Apple

I really like to give presentations. Thus i'm looking at new devices from the perspective "Do they make my life easier in regard of giving presentations?". And somehow i believe the Apple iPad could be the ultimate presentation device on-the-road. More than enough storage for my presentations, there is an Keynote version on the device to make last-minute-changes with a display large enough to make changes, with a Dock2VGA cable you have 1024*756 (pretty much the standard for meeting room beamers) and it's lightweight. Would be nice to carry around just such a device instead of a full notebook. I want one

Okay, Apple dropped the ball, but that doesn't mean, that no one else is capable to play it: ZFS for MacOS. At the end ZFS is opensource and it's available with a license compatible (CDDL) to the one of MacOS. So this was an obvious step after Apple's decision.

I really like Robin Harris' Storage Mojo blog, but in this case, but i'm thinking in his article Why did Apple drop ZFS he is wrong, when he thinks that the CDDL may posed a problem: Mac OS X uses Dtrace for a while now and it's licensed under the CDDL as well. So this can't be the reason. I assume some technical problems, but at Apple this includes "Steven didn't like the graphical user interface". Considering that this was a release concentrated at the inner workings of MacOS X, they didn't wanted to introduce a completely new feature to reduce potential instabilities because of newly introduced code. I don't even think a GPLed ZFS would help, given that a GPLed ZFS would introduce the same kind of problems for MacOS X than a GPLed Linux has with the CDDLed ZFS.

It doesn´t look as bad as the the battery of Kris. But ... well ... it´s the second battery in the life of this MBP. I got this battery in November 2008.

Hell ... this will be an expensive vacation: Apple stores selling iPhone 3G without a contract. At least the journey to the US is well timed ... By the way: Is there a halfway decently priced pre-paid data plan for mobiles available in the US?

Omnigraffle is one of my favourite tools. It´s one (if not the most important) reason, why i prefer to use MacOS X. People knowing Omnigraffle recognize at 10 miles distance, that most of my figures in my presentations were made with Omnigraffle.

The Omnigroup made an addition to their portfolio. I wasn´t aware of the program before, but i think it you will see the results of this new tool in my presentations, too: OmniGraphSketcher. It´s a tool with only one job, doing excellent looking graphs with a few mouse clicks.



Really fscking easy to create a graph ... the demo screencast is really worth a look and my own test took me fewer than 30 seconds. I´m impressed.



PS: The data in graph is nonsense ...

The Onion reports about the introduction of the new MacBook Wheel:



This is the notebook for the twitter generation - you don´t want to type in messages longer than 140 chars this way ...

Looks like i´m using too many small tools ...



from right to left: Spotlight, Clock, Language Setting, Volume, Airport, Bluetooth, Monitors, Spaces, Time Machine, PPPoE, Dial-In networking, Accessability, iSync, Growl, Caffeine, Twitterific, Nokia Uploader, Adium X, Jing, Camouflage, smcFancontrol)

The days of the Minority report alike GUIs getting nearer - gadget application by gadget application. FluidTunes (written by Majic Jungle Software) for example allows you to control your iTunes with gestures in front of your iSight:

PDF articles with multiple columns look good on paper, but they are a major pain in the a... to read on a display under 22 inches. There is a small little tool called Tofu, which rerenders documents in a way, where you just have to scroll horizontally instead of scrolling vertically to the beginning of a column again.

You can even cut´n paste a webpage on the window to get a columned version of the text:

You loose parts of the layout, but it´s much easier to read ....

Stefan Domanske of domanske.de pointed to a little interesting tool. Maybe you are aware of the technique of mindmapping for gathering ideas. I like this concept, but so far i prefered to use pencil and paper for this task as there was no really focussed and simple tool for it, at least not for the operating system from Cupertino. In the article "Mindmapping am Mac" Stefan talked about Mindnode. It´s a tool for MacOS 10.5 and it just does Mindmapping with a really clean interface. It´s near to the experience of using the oldfashioned paper because of the simple and clean interface. I really like this tool.

Mindnode is available for free on the website of the project, albeit there will be an Pro version in the future for purchase.

What is habituation? When you borrow a portable navigation device from your brother, try to scroll through the menus and twitch through the maps like on your iPhone and think at first: "Fsck ... the display is broken" ... i want an iNav!

You know, that a brand is well established in the marked, when the approx. 3-4 year old boy on the lap of his mother on the adjactent seat says: "The man has an iPhone". At least i think the boy mumbled something like that ...

I have a personal test for the market share of the Mac OS X plattform. I like to sit in the first wagon of the train. To get into the on-board restaurant i have to go to half the train. On this way i count the types of notebooks. 4 years ago, a Mac was a really rare sighting. On my train trip back from Berlin to Hamburg today, i´ve counted 13 notebooks, 7 of them were from Apple. I was somehow undecided about the move to the Intel architecture, but it seems that this move had paid off for the people at the Infinite Loop.