David Emery Online

Insert Witty Tiger Reference Here

So…

I’ve now been running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (mmm… snappy title) for a week now, and as you may have gathered from the rest of the ‘net it’s very nice.

I’m not using Spotlight much (I’m a Quicksilver guy; Finder works nicely enough for everything else) although it looks useful in the long term.

Dashboard I’ve taken to like a duck to water – it has just a bit more polish (and less CPU/memory usage) then Konfabulator, which I liked but could never stick with, and the Apple supplied widgets are really neat. I also want to have a go at making some widgets – being both a cocoa developer and a web developer, their looks like their could be real opportunities for doing cool stuff!

Also, I’m really liking the direction that Mail has taken in Tiger. As well as the added functionality, smart mail boxes, spotlight searching etc, I really like the new look, which surprised me, as it looked really nasty in the preview images. However, the new sidebar mailboxes, with their little progress icons, work really well, and the concept of putting the toolbar icons into buttons works really...

Moving House

I have a decent excuse for the lack of posts over the last few days; I’ve been moving house! I now live in sunny Islington, which is much more convenient then not-so-sunny Kingston – which after 4 years of living there, I think I pretty much used up.

Notes from moving:

• Leave More Time to Move – We left about a month to find a place and move, and we ended up moving on the we had to move out – which was a little bit hectic.

• Foxtons are Bastards – Don’t use them! Really! Part of the reason that we moved so late was that we had a place all ready to go with Foxtons, but then they screwed us around and we had to pull out. Also, they tried to charge us £370 for the privilege of moving with them! Compared to the £140 we ended up paying. They also wanted 6 weeks deposit, as opposed to 4.

• T-Mobile Hotspots are Expensive – We now live above a Starbucks (people who know me may find this amusing), and hence get WiFi reception and my internet addiction is such that I couldn’t resist the temptation…

• Boxes of old...

The Playstation Generation

So, after waiting for a while Sony have finally announced that the PSP is coming out over here in the UK (and the rest of Europe) on the 1st of September, for the pricey sum of £179 – which isn’t so bad compared to the US, when you account for VAT and that the dollar will likely be even worse come September. (Link to full information on GamesRadar)

The competition between the PSP and the Nintendo DS is quite an interesting one, which sums up the two ways the industry is going at the moment; Sony is aiming slap bang at the mainstream gaming market that it has done so well with over the successive Playstation generations, and looks to do so again with both the PSP and the Playstation 3 (to be announced at E3 next month). This is also the same market that Microsoft is going for, and is currently where the money in the games industry is; with games such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Half Life 2 and Halo 2 all selling millions of copies to gamings traditional vanguard.

Nintendo, however, are trying to do something completely different;...

Tiger / Safari Coolness

With a little bit of Interface Builder hackery, you can make Safari use the new “Unified Toolbar” (Plastic) look, as seen in Mail/System Pref et al. in 10.4.

And it looks nice:

(click for full size)

Yay Redux

After having played around with Google Maps for a bit, I’ve decided that it’s not quite as good as it looks.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I really like the technology and presentation – the live dragging, direction bubbles (complete with drop shadow) and the integration with local searching are all very cool, but Google Maps UK currently has one major flaw.

It doesn’t know where stuff is.

For example, if you look for Angel Tube Station , it correctly puts the marker in the right place, put the actual tube logo is about 100 meters to the left. It also doesn’t seem to be very good at finding stuff without a post code (i.e. 111 Test St, Testville will often give you a street in completely the wrong place, with the marker nowhere near where the actual place is.).
Of course, it is still in beta (when is anything Google not? Beta is the new black, you see.) but how are you supposed to trust a map service to tell you where places are, when you know it gets some places wrong?

Yay!

Much nicer then multimap et al.

Google Maps UK

Internet Cludo

Story: LightWave 3D 8.3 adds multi-core support

But there aren’t any Macs with multiple cores at the moment…

Hmmm :-)

Adobe buy Macromedia

So does this mean that we’ll get a good web page creation program out of them now; at the moment both Dreamweaver and GoLive aren’t worth installing if you ask me. As long as they don’t touch Photoshop…

I wonder who’s going to be the competitor that brings them to their knees in 10 years time when they’ve got all complacent?

Apple ? I really like what they’ve done with Final Cut Studio over the weekend at NAB, and would love a Photoshop/Illustrator/Flash competitor from them.

Link to story

Welcome, hello, and all that

Welcome to my blog! I decided that it was about time I had a blog, as that’s what all the cool kids have.

I decided I wanted a blog about 3 months ago. Quite how it’s taken me this long to set up is beyond me…

Now, I have to say at the outset that I’m generally quite lazy (when I’m not being paid), so this blog will be for me an exercise in trying not to be lazy, and I’ll try to post reasonably often (although I’m not promising anything).

Anyway, hopefully it’ll be quite fun…