Got it and so far it is awesome. I maxed out the graphics settings and had some fps lag issues so i bumped down the number of people in the crowd to normal and it works great. Looks good, plays smoothly, lots of fun! Seems like a pretty solid port! Now I just need to master the medium level so i can add that fifth fret.
Tag Archive for 'apple'
Moodswing is a script that allows me to update my adium, skype, facebook and twitter status with one simple quicksilver command. It is really simple using a quicksilver action applescript and it supports growl. I found out about it reading my TUAW feed, here is their writeup.
My blog automatically grabs my latest tweet. You can see it over on the right in the status area.
Callwave is a voicemail replacement service that I’m testing out. It’s pretty damned cool from what I can gather thus far. Basically you set your phone to redirect calls to a number they specify for you and set up your voicemail there just like any other voicemail service.
It is really easy to set up; it gives step-by-step instructions on what you do to our phone. It even provides simple instructions on how to deactivate the service. Once its set up when a call goes to voice mail it gets sent to the callwave voicemail service which renders the voice data as text and sends you a text message of the recording transcript. It doesn’t work especially well but, it does mange to give some sort of idea of what the person is leaving a message about.
In addition to the text messages, you get an email with an attached .wav of the message. The best part though is the fact that it integrates with dashboard so instead of calling a clumsy voicemail service I can push F12 and see a list of all of the messages I’ve recieved and listen to them in real time.
Basically, it does everything my existing voicemail did but also sends text message transcripts and allows easy access from my desktop.
There is only one thing that holds it back from being perfect in my book. That is that it can’t (yet) import from contact data from the OSX Address Book so most numbers show up with weird caller id data (usually either just the number or the name of the person that pays the bill which doesn’t necessarily correlate to whose phone it is). Other than this I really like the callwave service and hope that they continue to keep it as a free service. Although, I might be willing to pay a few dollars a month to use it if it came to that. Definitely check it out.
“Epic has confirmed that the Xbox 360 mega-hit Gears of War as well as the highly anticipated Unreal Tournament 3 are both coming to the Mac…”
Hooray, I love the Unreal Tournament series, used to play at LANs back in the day all of the time. Low Grav Facing Worlds Instagib CTF FTW. I played Gears of War at Ray’s LAN and it seemed really cool (although it takes some getting used to). I’m excited that these will both be Mac titles soon!
Ugh. Just got some new headphones for my to use at work for my MBP. Unfortunately, the MBP has issues with the headphone jack. It has constant hissing when plugged in and muted and there are sound artifacts when sounds are played squeeks and beeps and such. Sometimes a tone will sound for multiple seconds, and then stop when another sound is played.
I found online someone else describing the same problem:
http://www.macintouch.com/reviews/mbp15led/#issues
Add it to the list of MBP annoyances 
At least it isn’t noticeable when music is playing.
Apple FINALLY releases a quicktime update that allows for fullscreen playback without buying quicktime pro. They also released iTunes 7.3.1 which has some security update. Software Update is telling me to reboot to finish the install.
Well, I’ve had my shiny new Macbook Pro for a little over one week now and I decided that I would share my reactions thus far. So far I’m loving it.
Software
The OS, while it does take some getting used to, is pretty amazing. It looks good, it does what I expect it to (most of the time) and it is easy to learn. The fact that I can always fall back to the familiar bash console is very reassuring too. I have software to do pretty much all of the things I would expect to do on another platform (minus the ability to play games, but we’ll cover that in a minute). Overall I’m really impressed. I’m waiting on Office 2008 so that I can be on top of the new OpenXML document format from the PC version but other than that, I’m rolling along splendidly with OS X. Adium eats pidgin for breakfast in terms of completeness which is a real complement because I love gaim/pidgin. The dashboard is cool too, so much useful stuff all accessible quickly simply by pressing F12. Quicktime … still sucks ass. VLC however runs on the mac and is much better than the PC and linux versions in terms of UI uniformity. Very impressive there. Firefox and thunderbird still rule my browser and email but, the addition of iCal to my pim lineup is very welcome. A quick way to see my calendar and to sync it with my phone without having to load up google calendar.
Hardware
The hardware is very impressive. Core 2 duo 2.4ghz, 4gb of ram, 160gb harddrive. Everything seems very snappy and I never find myself wondering how long something is going to take. I still have complaints about the heat and battery life, both of which suck. The battery life hasn’t had much of an effect on me because I just keep it plugged in most of the time while I’m at home. The heat on the other hand is very annoying. smcFanController helps with that a little, I run the fans at 4k constantly to keep the heat situation under control. If I’m not doing anything to processor sitting it in my lap isn’t a problem, if the CPU usage is high, it isn’t bearable. In general the pros outweigh the cons I think. I thought I’d miss right click but, I don’t. Two fingers+click or two finger touch pad touch isn’t bad. I do however miss my middle mouse button!!! How do I open and close tabs without it?! Oh well, it won’t kill me.
Gaming, Windows
I brought my laptop to a lan last weekend and was totally impressed. Every game I touched played like an absolute champ. CS:S (my favorite) was 180fps+. Finally I own a laptop that isn’t afraid to play games! Unfortunately, most games require me to boot windows so I set up a bootcamp partition (32gb, probably too big gparted anyone?) and I have the vmware fusion beta booting it as well. This gives me the flexibility to run windows applications from within OS X (using unity) or to boot into a full-fledged windows to play games. Definitely cool.
Accessories
Zeroshock Case: A little bigger than the MBP (the 700m case fit PERFECTLY) but, it fits and provides a layer of protection in my backpack against real life.
Invisible Shield: The top shield (on the back side of the screen) was an absolute bitch to get on but, now it looks really good and will definitely help prevent unnecessary scratching of my mbp. The bottom shields were easier to put on but because it is made of many smaller pieces there are small gaps between where they connect. The touchpad covering plastic was absolute shit. I couldn’t move the mouse with it on there so it is in the garbage now. The palmrest protectors are ugly but I’m keeping them in order to prevent my palmrest from getting discolored.
4gb ram upgrade: Probably totally uncessary but it was cheap so I went for it.
Airport extreme: airport disk + 802.11n = :drool:
Overall
9.5/10
A few issues aside this is definitely the best computer I have ever owned. Anyone on the edge considering upgrading: do it, you won’t regret it. Several years ago I told myself I would never buy a mac because they were for total noobs. Now I can hardly see myself going back.
I’m really excited tht the iPhone is coming out today because maybe, just maybe, after toda I’ll stop seeing 50 referemces/day to it. I understand that it is a wonder of technology and it is really cool. I understand that it has its shortcomings. I understand its dataplans, features, price, service agreement and other details. I am just sick of all of my rss feeds and every blog post I read being cluttered with boring references to it.
Maybe today will be the last day. I doubt it though
I got thunderbird working with growl using this guide. It is a little complicated but I’ll summarize. First you need a thunderbird extension called yamb. You also need growlnotify installed, the installer puts it in /usr/local/bin (path didn’t exist so I created it). Then you use the shell script provided in the guide to interface between yamb and growlnotify. Works great 
I imported a large percentage of m old blog entries from blogger and livejournal. I can’t think of any other places where I have blog entries to import but that doesn’t matter. There is a lot of stuf in here now
Also I found a cool dashboard widget called WordPressDash that lets me blog straight from dashboard. I wonder if This works? (I doubt it).
edit: seems like wordpressdash has some CPU eating issues and I find myself killing dashboard processes most times after using it.
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