you forget your password and need to redo it due to the fact your keychain retains the old password. As always: remember to back up your hard drive before applying the OS update. Always repair permissions and check the drive with First Aid (part of Disk Utility) or DiskWarrior before updating. Be sure and remove any extra USB (not the keyboard and mouse) or FireWire devices before the install. 9:31:59 PM    comment []

Just when you think Apple is being very closed company it pops up and announces support for Windows XP in Leopard (OS 10.5). The public beta for the software you will need is being called Boot Camp and it arrived already on the Apple web site. If you want to try it out here[base ']s what you need. A Macintosh that is Intel based running 10.4.6, a blank recordable CD, and a Windows XP SP-2 install disk. Boot Camp includes Windows XP drivers for graphics, networking, audio, AirPort, Bluetooth, Eject Key (on Apple keyboards) and Brightness controls. No support for iSight yet so that will come hopefully in the future. Be aware that if you have tried the hack to get Windows running on your current Intel machine, a firmware update is needed. That will fail until you reformat your startup volume and use the default partition scheme then reinstall OSX and update to 10.4.6. However after talking to people who have used the hack this is a lot simpler. With all that said Apple may have just killed off Virtual PC. So, looks like it[base ']s Microsoft[base ']s move to really improve Virtual PC. Even though dual boot is OK, being able to run both at the same time is even better. Virtual PC allows users to drag files to and from the Mac desktop and switch back and forth without rebooting. This of course would make the Virtual Windows slower but more interactive. 9:30:55 PM    comment []