by cg on September 30, 2008
Targus is announcing this morning a new line of just-for-Mac products that includes two wireless mice, a wireless presenter, a laptop cooler, a clever portable hub, a high-speed Mac/Windows file transfer cable and privacy screens in 3 sizes. The new products have a design, form factor and manufacturing quality that place them in a league with Apple’s own products and give Mac fans an alternative to the cheesy items too often found on the Mac accessories counter. My review of the new Bluetooth mouse is here (reviews of the other products will appear in subsequent posts). Nice job for a company that used to be focused on Windows only…
by cg on September 26, 2008
Have to admit, since Anathem arrived on my Kindle I have spent a lot of time with my nose glued to its e-ink screen: on the treadmill at the gym, commuting on Caltrain, a prelude to ‘chemo-naps,’ over lunch and just about any other free moment. The Kindle has freed me, with my hemiparetic left side, from reading only on my computer – I’m back to reading again, as if I could still handle a hardback volume (the Kindle’s light weight and page-change buttons are much easier to handle). Indeed, I left Jared Diamond’s excellent Collapse in mid-chapter (page still preserved on my Kindle) to start in on Anathem. Yes, I’m a Neal Stephenson fan…
by cg on September 25, 2008
Admittedly, gulker.com is a small operation: we have one ‘employee,’ sometimes two, sorta, kinda. So, we don’t have the kinds of coordination problems as do bigger enterprises with dozens, or hundreds or thousands of workers. Meetings are easy to schedule – outside of my gym and physical rehab time, I’m wide open, usually.
Nevertheless, I need a way to communicate my availability to my spouse, at least, and occasionally to others. I also need to engage with the people and companies I write about, and its great to be able to get to my works-in-progress, be they blog posts, written essays or photography and also to deliver them to my readers and clients.
While I applaud Apple’s effort to finally make .Mac into something more useful than its previous iterations, Google has really beaten Apple, and everyone else to the punch. Fore one thing, Google was there first, for another, most of their apps are cloud-based and OS independent, requiring nothing but a browser and a Net connection. I move from my powerful quad-core desktop Mac to my Linux-based EeePC ultraportable without blinking. Everything just works. Kind of like a Mac, but it’s in the cloud…
by cg on September 24, 2008
We’re still waiting for Google to offer Mac (and Linux) versions of Chrome so we can run them natively on our 2 favorite computers. We’ve been using the Windows beta under VM on the Mac, and are, so far, impressed. Chrome is – dare I say it – Mac-like in its UI, and the vaunted V8 script engine, while still a bit buggy, is, indeed, fast. Google’s apps, which I use often, run particularly well (but, of course)…
