Glenn's Daily Script » Software

Vista and Fusion

Glenn — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 22:36:12 +0000

I’ve just setup up a new virtual machine under VMWare’s Fusion. Since Kathy has been having good luck with Vista, I decided to take the plunge too and used Vista SP1 for this new virtual machine.

My purpose for this installation is to run a few simple programs that I have yet to shed myself of.

1) MS Money is what Kathy and I use to manage both our daily money and validate and sanity check our financial planners work. If I found something that could replace it on OS X, I probably would at least for the long term planning work. NOTE: If there is anyone out there using something that might work, let me know.

2) Alarm programming and control using HAI’s software only works under Windows. This is not likely to change.

3) UPB home automation software, like UPBStart, is currently only Windows compatible. This could change though maybe not. People have to have a motivation and mostly that is about making money so I’m not sure OS X is a target market for home automation.

4) I’m the treasurer for our kids’ school’s PTSA and so I use Quick Books. I could go to a OS X version but Intuit does a lousy job for transferring the files between OS X and Windows. Also, after I serve my second year, the replacement would likely be using Windows so keeping it there makes sense.

I’d go nearly instantly to OS X versions for the first 3. Maybe someday!

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Vista and Fusion

Apple’s iPod Touch and Mobile Me

Glenn — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 08:25:34 +0000

Like many users of an iPod Touch (or iPhone though I don’t have one of those – because of AT&T) and Mac computers, I’ve been waiting for some updates.

For the Mac computers, we’ve been waiting for Mobile Me updates which will allow for push updates of mail, calendar, contacts across multiple computers and updated iPod Touch’s and iPhones. I have 2 computers that I use – one is my laptop – and this kind of functionality sounds perfect and better than anything out there if it works.

Apple really horked the process on this one. They took down .Mac services to update to .Me services which took more than a day when they initially advertised it taking about 4 hours. Also during this time, no one could get the update for OS X 10.5 Leopard. Lastly, they even had to do a patch update to fix issues.

Now as to how it works, it looks pretty good now that it is up. I’ve seen the stuff pushed and synched between all the devices. I’ll keep an eye on it but I’m generally happy with it.

For the iPod Touch, the update was promising the ability to add applications from a store on iTunes. On the iPhone, they have some additional things depending on whether you keep an older iPhone or go for the iPhone 3G. I’m not getting an iPhone so I only care about the iPod Touch features. In addition, this update works with Mobile Me.

Apple really horked this process too. The update was supposed to be available Friday morning but it wasn’t really up till Saturday during the evening. For a user, this is very frustrating and lowers loyalty.

As to the update, it’s nice to get apps but none of the apps that are really for the iPod Touch are great. They are fun and simple but no app truly adds the functionality that says it’s the new killer app for the device. As Apple opens up the store to more apps, maybe we will see one but not yet.

Browser News: Download Firefox 3 Today

Glenn — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:27:41 +0000

At 10am (PST), Mozilla (makers of Firefox) is asking it’s existing and new users to help it with a challenge.

Their challenge is to establish a new world record for the most downloads of something for the internet in a single day. Since it’s a new record, anything measurable establishes the record but they want to set a really high bar by having as many people world wide as possible download Firefox 3.

Again, this begins today (6/17/08) at 10am (PST) so go to Firefox 3 download location and get Firefox 3 today.

(Yes, I know this sounds like a commercial but it’s not. I really like Firefox and think Firefox 3 is an enormous improvement over Firefox 2.)

Update: I had the wrong link to the download site. Go to the real Firefox 3 download location if you want to download it. You may want to wait awhile though because the website is really really really slow.

MacJournal vs Ecto

Glenn — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 00:58:49 +0000

Well, I’ve used MacJournal for about 100 posts and it’s a nice application. It has the benefit of allowing you to have a �Blog� and a private journal.

In my view, the weaknesses include the lack of synching a designated number of posts from a blog site which could include download all posts. I like my blogging software to have a complete record of what I posted.

Another weakness is the lack of simple use of HTML tags. Photo’s, audio, video use it’s own mechanism which requires these to be uploaded to your blog but if you just want to link to something, you can’t do it – at least I couldn’t find it.

A strength of MacJournal in addition to the private journals, is the ability to freeform tag. I like this though it could be improved by showing a list of the tags set up in the blog itself.

Ecto has once again become my default blogging software. It has the ability to do or at least work around the weaknesses of MacJournal.