Apple did what it always does and waited until I couldn’t return my MacBook Pro before updating the range. Faster processors and on the 15-inch model, the option of an LED backlight.
If you fancy a Mac word processor but don’t need a full office suite, check out Bean. It’s basically a text editor beefed up into a word processor rather than a cut-down Word clone, if that makes sense.
NetNewsWire 3 is out of beta, and it’s brilliant.
There’s a new, X11-free version of OpenOffice available for OS X. Probably not worth the download until the “can’t print” issue is fixed.
Camino 1.5 has been released.
Thanks to the strong pound, the wonderful Better Finder Rename utility is better value than ever. The whole “Better…” suite is £21 by electronic download. I know batch renaming utilities aren’t very glamorous, but ABFR is a fantastic tool – particularly if like me, you regularly need to batch change file extensions or rename hundreds of screenshots simultaneously.
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0 responses to “Apple odds and sods”
> a new, X11-free version of OpenOffice
I got rid of OpenOffice because X11 was such a monumental pain in the arse, so that’s good. Too late for me, though: I got MS Office for 17 quid through my work. It’s not worth the 120-odd MS prefer to charge for it, but, for 17 quid, it really does wipe the floor with the competition. Entourage alone is worth more.
Camino 1.5 rox.
A friend just bought an “old” MacBook at a great price because of the upgrade…
What’s the point of an LED backlight? Everyone knows LCD is better than LED (or did when I was at school). I suppose you lot are too young to remember LED digital watches…
It’s not instead of LCD, silly, it’s as well as. I imagine using LEDs in the backlight instead of conventional types of lights would increase the battery life, wouldn’t it?
You could be right. If only there were some simple and easy way of looking stuff up on the web! Of course, it’s a chicken and egg situation: without such a tool, one cannot find out if it exists.
Battery life isn’t the only reason – they mean less mercury in laptops, and they last longer than traditional LCD displays.
On a related note – anyone tried Parallels 3.0? Is it worth spending £40 on if you’ve already got Parallels 2.0? (Especially 3D stuff)
Haven’t tried it yet but a chap’s reviewed it here:
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/breaking-down-the-walls-between-mac-os-x-and-windows/
Just ran a quick test on my boot camp partition. 3D doesn’t work in vista yet. Which is a shame, because otherwise it’s quite nippy.
Hmm. Doesn’t work Vista, eh? Sucks. Does that mean that you don’t want your copy of V2.0 back then? ($40 upgrade to 3.0!)
Vista runs fine, but without 3D acceleration so there’s no aero glass and even games like Chess Titans run in 2D instead of 3D. So no, I don’t think I’ll go down the parallels route.
Lots of speculation that Boot Camp will be enhanced dramatically in Leopard. We’ll find out this week.