Sticking with Snow Leopard
From Ron:
Charles Moore,
I agree with you entirely regarding Cowardly Lion: 11 Reasons Not to Upgrade
to OS X 10.7 Lion.
I use [OS X] 10.6.8 all of the time, except when beta testing 10.7.4
and 10.8 - and don't see that as changing any time soon.
As an AppleSeeder testing Mountain Lion (ML), I find that Lion and
ML are simply an attempt to make more comfortable the growing number of
newbies to the Mac platform (after they've purchased an iPad or
iPhone).
The system is being "dumbed-down" so that they are not able to make
mistakes . . . or at least not as many.
The Mac has taken a leap backwards in many pragmatic ways (loss of
Save As..., loss of upper right button in windows, etc.) and
replaced with lots of gestures and social networking bells and
whistles.
It doesn't appear that this will be changing any time soon from the
feedback we are receiving from Apple regarding ML.
I'm sure glad SL is so fast and easy to use <g>
Regards,
Ron
Hi Ron,
Thanks for the input.
We seem to be completely on the same page.
Charles
Loving the Apple Refurb Store
From Magnus:
I very much enjoyed your featuring of the Refurb Store.
I myself am a repeated customer of the store, and I am always
pleasantly surprised. Not only are the products, as you report,
virtually indistinguishable from new (save the box), but they often (in
my case always!) come with some nice extras.
All Macs in the Refurb Store are advertised with their respective
standard configuration, but they may come with way better
specification. My Mid 2010 Mini, for example, was advertised as a Mac
mini "Core 2 Duo" 2.66 featuring 2 GB RAM and a 320 GB hard drive,
but came with 4 GB and a 500 GB disk. Even more spectacularly, my
Mid 2011 Core i7 iMac (21.5") came with 8 GB RAM (instead of the
listed 4) and a whopping 2 TB hard disk (instead of 1 TB).
Considering the enormous costs of exchanging the hard drive in an iMac,
the savings were amazing.
I'd also like to mention the website http://www.refurb.me where all stock of the
different Refurb Stores worldwide are listed. One can even set an alert
to be notified once the desired machine is back in stop (that's how I
got the iMac).
Cheers from a cold and freezy Vienna,
Magnus
Hi Magnus,
It's always great to hear of good customer experiences
with Apple, and from happy refurbished hardware customers.
Since Apple very rarely offers discounts (Black Friday
one-day discounts are an exception), and seldom other sales incentives,
the Refurb stores are a substitute for bargain-hunters who hate to pay
full retail.
I did break pattern and paid full retail for my iPad 2
last spring, but I sat on a waiting list for a month just to get one at
all under the circumstances that prevailed with demand outstripping
supply for months.
Indeed, the rapid development of iOS devices
technology and features in general might confound buying refurbished
philosophy somewhat in that by the time iPads, for instance, are widely
available in the refurb supply pipeline, release of a newer, more
desirable model is on the horizon.
For example, my iPad 2 is only eight months old, but
the rumored better camera and faster processor in the forthcoming
iPad 3 sound tempting. I'll do my best to resist.
However, for Macs, which have (or at least have had)
longer service lives, Apple Certified Refurbished machines are the
value alternative.
We're finally getting a taste of winter here in Nova
Scotia as February draws to a close, although I think most of the cold
went to Europe this year.
Charles
Car-Indifferent Millennials
From Scott:
Greetings,
I read your article about car-indifferent millennials and
immediately thought of a theory as to why the younger set isn't
particularly fond of driving. Cars do not offer any sort of instant
gratification, which their other devices do.
In the day and age of text messaging, search engines, and online
downloads, everything comes within seconds. Even McDonald's seems slow
to many millennials. The idea of having to get in a car, drive while
avoiding distractions like texting (now illegal in my state of
Pennsylvania and many others), and take time to get somewhere
frustrates this "I want it now" generation. When they do travel, they
prefer to find a method that doesn't temporarily separate them from
cell phones or other devices. For vacations, the airplane is usually
the only option.
