Press ESC if you’re unsure about a word’s spelling

Not sure if this is a feature that was always there in OS X, but just now, while I was writing an email, I accidently hit the ESC key while in the middle of a word. OS X completed the word for me. I pressed enter to accept the suggestion. Nice! Works in Text Edit and Mail, and probably everywhere else…

Jailbroken iPhone

After being a very satisfied customer with the current iPhone (1.1.4), and considering the fact it almost never crashed, I decided it was time to jailbreak it and install ‘almost’ useful apps on it!

Here the steps:

• download ZiPhone
• connect your iPhone and make sure to exit iTunes
• in Settings/General turn Auto-Lock to ‘Never’
• start ZiPhone
• press ‘Jailbreak’
• wait for the phone to restart a couple of times
• done

 

You will end up with two new icons on your iPhone:

simply start the Installer app and install away! I ended up with these apps:

fring
free mobile calls, live chat & presence over internet data plan or wifi

Capture
an easy to use no frills screen shot utility for everyday people

VoiceNotes
VoiceNotes allows you to record, play and share voice memos

iFartz
the most useful application you’ll ever find for your iPhone

(click on each for their respective home pages)

And last but not least, here my current iPhone screens:

Apple runs new multi-banner ‘Get a Mac’ Web ad

Happy Birthday Dave! (1Password 42% off)

Special Happy Birthday Dave! sale:

but it only lasts another day! Click here if you’re interested (I couldn’t live without 1Password!):

Dave Teare, co-founder of Agile Web Solutions, is another year older today, and in following tradition Dave wanted to share the celebration with everyone by creating a special Birthday ZOT Deal!

 

Hi-end Notebook comparison (totally non-scientific, of course)

I was asked by a friend what recommendation I would give for a high-end notebook.

For him, CPU and graphics performance are more important than the question OS X or Windows (the fool!). Price was also an issue (of course). He was under the impression he would get more ‘bang for the buck’ purchasing a Windows notebook.

That intrigued me and I set out to compare (as close as possible) the prices for:

Apple’s 17″ MacBook Pro, Alienware’s Area-51 m9750 and Dell’s XPS M1730.

Here their configurations:

Apple MacBook Pro
Mac OS X
2.5GHz C2D
2GB Memory
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 512MB 
200GB 7,200RPM HD
17″ 1920×1200 LED
$2,949.00

 

Alienware Area-51 m9750
Windows Vista Ultimate
2.33GHz C2D
NVIDIA GeForce 8700M GT
17″ 1920×1200 LCD
(all the other parts are the same as the MacBook above)
$2,963.00

Dell XPS M1730

(the same configuration as the Alienware above)
$2,809.00 

 

Looking at these numbers, I did recommend to get the Apple… mainly because of the build quality, the better portability, the LED screen (instead of LCD), and design. (For completion’s sake – when getting the Apple one has to add the cost of Windows Vista as well – OEM versions go for ~$190 for Vista Ultimate)

But, I also mentioned this system – mainly if he had any more money to spent, he could go with a Dual SLI graphics card setup and a RAID HD setup. Apple doesn’t anything like that:

 

Dell XPS M1730 (Fully pimped edition)
Windows XP Professional (no drivers for Vista yet (haha!)) 
2.8GHz C2D Extreme
4GB Memory
NVIDIA SLI Dual GeForce 8800M GTX 1GB
400GB (2x200GB RAID) 7,200RPM HD
$4,729.00 

 

So if performance is the only goal, spend the money and get the biggest pimped out Dell you can afford. Software is also worth a mention – the Mac versions of some pro software is likely to be not as optimized as their Windows counterpart (AliasWavefront Maya, 3D Studio Max, Avid, etc…). So it’s worth checking into that as well.

But now we would enter a price range where a power desktop would be in the cards… oh, let’s not go there 8)

 

 

How (long) can they get away with this?

Looks like Psystar is selling a “OpenMac”. Apparently you buy the box $399 and Leopard. And you have a very cheap Mac!

 

Psystar Homepage