I’ve been downloading quite a few iPhone applications since the launch of the app store… but I really don’t use most of them. Here is a short list of those I use on a regular basis and that I would highly recommend purchasing (if not available for free), in addition to the following built-in apps: SMS, Calendar, Photos, Camera, Maps, Clock, Stock, Weather, Calculator, Phone, Mail, Safari and iPod.
When working on my Mac, I’ve been using Ecto as my blog editor of choice. It gives me a lot of flexibility, enables me to write the drafts of my blog posts while off-line (I find airplanes a great place to write entries) and integrates nicely with Apple iPhoto. You can also customize it greatly and automated many tasks and repetitive HTML snippets quickly.
On the Windows front, I have also used Ecto for a while. While it works almost as well on Windows than on MacOS, except for the iPhoto integration obviously, you can feel that this is not a native application. Listening to episode 42 of Windows Weekly, I wanted to know more about the Windows Live applications from Microsoft, and especially the one to write blog posts: Windows Live Writer. And I have to say: Microsoft, great job!
There is a lot of noise about Java6 not being available on MacOS X Leopard… and now there is an online petition on the Sun BabelFish blog to show that users care (thank you Alex for pointing this out to me). So here is my vote:
13949712720901ForOSX
In a previous blog entry written just after the introduction of the first version of Boot Camp by Apple and of Parallels Desktop, I was wondering if Windows could actually, looking at a potential future roadmap of Mac OS, become the new Classic for Intel based Macs, just like MacOS 9 was for PowerPC based machines. Since then, Apple continued to release updates to the Beta of Boot Camp and Parallels continued improvements to its virtual machine software.
Yesterday, version 3.0 of Parallels Desktop got released, introducing many new improvements such as 3D support (for the gamers out there) as well as even closer integration with the Mac through a method called “Coherence”. This enables users to hide the Windows desktop and have applications made for Microsoft’s operating system run side by side with those for MacOS X. From a user experience, it’s really very similar to the Classic mode on PowerPC based computers from Apple. So yes, in my mind, Windows is the new Classic after all.
In an even more interesting move, Apple chose to release the new beta version of Boot Camp yesterday. The latest version has improved drivers for Windows XP and Windows Vista. But what surprised me is the fact that both Parallels 3.0 and Boot Camp 1.3 Beta got out the same day, just a few days before WWDC. Now, how likely is it that two companies release updates to products that work together (you can use a Boot Camp partition in Parallels) on the same day? I haven’t seen any mention that Parallels requires the latest version of Boot Camp, but part from that, for those who believe in conspiracy theory and love rumors that are made out of nowhere, what if Apple and Parallels where working together for one of the top secret features of Leopard that will potentially get announced next week… 
Update: There might actually be nothing between Parallels and Apple, except a big coincidence… If you have Boot Camp 1.3 Beta drivers installed on Vista, you won’t be able to use that partition in Parallels as it freezes your machine.
In a modern business environment, email is everywhere. When using Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange / Outlook solutions, it is even the underlying technology for collaborative scheduling, tasks management and notes taking! And with emails being the “killer-app” for the mobile communication, from Blackberry to Palm Treo devices… it sometimes feel like your number one “productivity application” is your email client, with the word processor becoming the underlying technology for writing electronic documents sent over the Internet. Could this mean that the number of emails per hours (eMpH) one is able to process is the new way to measure productivity?
Every once and a while, a new operating system comes out. Apple seems to be on an 18 to 24 month life-cycle for MacOS X, Microsoft seems to be more at the 24-36+ months (if you also consider the major service packs), and some Linux distributions come out every 6 months. The hot topic is currently “to upgrade or not to upgrade” to Windows Visa, Microsoft’s latest and greatest operating systems. Shortly, the followers of the Apple cult will have the opportunity to get their favorite computers running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. In this blog posting, I look at the flip-side of the software world when it comes to an Operating System upgrade, e.g. the perspective of the company / people who create the applications (often qualified as ISV or Independent Software Vendor). And I’ll stay as far away as possible from the Web 2.0 discussion in this entry.
There has been a lot of noise on the net about Apple’s latest beta software called Boot Camp. The next day, another company announced Parallels for Mac OS X (intel processor required), a virtualization software. Listening to this weeks TWIT podcast, I started wondering why it needs to be one or the other?
Latest new from Apple: Macs do Windows! Well, at least with a little beta software Apple released publicly that enables to dual-boot between Mac OS X 10.4 and Microsoft Windows XP and that is completely unsupported. I haven’t received my MacBook Pro (yet) so I wasn’t able to try it out, but this is just the beginning… and here is a potential future I would welcome.
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