Steve Jobs used to say the journey was the reward in any venture of
life. This is true in travel as well. I enjoy traveling by car for that
reason. I remember the excitement when I got my permit, then my
license, and ultimately my first car. Only a handful of my peers were
the same way. (I'm 25.) I babied her big time - waxed her every month
(most of my friends were lucky to wash their car once a year), was
religious about maintaining the vehicle, and enjoyed every minute I
spent behind the wheel, whether it was my morning drive to school or a
trip on the turnpike. If I had a rough day, I'd take a long drive, as I
found it enjoyable and relaxing. Even though the car was 16 years old
when I got it from my grandparents, it got treated as though it was
fresh out of the showroom. I even buffed the leather four times every
year.
I don't work on cars as of now, mostly because I never had the time
to take an automotive technology course. I could tinker around myself,
but I want to learn to do these things the right way. However, I always
take the time to learn about the car itself and know, in theory, how to
do the repairs and maintenance. Once I get the right tools and a bit of
training, you can make a safe bet I'll never set foot in a mechanic's
shop again.
I have driven a manual transmission and find it both enjoyable and
superior to automatic (which I've had in all three of the cars I've
owned, including my current one; it's more a question of finding a car
with a stick where I live, which is nearly impossible). I'd love to
find a pickup truck with a manual to go alongside my Honda Civic, my
current vehicle. Yes, I'd be willing to travel a few hundred miles to
get one.
On my days off, I enjoy taking road trips. I'll drive a several
hundred mile round trip in a day and have more fun driving to and from
than actually spending time at my destination. A nice trek down an
interstate with some good music in the background is, plain and simple,
relaxing. The iPhone gets set aside on these trips. If someone wants to
get ahold of me, they get to wait until I arrive at wherever I'm
heading. The break from the everyday grind of the world online is worth
it. I'm already leaving the offline world behind when I take a road
trip, so why not leave behind the second world I exist in as well?
My friends think this idea is nuts. They all think I should be
flying if I'm going on, say, a seven hour trip. I also get chastised
for the fact I'm using a lot of fuel (at least I can fight back and say
I have a Civic, which gets 45 mpg on the highway!) and that I never
answer my phone when I'm on the road. I always invite them to join me,
but they don't have the patience, since a trip from, say, Pittsburgh to
Charlotte, would take eight hours on average one way. They have no idea
how much fun they're missing out on with the driving alone.
I, too, miss the old songs about cars. I'm a big fan of the Beach
Boys in part because of the emphasis on cars in their music. My
favorite has always been "Little Honda", which I know is really about
motorcycles, but as someone whose mother had a stick-shift Accord and
whose father had a stick-shift Prelude, I used to always think the song
was about the cars. (Both cars were dark blue, so when I bought my
Civic - my first brand new car that wasn't a castoff from another
family member - the color choice was a no-brainer).
Sadly, I know a lot of people who hate to drive who are my age. One
got rid of his car entirely and relies on public transit. Many complain
about having to drive anywhere, even on vacation. My cousin, who just
turned 17, doesn't even want a driver's license. If only they took a
nice cruise down the turnpike in the middle of June, free of cellular
devices. They too would realize the true joy in driving, one that can
be accomplished with anything from the most tech-heavy Ford Focus to an
old-school Delta 88 (yes, I'd love to get my hands on a Rocket V8).
Let's keep the love of driving alive!
Hi Scott,
It's truly encouraging to hear from someone your age
who is a car enthusiast. It's hard not to notice that people immersed
in car culture these days tend to be an older crowd. Case in point: A
lot of the people writing for car magazines that I've been reading for
nearly 50 years now were there in the 1960s. David E. Davis Jr., who
had formative influence on both my car enthusiasm and my writing as
editor of Car & Driver, and later as founder and editor of
Automobile Magazine, was still writing a monthly column for
C&D at the time of his death a year ago at the age of
80.
I think your analysis of the lack of immediacy is
probably part of what disinterests the wired generation in automotive
pursuits is likely correct. I know that Internet addiction has made me
a lot less patient with lack of immediacy than I used to be, so for
folks who have never known life without the Internet, it must be
significantly more difficult to go offline than for someone like me who
first got connected at age 46 (the first day the Internet became
available where I live).
Trivia note: While "Little Honda" was indeed written
by Brian Wilson and Mike Love of The Beach Boys, the original hit
record was recorded by a cobbled together one-off group of studio
musicians under the name "The Hondells," and it hit No. 9 on the US pop
singles chart in 1964. The Beach Boys subsequently recorded and
released their own version of the song.
I encourage you to keep doing your own maintenance and
repairs when practical. A modest set of tools and a service manual will
take you a long way. And I hope you someday do get that V8! Nothing
else sounds like them.
Charles
Congestion Is Killing the Desire to Drive
From Nathan:
Good morning, Mr. Moore,
I felt compelled to comment on your superb article. I am a high
school student awaiting my license. To me, the car I will own must be
affordable, reliable, look decent (no recent Acura TLs, thank you), and
be safe. Oh, and have enough horsepower and suspension tuning to
entertain me on California's hidden canyon roads.
That eliminates about 75% of the cars on the market today. As a
student with no job, I am hoping to be able to afford the gas for a
1986 Toyota 4x4 truck, let alone the insurance.
Part of the reason for the decline in popularity of cars, at least
in SoCal, I believe is due to the concentration of vehicles. My friends
like driving as a means to get places without having to bug their
parents or ride a bike, but they don't seem to enjoy driving for the
sake of driving. My guess is that we have so many cars on the road here
that it will take my mom and myself 15 minutes to drive less than 3
miles at some times. That is absolutely ridiculous. Our transportation
system has served us well, but with the ever-increasing number of cars
on the road, at some point we young folk get frustrated and stop caring
about the joy of driving.
Also, the extremely expensive prices of the nicer cars (in
ride/handling, economy, safety, and looks) are out of reach for the
average person, let alone youth. Some of the cars that I think are
almost perfect include the exciting BMW 328i, the safe and beautiful
Volvo S60 T5 (look at it in its metallic red), and the sporty and
practical Volkswagen Golf TDI. At prices of roughly 35, 30, and 25
grand, they are all (way) out of my reach.
But I still consider myself an automotive enthusiast. What else
describes someone who has an entire DVD devoted to rebuilding a
small-block V8 engine? Or has a magazine subscription to Motor
Trend and NASCAR Illustrated? But, by the same token, reads
Low End Mac every day and browses through Macworld's and TidBITS' RSS
feeds daily?
No, I don't think the younger generation has forgotten the
enthusiasm for cars, but I think they have resignedly dealt with
traffic and warnings from parents for so long that we don't think about
our initial infatuation with our autos and just plow through the
privilege of driving as if it were a chore.
Thanks for listening,
Nate Jones
Hi Nate,
Thanks for sharing your perspective. Great to hear
from another young car aficionado - more evidence that car enthusiasm
isn't limited to us old guys.
I remember the last year before I turned 16 seemed to
drag on forever. I got my own first car a couple of months after my
birthday - for $200 off a used car lot. It was a rustbucket, but it
taught me a lot in a very short time, and I even managed one longish,
several hundred mile road trip in it, albeit with the frame broken in
two places.
Good point about traffic congestion. After I moved to
a city in my late teens, I would often leave my car in its home parking
spot and walk or take the bus to avoid the tedium of traffic congestion
and finding a place to park. And that was in the late '60s/early '70s,
when it was a lot less crowded on city streets than it is today. And I
agree: Prices - both purchase and operational overhead - must be
daunting for a young person.
I encourage you to persevere, though. There's plenty
of authentic crossover between car and computer enthusiasm, especially
these days, and the car hobby can be a real source of enjoyment, as
well as a money-saver if you learn to do your own maintenance and
fixing.
Charles
Cars and Losing the Frontier
From Mike:
Dear Charles,
It's great to see you going off on tangents again. Gadgets are
interesting - although Macs are getting less and less exciting with
each year - but it is the feedback process of technology affecting, and
being affected by, society which is really interesting.
I think the decline in car-love, at least in the US, has to do with
the mass migration of people to crowded cities on the coasts. The
ridiculous cost of new vehicles, insurance, and spiraling fuel prices
all certainly contribute. But I want to seize upon your fond
recollection of practicing driving way out on rural roads. How I envy
you!
I never saw a country road until I was 25. Cars were always driven
in the presence of lots of other cars. You'd be nuts to let a kid drive
around here. My dad got often stuck coming home from work in the
traffic jams on 8-lane-wide US 19 on his 20 mile commute. Mom wouldn't
take me places in Tampa because she was afraid of a stretch of I-275
called "malfunction junction." This wasn't Dead Man's Curve, but more
Dead Man's Gordian Knot: three bay bridges funneled into an elevated
highway with no place to pull over. Straight through some of the most
blighted parts of Tampa, for nobody wants to live under the interstate.
Grandfather's green flattop of a Buick was always in the shop getting
the air conditioner fixed, but it never seemed 100%. For a
straight-laced old New Jersey Catholic transplanted to Florida who was
never entirely comfortable outside of slacks and a collared shirt, good
AC was important. By the way, I'm not harping on the size of old cars
for the sake of the environment: I failed the driving test three times
in a Dad's cone-smushing car the size of the USS Nimitz. The fourth
time I passed, sparing all the cones in my girlfriend's father's
Toyota.
When I was 25 and drove across South Dakota chasing Mount Rushmore
and the Badlands, I began to see how driving might be fun. No roads
forming bow-tie malfunction junctions out there! 80 miles to the next
Steinbeckian oasis of a gas station? No problem! I drove that little
rented Neon like it was a 747! Of course, the twisting washboard roads
and hills of the Badlands threw a bit of, uh, turbulence my way, and I
began thinking about learning to drive a manual when I got home.
"It's what separates us from the ladies," a colleague solemnly
informed me, with a fatherly hint in his voice of Tom Skerritt in
Top Gun. He'd learned to drive in the back woods of West
Virginia. Now trying to get used to the clutch in the concrete gray
tinsel sprawl of West Central Florida . . . it was hellish.
Getting pulled over by cops who think you might be a drunk driver,
stalling all over the place at major intersections, jumping forward and
then conking out right in the middle. This is not the stuff of John
Denver songs and Fahrvergnügen.
I don't know about your impression of American Graffiti, but
I came away with an overwhelming sense of open possibility: of a small
town in a very big, spacious countryside, in a giant country still
(deservedly!) riding high after saving the world from murderous madmen.
There were places to drag race, watch submarine races, and be the
victim or perpetrator of obnoxious pranks. The space age was being
born; the same minds who had once made terror weapons were now putting
men in space! American Graffiti seemed to me a warm-up for
Star Wars - but with gas-burning cars as the plot vehicles
instead of space ships running on magic (the Force?). It even had
Harrison Ford playing a bad - but not really all that bad - boy on the
edge of town.
I fear we Americans have lost this sense of frontier, perhaps for
good. In many places the town has no edge, or if it does, it's just an
administrative boundary dividing it from an adjacent town. Why go
there? Both towns are the same anyway, each having the usual fast-food
chains, surveillance cameras at all the stoplights, and the company
store. (You know which company I mean. We owe our souls to it!) Going
places in cars and other vehicles and having adventures, sense of
wonder, new frontiers, I can't help feeling all this good stuff is born
of family, which in turn, we appreciate all the more when returning
home. (In empty houses, with Mom & Dad at work all day and
grandparents left moldering in some "facility," even submarine racing
fans needn't leave home, but just pick up the cell phone.) For some
strange reason, Americans of all ages have been turning away from
family, the birthplace of the adventurous spirit, and replacing it with
that morally indifferent crucible of conformity, the corporation.
If you want to see a George Lucas film more apropos of (sub-)urban
living and driving, try watching THX-1138.
PS: The iCar looks like something made for Stormtroopers.
