April was a big month for us. Some of you may recall that it was then that we took the plunge and bought MacBook Pros. Thinking back, our first week was a bit painful. It took time to "re-train" our brains to think differently.
Several months ago for one of our CyberNotes, we talked about Vista's Parental Controls and how it's one of Vista's shining points. It gives parents control over nearly every aspect of their child's computer use. Parental Controls help parents do their job of protecting their children from harm while allowing them to experience all that a computer can offer.
Lately we've been finding ourselves discussing applications that we really like for one operating system, that would be great on another.
There are a lot of things that are often overlooked when designing a new operating system whether it be Windows, the Mac operating system, or any of the various distributions of Linux.
Everyday many of us have to open various files on our computers whether they are documents, music, or photo files. It's something we do out of habit without even thinking, so you probably haven't really stopped to think about the process of browsing for files.
It looked like Mozilla was ready to ship Firefox 3 with the last Release Candidate, but a critical bug surfaced that they couldn't ignore. So Mozilla is rushing out a Firefox 3 RC3 that fixes only this one bug, and only Mac OS X users need to make the upgrade. Firefox 3 RC3 for both Windows and Linux are the same as Firefox 3 RC2.
For Mac users, Apple has released the update, Mac OS X 10.5.3. You've probably already seen the update available for download in the Software Update, but you may not be aware of what this new update does.
These days, it can be difficult to manually keep track of contact information for family, friends, and co-workers. Not only is there usually a phone number to remember, but often times there are multiple phone numbers, email addresses, fax numbers, pager numbers, etc. One way to solve the problem of trying to keep up with all of your contact's information is to use an application for managing them.
Mac only Ashley and I have been getting acquainted with our new MacBook Pro's over the last few weeks, and things are going pretty well. I really wanted to get an external hard drive so that I could do Time Machine backups, but I didn't want to fork out an arm and a leg for one.
As we mentioned last week, our featured CyberNotes articles on Mondays will now focus on both Microsoft and Mac instead of just Microsoft. You could say we're broadening our horizons a little... Today's article will be the first in a series of several, focusing on comparing a feature in Vista with one in Mac OS X 10.5.
There were some doubts about how real the Psystar Open Computers were, but reviews are starting to pour in from the gadget sites that have received the machines. That's definitely good news since it adds some reassurance to those who purchased the computer, but it looks like some quirks are already starting to come out of the wood work.
Now that I'm up and running on my Mac I decided to give the Apple Mail program a shot. It's the built-in email solution that is bundled with Mac OS X, and also lets you do things like leave notes to yourself or manage a todo list. One thing that I quickly noticed was that it doesn't directly include support for HTML signatures.
Last week in our MyFive article titled "Computers We've Owned," we left out a "5th Generation" of computers that we've owned in the past because we hadn't yet purchased them. In the article, we mentioned that we've been looking at different models and manufacturers to see what would be best. We finally made our decision after lots of research, and the purchases were made.
Remember the Psystar company that we wrote about yesterday? They are the ones who make the Open Computer that is capable of running Mac OS X, and they'll even go as far as to preinstall it for you. Because their prices are surprisingly reasonable there has been some concern raised as to whether the company is a scam.
I don't know whether this was exactly a smart move, but Psystar has begun selling a PC dubbed the Open Computer. It rolls in at a budget-priced $399, but what really makes it unique is that fact that you can have Leopard preinstalled on it for an additional $155.
It's always amusing to read why people think one operating system is better than the other. Of course we are all titled to our own opinions, but people can really get defensive when it comes to their operating system of choice even if they have no knowledge of, or have never used the other operating system.
It's often a lot of fun to push things to the limits, and that's one reason a year and a half ago we installed 200 extensions in Firefox to see how well it would perform. Needless to say Firefox became a little sluggish, and there was very little viewable space since the toolbars occupied a large portion of the screen.
February was a good month for almost all of the browsers out there except for Internet Explorer, according to Net Applications. From December 2006 to August 2007 Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser was able to maintain a substantial 79% marketshare. In the last 6 or 7 months, however, they've been dropping just under 1% each month.
Oliver Rist, an editor at PC Magazine, decided to take a new perspective on the who Vista sucks theme going around. Normally I just pass right by these articles, but his really caught my attention by saying that Leopard is the New Vista. The article, to say the least, is hilarious. Checkout my favorite parts of the article:
The new Mac Leopard OS has only been out for a few weeks now, and the hacks keep on rolling out for installing leopard on a PC. This time around Lifehacker's Adam Pash put together an amazing article on building a high-end desktop Hackintosh (a PC running the Mac OS) for under $800. His configuration consists of the following:
