I have made a few minor tweaks to make the site more palatable to Safari / Mac users. They added a new font rendering style to Safari for Windows called Standard (for CRT). It is kind of like the Mac font rendering acting a wee bit more Windows like. Is this available in for Macs? or Safari on the Mac. Screen shot shows Opera on the left and Safari on the right.
For many years I have had a nagging feeling about Apple and it’s products. I generally like what they do and many of their laudable aims, but they have really started to grate with me in recent years. I’m not entirely sure why, they are not any worse than many of their rivals and often have vision beyond them.
Maybe it’s the religious fever that their products inspire? I love tech as much as the average geek, but I have a general mistrust of religion and religious behavior. Considered opinion I can accept, blind faith I can not. I find this a wee bit of a problem with Nintendo, but to be honest I don’t dislike them for it. So maybe it isn’t that.
It could be the smug marketing and often almost inhuman level of polished message. I often can’t see the Woz for the Jobs in Apple these days. The geeky wide eyed tech fun seems to be buried in Aluminum and Glass. I do generally appreciate Apple’s sense of design, I often feel it can be a bit over minimalised at times and stubborn in it’s conventions, but in general is so much slicker than the competition. So maybe it isn’t the slickness.
I think my main problem is the fact that Apple don’t want me. That is to say the enthusiast computer user, used to building and maintaining my own machines. I don’t expect them to fully cater for me, but I do feel left out in the cold with so many un-upgradable hermetically sealed computers. Apple have an end to end business approach and I do not expect them to jack that in, really all I want is a Mac non-Pro, I don’t need a Dual Zeon £2000 workstation just a fun little tower that could inspire me and the budding Woz’s of the world.
Seems like youngsters with talent greater than mine are getting younger and younger. DJ Sara and Ryusei would be younger than me if they combined their ages then doubled it.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Need For Speed.
Need for Speed is a series I have always held in disdain, a chav racer only that wasn’t worth looking at versus arcade racer king Burnout or simulation champion Gran Turismo. I saw The Fast and the Furious, whilst entertaining it did little to contradict my view of shiny glowy night time racers like NFS:U, NFS:U2 and NFS:C. The first inkling I had that it might not just be a chav racer and something of a good arcade racer to have as a wing man to Burnout was 4 Color Rebellion’s take on NFS:Carbon for Wii.
So a couple of weeks back I asked my mate to download the demos of NFS: Carbon, Juiced 2 and PGR 4 on his Xbox 360. I tried NFS first and was confounded, it was hugely enjoyable and certainly looked nice if a little low on FPS. So we tried Juiced 2, it looked a wee bit nicer, but the game handled like 2nd rate racer, not bad just not great like Auto Modellista did. PGR 4 is the latest in a series of games that after every retry I have disliked immensely. No great surprise when I thought it was made of huge amounts of ass when I played it, nice rain though.
So fast forward to this weekend and my mate John decided to trade in his PS2 Slim for the shiny monolith that is the PS3. Whilst we were in Gamestation Kirkcaldy I found a rare copy of NFS:Carbon for the Xbox 180. I was informed by a bemused Gamestation Edinburgh employee that the Xbox version was always sold out and he didn’t have the foggiest idea why. The simplest answer is MS dropped the Xbox like a hot potato and there for EA followed suit. This is a great shame as the Xbox Carbon looks great, not as great as say Motorstorm in 720P on the PS3, but pretty flipping amazing for the little black box.
I started on tuner as the muscle cars feel as crap as they look and until I have mastered some skill in NFS I feel my nice shiny RX8 tuner will meet my needs. The game plays really nicely and has a free roaming aspect that I didn’t expect, I really am enjoying it and the ability to play in bite size chunks makes it all the more appealing, like GTA: Vice City.
It seems like Vista has a bad rap these days. I really feel kinda sorry for Microsoft as they seem to be unable to do right. When they don’t have security, people whine about not having security. When they do, people whine about security features. When you only have XP, people whine that it’s old and is kinda tired. When they have XP and Vista, they whine on about how Microsoft shouldn’t have bothered as XP was good enough.
It works for me, but I had built my own PC from nothing but brand name parts. It wasn’t expensive at all. People these days buy sub-£300 PCs and complain about the quality. Well duh! you pay for what you get, I don’t see you driving a Lada or eating nothing but Tesco’s Value food. You want something that works well, pay for it, it doesn’t have to be expensive just be made to a good standard.
Only had it a couple of hours and it really does feel so much better than 8. I got a really cheap upgrade offer for $100 US inc Acdsee Pro which is so so, but getting a package as good as Canvas for that price is a steal. I know it’s troubled package much like a lot of the Ex-Metacreations software, but it doesn’t stop it feeling like a stonking package. Think the Adobe Creative Suite in a single program it’s scope is insane.
I’ll report back once I have some work done in it.
Being based on an old theme I needed to get with the program and widgetise the sidebar. This gives me much better integration with DA and Flickr.
You may or may not know that I am a big fan of Opera for Windows. I find it personally to be the best browser on the system. I am free tech support to my parents, so after some nasty spyware problems I shifted them over to it. I work day to day for a large firm doing web and graphic design and Internet Explorer is always a pain. I would say however that IE7 combined with Maxthon 2 is a magic combination and really the only way you should use IE at all. I don’t like Firefox much, but it is so much better than IE6 I am compelled to recommend it if Opera or IE7 doesn’t tickle your fancy.
I recently used a Mac for testing purposes and found the multi platform browsers to be seriously wanting. After a bit of testing I decided that I liked Shiira, it is the nearest thing to Opera or Maxthon I could find that ran like a real Mac app. Safari is too light for me and few people will pay for Omniweb. Shiira uses the same webkit engine as Safari, but with a vastly better interface.
IE6 or below is not supported by this website, MS promised PNG Alpha support for years and only IE7 now supports it so if you see my banner with a gray background you have a duff browser.