Hi Mike,
I immensely enjoyed reading your lyrical commentary on
my reminiscent ramblings, and I concur with your analysis, especially
about family as a cultural anchor and the contemporaneous fragmentation
of a once coherent culture.
Incidentally; big cars. Still love 'em. I've owned
several over the years including a couple of early-mid '60s full-size
Chevs, a '67 Pontiac Parisienne (Canadian equivalent of a US Catalina),
a '73 Dodge Polara, and my current 2000 Mercury Grand Marquis.
I've had poor luck with air conditioning too, although
here in Nova Scotia you only really miss it about five days in July and
August.
Charles
Why Some Millennials Are Oblivious to Cars
From Alex:
You discovered the precise reason why some millennials are oblivious
to cars. Then you sat there, using your advantage of having experienced
the days when a luxury car cost $10,000 and what would be $1 million+
cars even in 2000 were $50,000-$640,000 tops, and gas prices were such
that $16 would buy more gas than your car could hold several times
over, and you sunk back into unreality.
Reality is when something that once was affordable enough to make it
worthwhile, and then starts costing higher order multiples of what it
used to, and in the case of gas is less intrinsically worthy (being
ethanol blended BS or almost totally ethanol super-BS) and also costs
higher order multiples of what it used to, it would have taken Apple
doing at least what Harley Davidson did with the F-150, where Apple
makes a certain model of car and puts their branding on it, but with
Apple giving free stickers away, who of my type of millennial wants to
spend extra money on an Apple branded car unless we thought it was
worth more than a computer that has much less initial outlay and
maintenance costs?
I mean, surely you're not supporting the insurance companies and
companies pumping out ethanol corrupted gas that costs as much as gas
without ethanol used to cost relatively without inflation?
Even die hard car fans say that insurance companies and oil
companies are just about legalized robbery, because you have to pay
them and they don't want to pay you and sometimes flat out won't even
if you try to force them to.
A computer requires much less equivalent to oil (as in Internet),
especially if you're like me and don't have an iPhone with a huge
monthly contract. Same way with the equivalent to water (power, as in
good 120/240 VAC). We may have to get a car to pay off student loans,
but we're not going to be happy about it.
Set me back in the 1960s with that same car you gave your daughter
that you gave her outright, and I'll have the same reaction as she did,
because computers aren't there to be a much cheaper time-spending
equivalent to cars.
My Daddy wasn't able to give me a high intrinsic worthiness index
car, and there's no way I feel like paying $20,000 for something only
worth $2,000, $50,000+ for something only worth $10,000-$640,000
tops.
A lot of people my generation might not be so "give me everything
for free"-minded if the cost of living was what it was in the 1960s.
Even with period wages. (I know the last part is applicable to me for
sure.)
You earned some things, but the times you were born and lived in
were times I would give every computer and accessory I have ever had,
have, and will ever get in the future, both new and used, working and
not working, affordable or very expensive, to live in provided I could
keep parents with an equivalent intrinsic worthiness index as my own.
God didn't give me that choice, and more than any earthly thing, the
choice of when to be born, live, and die, is one that I do feel I
should be entitled to.
Given that God screwed me over in terms of time to be born, live,
and die, while still keeping good parents, I try to do the best that I
can.
(Speaking of the article, there's a car commercial that was on as I
was starting to type this sentence, and while you might have had good
car experiences, since mine are all negative in the end - as are my
experiences with team work and trust with other people - I have learned
to come as close as possible to cussing out car commercials for
representing something that has been utterly ruined for me.)
Instead, Daddy's car make preferences are what I prefer, and
commercials for other makes and models just off-put me to the point
where you could replace off-put with the nearest same starting letter
four letter word.
Even my Daddy says that if his father could have afforded to just
outright give him the same car you gave your daughter, he would flip.
From the article, it seems like she appreciated the intrinsic
worthiness of the car, but not the kindness of the gift.
That part may have gotten lost in translation though, that last part
was just an observation based on apparently poor understanding of the
context, so that it could be cleared up and the editorial process
brought to a more satisfying conclusion for the both of us.
