Is This Progress?!

I just don't believe it!

I'm about to leave for a few days on Hamilton Island. Being the nerd that I am, my MacBook is coming along, because I want to do some coding in the off hours.

I decided that it would be nice to have a real mouse, rather than being forced to use the trackpad all the time, so I bought one yesterday.

It came with a driver CD. This morning, I remembered that I hadn't run the installation, so I stuck the CD in the drive.

Poor Noether can neither read the CD, nor eject it!

There's no time to take her to an Apple shop, so I'm stuck, for the entire trip, with a CD permanently in the drive that the MacBook tries to read every couple of minutes, which chews the battery ... plus it makes that horrible wheezing motor noise.

In days gone by, CD drives had a hole you could stick a paper clip into to physically force the CD out. Not so with these damned slot loading drives!

To add insult to injury, it turns out that the only value of the special drivers is to let you use the extra buttons on the mouse. The features I want ... basic functionality and the scroll wheel ... work just fine without them!

Hopefully, a dozen of those alcoholic drinks served in a pineapple, like this one here, complete with a couple of paper umbrellas, and I'll forget all about it!

Hey! Is that a laptop bag she has next to her? ... I think I'm in love :-).

Fake "Hello, I'm A Mac ..." Ads

Gizmodo has a list of what they consider the best "I'm A Mac" parodies.

Most of them I've seen before and they're pretty silly. However, I do like this one, which adds Linux into the mix.

Nvu For Mac

I heard on the Mac Review Cast today that Nvu was available for the Mac (and Windows). On its website, it is billed as rivalling applications like FrontPage (but that's not saying much) and Dreamweaver.

Personally, I prefer to write my own HTML using a simple text editor. However, I've read good things about Nvu in various Linux magazines in recent years.

I've not downloaded the software myself, so I can't say whether it's a native Cocoa application or if you need to run it under X11. I'm guessing the former; since they've gone to the trouble of building a Windows version, I assume they've done the same for OS X.

Yet Another Apple Rumour ...

"Reliable sources" opined yesterday that there's possibly an ultra-thin 12 inch MacBook Pro coming out in February.

Too bad I already have my 13.3 inch MacBook, because I'd much prefer a lighter laptop. Oh well, who knows, maybe I can sell this one off. It'll be almost a year old by then, anyway :-).

New Parallels Beta

I read this morning that there is a new beta of the Parallels virtualisation software available.

This version comes with a number of very impressive new features. If you have Windows XP installed on another partition using BootCamp, Parallels can use it directly.

Graphics performance has been increased up to 50%. You can drag and drop files between Mac and the Parallels-hosted OS.

Windows applications can be displayed as if they're simply OS X windows. This looks quite neat. Here's a screenshot ...



All up, it sounds like the next release will be well worth waiting for.

New I'm a Mac, I'm a PC Ads

There are three new ads in the series. I don't think they're the best so far, but they are funny.

    

Before you ask ... appalled though I may be to admit it, yes, out of those two choices, my gift preference matches the PC :-).

Software I Use Every Day

My dear friend Paul has decided that his next computer will be a Mac laptop. The more we discussed OS X the other night, the happier he felt about that decision.

One thing we talked about was whether there were Mac equivalents for the various pieces of software he relies upon. The answer was "yes" in every case.

That got me thinking, about the software I use regularly. Since I (sadly) spend most of my time in Windows, that's what dominates this list:

• Firefox (web browser)
  
• Google Mail (web-based mail)
  
• Launchy (program launcher)
  
• Foxit PDF Reader (smaller and faster than Acrobat)
  
• Servant Salamander (dual pane file manager)
  
• Vice Versa (file synchroniser)