Twitterless...

Will keep this very short.

I'm in the final stretches of a super secret project that has taken an enormous amount of work to pull together. Some custom screencasts that are short but varied, can't say anymore!

It's taken long days and complete focus to pull it off, so my Twittering has suffered, reduced to the occasional burst.

And you know what, I miss it!

There's a definite connection with Twitter that's hard to define and without it, you certainly feel more isolated. I've noticed also that if you don't twitter, you don't get replies! I think it's the interaction that's the killer feature with Twitter, not so much the passive viewing of other Tweets, well, at least for me it is!

So today should be the last day of the super secret project and normal Twitter service should be resumed tomorrow.

And I must be getting close to the 30 days of my daily blog posts by now - must check.

Click to read more ...

My deliberations.....

Thanks for the comments on the previous posts. There seems to be a lot of people who "get" the MacBook Air.

In reality, I've not really had that much time to sit down and consider the options in as much detail as I'd like, so I'm not going to make a rash decision and will hold off to see what the summer may bring. I'd like to upgrade to the faster MacBook Air with the SSD but as a couple of people have pointed out, I don't really need to at the minute, and it's not a trivial amount to upgrade, even if I sell the original MacBook Air.

Just a quick comment about the two Mac Pro setup.

I'm currently doing some commissioned work which involves a lot of smaller screencasts than usual. The ScreenCastsOnline production is quite different in that I work in more larger blocks of time on individual tasks, but with this commissioned work, I'm jumping from audio recording, to screen capture, to scripting, to editing, to encoding, etc. all in much smaller blocks of time. To be honest, having two machines connected via a KVM has proved to be a bit of an irritation and has slowed me down a little.

Let's see how I get on, when I get back into full ScreenCastsOnline production mode but there may need to be a rethink!

The two machines for encoding via a virtual cluster is still a tremendous boon though

Click to read more ...

My dilemma...

Ok, so the dilemma is this, to use your ADC discount (which is part of your ADC membership) you need to create a dummy order on the online Apple store, and then ring them to find out what discount is available. On my current level (Select) I get a single credit each year, which gives a variable discount on a single system.

The discount varies on the kit you want to buy, and is really aimed at developers wishing to buy development equipment.

So I duly spec'ed out a MBA with the 128 SSD config and got in touch to check on the discount.

10% :-(

Just 10% off the total order. Do'h

It transpires that the MacBook Pro gets 20% but the MacBook Air only 10%.

If you think about it, that's probably reasonable as no one is going to buy a MBA as a development machine but still.

In reality, what it means is that is costs roughly the same for a:

Macbook Air

Macbook Pro

Now if I were to upgrade, I'd have to sell my existing MBA to help finance the deal so the laptop I'd buy would be my primary laptop.

So for virtually the same price, I'd be getting so much more bang for my buck with the MacBook Pro, more screen real estate, double the RAM, much faster processor, more ports! (including FireWire), double the disk space, a super drive, two video card and twice the video RAM.

But it's nearly twice the weight.

So do I stick with the sleek form factor and get a machine that probably has more than enough horsepower to do all I want, or spend the same money to get a powerhouse that might take a little getting used to.

Oh, the dilemma....

PS. Feel free to add your comments. I imagine I'll get a number of incredulous comments on it being a no brainer as the MacBook Pro looks like the obvious choice. Fair do's but to be honest, once you've become used the the MacBook Air form factor, it's really not that cut and dry.

PPS. Or should I just wait for the MacBook Tablet and sort out my studio chair in the meantime...

Click to read more ...

A nice dilemma to be in....

I'm at it again :-(

While I was at the Apple store a few nights back, I snuck in to take a look at the 17" MacBook Pro. I'd seen it before whilst at Macworld but that seems such a long time ago now.

If you follow my deliberations on the kit I currently use, you'll know that I use a 1st gen Macbook Air for my mobile computing (OK that would be sort of one step up from the iPhone type of mobile computing).

I don't travel that much (well not regularly each week, I tend to save it up for big trips) so my choice of the MacBook Air might be surprising for some people. Well the MBA is my pick it up with one hand, balance it on my lap, notebook mainly used whilst I join the rest of the family in the living room. Nothing too taxing, just checking my emails and RSS feeds.

It's small, yet has a full size keyboard and is light enough not to cause any major discomfort and speedy enough to handle its minimal duties.

When the new unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros came out, it was not even a consideration to think about replacing the MBA. I was pretty happy with the machine and didn't really see much of a difference in the new MBAs to warrant an upgrade.

However, (here it comes...) one thing that I have to admit to having an issue with on the MBA is the lack of screen real estate. After spending all day in front of some pretty big monitors, it takes a bit of getting used to a 1280x720 screen.

What, no violins.....

Anyhow, I sort of started thinking about if I really should look at upgrading the MBA for a new MBP, either the 15" or the 17", mainly for the extra screen real estate.

Well the trip to the Apple store confirmed it for me...

No!

I found both the 15" and the 17" to be way too heavy for me. Don't you just know Allison's going to give me a hard time on the Mac Roundtable after my comments about the iPhone being too heavy to control a presentation on.....

Lovely machines, but I'm so used to the form factor of the MBA.

A bit of research on the new MBA machines gave me food for thought, when it looks like they've significantly upgraded the graphics on the newer models. Not a bigger screen, but much faster and they support the 30" external monitor. A quick question on twitter brought back several responses form people who had upgraded and these ranged from the new machines being snappier, to comments indicating quite a significant speed improvement, especially if moving to the SSD.

Well it wouldn't harm to price a new MBA with SSD on the Apple store would it, and I've still got that Apple Developer credit to be used by November............

I'll let you know how I got on tomorrow and explain my dilemma!

Click to read more ...

Taken for granted....

As a father of a teenage daughter with an active social life and lots of activities, I spend more time than I ever thought possible sitting in my car waiting for her to finish said activities. Yes, if I could charge for it, I'd be running a very lucrative "Dads Taxi" service.

Luckily for me, my saviour since the summer of 2007 has been my constant companion, my iPhone.

I've listened to podcasts and music, I've watched movie and web clips, I've run my business answering emails and administering my website, I've conversed with friends via Twitter, I've browsed the web, I've read snippets I'd stashed away for later via Instapaper, .... actually I've communicated in so many different ways but the most infrequent being via the phone itself.

The iPhone has been a delight by being both a productivity tool and an entertainment device.

And then last night, to my horror, I left the house without checking it was fully charged. Now I usually place the iPhone in a charger overnight, next to my bed, as I use it as an alarm clock (and a damn fine alarm clock it is with different settings for different days) but, I'd not used the dock the night before. I also have a dock on my desk, but never thought to dock it, other than to sync my podcasts a few minutes before leaving the house.

And to make things even worse, that expensive Mophie JuicePack, my external battery for the iPhone, was fully charged up, but sitting on my desk.

D'oh!

After dropping my daughter off, my iPhone was down to 10% and I had an hour to kill in Liverpool. A trip to the Apple store and a Twitter session in Starbucks, but the iPhone kept going.

By the time I was sitting outside waiting for my daughter with 20 minutes to spare, the battery died, no further warning, it just shut down the phone.

20 minutes sitting in the car with no iPhone.

How the hell did we manage to keep ourselves entertained and informed pre-iPhone! I won't do that again.

Click to read more ...