That's my take, that for a big portion of millennials like me,
economics is such an overwhelming reason that we just sit there and
wait until the rubber just has to meet the road, and then we can't get
what want (which is a V8 with the gas to keep it happy), so we get the
I4 crap poop and are horribly unhappy with it but we're stuck with
it.
Now there are some of us like the millennials related to
Chevron/ExxonMobil/Conoco-Phillips/etc. or
Ford/Chrysler/GM/Toyota/Honda/Kia/etc. bigwigs on either a national,
continental, or even global level, they probably still find cars as
interesting as your daughter did with the Austin. For the rest of us
lowborn millennials, what happens in the preceding paragraph is more
like it.
(And I think cars should be redesigned to use Wankel engines. It
like the aesthetic properties of such an engine, and the difference
between it and a boxer, inline, or V engine that have a three way
stranglehold on the market. Profits go into the ashcan, both because I
want a Wankel engine, and because I think if profits didn't exist, life
would be oh so much better to boot! Only a true motorhead or history
buff would know what that is. A bigger knowledge test, the first
pretest was I4.)
Why did the Chinese force us and hundreds of generations of
ancestors going back to the original philosopher to live in interesting
times? It's been happening to every generation during and since, and
that person deserves ling chi, death by slow slicing,
technically death by up to 10,000 cuts, although usually you were
officially known to be dead by 1,000. The catch was some executioners
during some dynasties carried out the sentence in such a way that
sometimes you could stretch it out to the full 10,000.
Life is interesting, but I would settle for the interesting you have
had.
Better go before I spend all my life responding to one article.
Kind wishes sincerely most,
Alex
Hi Alex,
Thanks for another thoughtful and engrossing musing.
Don't get me going on ethanol blend fuel. Here in Canada, it's mandated
by the federal government, never mind that Canada is a net exporter of
petroleum and that most of the ethanol that gets blended here is
shipped in from the US - and almost certainly has a greater carbon
footprint than real gasoline would have.
An investigative report by Road & Track
magazine's longtime engineering editor Dennis Simanaitis noted that
some experts he consulted admitted that the US has barely enough
corn-growing capacity to support near-term renewable fuel source (RFS)
goals, let alone those set for 2015 and beyond, and makes the
commonsense observation that increasing corn production has
consequences in terms of of water use, pesticide runoff, and inherent
risks of a monoculture. Simanaitis also says researchers who've studied
greenhouse-gas emissions and the total environmental impact of biofuel
sources conclude that US corn, Brazilian sugar cane, and Malaysian palm
oil as biofuel sources all are shown to be a greater environmental
detriment than gasoline, although ethanol produced from basic
cellulosic feedstocks (such as wood chips, grass, or household garbage)
holds more promise.
Slightly more encouraging, Simanaitis notes that at
least the Energy Independence and Security Act has "offramps" built
into it, with annual assessments to be made and RFS goals to be
modified if necessary, suggesting that's a very good thing because
nobody really understands the implications of producing 36 billion
gallons of ethanol annually. Time for politicians in power, in Canada
as well as the US, to admit that grain-based biofuels are a mistake and
modify (preferably terminate) subsidy policies accordingly.
Regarding the old Austin I gave my daughter when she
was 13, it was a '61 model that I originally bought in I think 1976 for
the princely sum of $300 and put a ton of miles on between then and
1989, when I stopped using it. It was the first car she ever rode in -
home from the hospital as a newborn. I did have a bunch of other cars
in the meantime, all old and inexpensive. She sold the Austin to an old
car buff in 2005 for $500 I think - not bad reverse depreciation!.
Today she's still hotrodding on a budget, with a 1968 Imperial Le Baron
convertible and an ex-RCMP Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor.
When I got my driver's license in 1967, gas was
selling here for about 43¢ Canadian per Imperial gallon, and I was
making 65¢ an hour sanding cars in my cousin's body shop. In that
general context, I'm not sure that gas today at about $5 Canadian per
gallon is proportionally more expensive, although I agree that a lot of
other car related costs are.
