Getting Organised

It's been a busy week of organising stuff, both for my trip to London and also my online presence. As far as London is concerned I think I'm on top of things, just a few things to pack tonight and I'm good to go tomorrow morning. My online state of affairs is not quite so organised. I've been trying out some new services for blogging (and web hosting) and found they're not as good as blogger. So I've re-located my blogger site to this new URL and I hope to get it embedded into my iWeb/MobileMe site soon. I'm a little concerned that iWeb is too limited as a platform to build my site with because you cant actually access the HTML at design time. Editing it after you publish means you'll overwrite your customisations next publish. It does have some nice templates though, so i might stick with it. MobileMe on the other hand has really impressed me so far, but I'm glad I waited past the initial roll out of the service. Even now theres a few bugs with calendar syncing and timezones that are pretty confusing.

Anyway, I need to get some lunch now, kthxbai.

Epic Win

Last night was my annual company party- sort of a belated Christmas party, but it's always arranged for January. Probably a politically correct thing or cost saving thing. Anyway, it was my second time at one of these do's and I approached it with caution, last yr I fell victim to the lure of free wine! There's no such thing as free alcohol, you always pay for it one way or another- or if you're unlucky, you pay twice! Well last night was a victory, I didn't know if I should drink at all or just go wild. I drank a good amount really- about a bottle of red and 2 pints, then another glass or two of red back at a friends house. I also learnt that another friend is rather skilled on the piano, massively impressing me- who dropped out of lessons after two months, wish I'd stuck to it. But I wasn't very good! Anyway, I'm staying in bed till lunch. Yay.

Dining Table

It's late and I should be sleeping so this will be short. We got a new dining table this weekend and paid next to nothing for it due to a closing down sale. It's solid oak, has 4 padded chairs and two solid and should have cost around £1200 for the lot. We paid £60! I still can't quite believe it, but it's true! So that's one major exspense for the yr dealt with, bring on the next one!

My iTunes Purchases

Well since it's DRM free now, I have nothing to be ashamed of!

Here's my iTunes Widget:


http://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/ws/RSS/myrecentpurchases/sf=143444/userid=106548461/xml?v0=9985
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/wa/widget?type=1&sf=143444

MacBook - First Impressions

Awesome! It's solid, attractive and fast, with great battery life- even hammering the battery by installing software for 3 hrs didn't flatten it! For just browsing you'd get over 5hrs, with dome YouTube it's less but even streaming YouTube constantly it's about 2.5hrs. I installed Spore under OSX and it runs great on max settings. I dual booted with Vista and installed Crysis, which ran and looked great on the bottom settings with native resolution. I'll try see how high that can go!

Alu MacBook on it's way...

I just ordered an Alu MacBook 2.4Ghz yesterday. I spent November and December trying to find another option but ultimatly couldn't. I was drawn to the HP Pavilion Tx2 series, which should launch in the UK this month. These are convertable tablet pc's and this new model has a capacitive touchscreen like an iPhone. That means it responds not to pressure, like a resistive touchscreen, but to capacitance in your fingertips! This makes the user experience feel light, responsive and more precise. It also gives better image quality because there is no resistive layer in front of the screen. Another tempting feature of the Tx2 is multi-touch, the ability to use multiple fingers simultaneously to perform gestures that might zoom or rotate your view. That's a cool feature, but Windows XP and Vista aren't designed for multi-touch. Instead the drivers map gestures to a keyboard shortcut for existing functions that perform the desired action. For example; you gesture to rotate an image left, the driver sends Ctrl + Left to the app and the app responds with a function that rotates left 90 degrees. This sort of works but looks and feels rubbish, it's too disconnected from the user for them to feel any sense of direct control. Windows 7 should solve this, but that's not out yet!

Anyway, I want to summarise the pro's and cons of the MacBook in relation to the Tx2. Yes, I know it's a bit like comparing chalk with cheese but that's the real world for you!

Pro's
* Build quality & design
* Weight & size
* Battery life
* Graphics performance
* Boot Camp (it'll be a powerful Vista laptop too)
* Almost no heat
* Almost no fan noise

Con's
* No touch or pen input
* Not a tablet!
* No fingerprint reader
* More exspensive

So to conclude; it's MacWorld Monday and if Steve Job's announces a tablet MacBook with all the features of the 2.4Ghz MacBook and a capacitive touch screen for around the same price- I WILL cry!

Incidentally, it should arrive Tuesday. Given my track record with blogging- don't expect to hear from me till about June!