Circular arguments
While clearing out the applications that seemingly pile up on my drive on a continuous basis, I noticed something about their icons.
Macworld
Articles related to Macworld. Typically links to articles I’ve written for macworld.com.
Google Earth goes golfing
After a recent golf outing, I decided to try something a little different with Google Earth. Overall, the project came out quite a bit better than I had expected it to going in.
Not factory recommended
After recovering from my dead iPod experience, I decided to replace its aging battery, and wrote about the process. While it wasn't overly difficult, I'm very glad I'm not an iPod technician--working on something that small and compact all day would drive me crazy!
In praise of Senuti
At the beginning of my trip to this year's WWDC, my third-generation iPod suffered a severe failure, apparently leaving me music-free for the entire week. Luckily, someone pointed me to Senuti, and I detailed how it helped save the week (from a musical perspective, that is).
Which Mac should I buy?
Given that everyone at Macworld is publicly reachable via a web email form, I get a lot of random questions in my inbox.
By a wide margin, the two most popular recent questions have been "which Mac should I buy," and "when should I buy it?" After answering the question about 2,500 times (or so it seems), I decided to write up my usual responses for easy future reference. There was some good conversation on the topic in the forums as well; this has become one of the threads to which I point those contemplating the switch.
Widgets calling
The recently-released OS X 10.4.7 update included a not-announced Dashboard widget update feature which silently checks to make sure that your widgets are valid. I agreed with the need for such a feature, but wrote about how I think Apple could have implemented things a bit better.
Something’s missing here…
My story about what happens when you wake a Mac...without the hard drive that booted it being attached!
MacBook gaming: A graphics concern?
I wrote up my perspective on playing games on the just-introduced (and video-card-lacking) MacBook. There were some encouraging results, and a lot of not so encouraging results. Overall, I thought the MacBook did a passable job with older titles, a better-than-expected job with some games in Rosetta, and an abysmal job with the few current 3D games I tried.
Just the iPod facts, ma’am
Last Friday, a relatively huge article in the Living section of The Oregonian caught my eye. As you can see in the picture at right (hover and click for a larger version), it was hard to miss this article.
Expecting to find a shocking exposé on the hidden faults of the iPod, I started reading...and started getting angry. The article was nothing more than a writeup on one user's connectivity issues between her iPod nano and a Toshiba laptop. That alone would have been fine. But the article attempts to bring in other "evidence" of iPod nano flaws, and that's where I feel it overstepped the bounds of reasonable journalism (even for something in Living).
So I wrote up my thoughts for Macworld's site, as I felt it was unfair to let something like this sit without some form of response. I have also sent the paper a copy of my writeup, though I'm not expecting much in the way of follow up.
Music Store search struggles
After a particularly infuriating search effort for the Curious George soundtrack at the iTunes Music Store, I wrote this editorial about the store's messed up search functions. Oddly enough, the very day we ran the editorial, Apple updated the store's search functions, and the new functionality addressed every single issue I had raised. Talk about bad timing!