Wankels: A buddy of mine was a Wankel enthusiast back
in the day. At one point he had a Mazda RX-2 and a big
Suzuki (I think) motorcycle also with a Wankel engine. I never drove
the bike, but the RX-2 was downright eerie the way it would rev to the
redline with little noise and no vibration until the audible "shift
idiot" warning went off. Unfortunately, Wankels, while elegant in many
ways, are not very fuel efficient, and rotor tip seal issues were never
entirely solved. The last time I saw my old friend a couple of years
ago he was driving a nicely restored late-'60s Chevelle 2-door hardtop
with a honking big V8 and symphonic sounding dual exhausts.
Charles
<center>***</center>
Yep, before I discovered the magnifying glass trick, my whole iPad
writing experience was really frustrating. Once I discovered it, I
could then copy and paste much easier, so much that the onscreen
keyboard is passable and my iPad is much more portable as a result. Of
course, my iPad had to get a screen scratch as a result, but then again
a Windows 7 netbook I had got Dr. Pepper spewed into it liberally,
which was far worse, so I guess I should look on the bright side, which
I have an infamously hard time doing.
I must say, the iPad is amazing, even if it tries to replace
something that doesn't need replacing - the Mac 128K and it's Snow
Leopard Intel Mac descendants.
Sent from my iPad
Alex
Hi Alex,
I've found that Infovole's
text processor (with many keyboard enhancements and selection
shortcuts) - and lately
Nebulous Notes as well (best Dropbox sync yet) - have proved the
charm for me, and I'm using the iPad a lot for composition. I find the
onscreen keyboard a lot easier to live with than I had anticipated, but
Textkraft's enhancements make it better yet.
My iPad 2 came
pre-equipped with a screen scratch that I didn't notice until several
days after the purchase, so I opted to live with it. However,
installing a fuse
Antibacterial Screen Guard, which also protects against
fingerprints, static, and grubby residues and covers the entire
touchscreen surface, also covers the scratch with a thick film of clear
plastic that should protect against further scratches. Once the Screen
Guard is successfully installed, it's not obviously visible, and you
pretty much forget it's there unless you're thinking about it, and a
happy bonus is that it doesn't seem to attract finger smearing as
efficiently as the iPad's own glass screen.
Charles
iPad Browsers and Writing Tools
From Eric:
Mr. Moore,
Just read your column re
browsers on Low End Mac. Since Safari updated to version 5, I've
found it to be a memory hog on my 2008 MacBook Pro and mostly use
Chrome.
In the iOS world, I use Safari (tabs made it much more useable) but
spend most of my time in
Grazing, which you didn't mention so thought I'd pass along. It's
fast and stable and very customizable (i.e., I can send links to
Instapaper, Reader, and
Pinboard with one click). Don't work for them, just a happy
customer, as the saying goes - I use Grazing on the iPad and iPhone.
Oh, and it has adblocker built in
And as an aside, as I know you like text editors, have you tried
Nebulous Notes on your iPad? What I like is the extra row of keys up
top that can be set with macros. There's a free version as well. My
other current favorites are
Phraseology and
Daedalus Touch.
Guess that's enough Mac rumblings for the day :)
cheers,
eric
Hi Eric,
Thanks for the comments. I really can't perceive any
compelling reason to use Safari other than its tight integration with
the Mac OS (or now just OS X), and that's a mixed blessing.
There is Reader, which is useful at times, and Safari starts up fast,
but neither is a must-have feature, and I just like Opera, Chrome, and Firefox better.
On the iOS front, I hadn't heard of Grazing. Looks
like it has some interesting features, but I'm skeptical that any Web
browser that isn't freeware will make much of an impact in the market.
Too many good ones available for free.
Thanks for the tip about Nebulous Notes. I've
downloaded it and have been trying it out, and it's a great little app.
It doesn't match Textkraft for text handling features, but has a great
interface, and I think it's Dropbox
implementation is the best I've encountered yet.
Charles
Go to Charles Moore's Mailbag index.
