Flight Control – Game Review

Flight Control is a simple game for iPhones/iPod Touches that is addictive and a great time killer for the subway ride, the doctor’s office, or wherever you want to distract yourself for a few minutes. Using your finger, simply trace the path that leads the appropriate planes to the correct runways. Easy, right? Yup it’s all a breeze until the airspace starts to crowd with aircraft, and the big planes with their speedy engines start to fly in from all directions. One of the best features of this game is that it gives you the option to either use the game sounds or keep playing your own music in the background — too many games prefer to replace that Lady Gaga song that I had been enjoying … darn you Bejeweled 2! Anyway, as I said, this is a nice little game that you will enjoy anywhere you bring your iPod (except you might want to avoid playing it on your next flight… I’m just sayin’).

Pocket God – App Review

Imagine you are a powerful Polynesian deity, able to wield your infinite might over a tiny island nation of palm-frond-wearing natives. You control the sun and the moon; you manipulate the clouds and storms; they worship you and fear the wrath of your mighty lightning. Omnipotence sure feels good, don’t it? Well, with Pocket God, a really cute pseudo-game from the iTunes app store, you get a taste of what that’s like.

It’s a very simple concept: there’s an island on the touch screen, complete with coconuts and idols, and a shark waiting in the water for the little cartoon natives. If you tap on the coconut, it drops out of the tree. With your finger you can lift the natives high into the air, or drop them into the sea (if you dangle them over the shark, it might just jump out of the water for a snack). You can even manipulate gravity by turning your iPod upside-down. If you’re feeling vengeful, you might toss a few islanders into the nearby volcano — try three of them. (Don’t worry, you can easily create more — you’re God,)

It doesn’t take long to do all the things that you can do, but the animations are extremely cute. The best part is that the updates are frequent, and each update brings new features and new activities that you can do. The latest update added the feature where tapping on the moon brings a vampire bat to your island to bite one of your little friends — you can guess what that’s going to lead to. Just wait until the sun rises in the morning — ouch!

This is one of those fun little apps that are great to show your friends, plus you may become addicted to trying out all the activities. I hope they keep adding on the updates. Til then I think I’ll chuck a few more thunderbolts their way. Hey, not actual islanders were harmed in the making of this game. We’re cool.

My Favourite Free iPod/iPhone apps

When you get to the point of having many screens of iPod/iPhone apps (I’ve got eight pages going right now), you really know the important ones because they’re the ones on your homepage. They’re the ones that you use on a regular basis, maybe even day-to-day. Surprisingly for me, most of these are actually free on the App store. They’re not all new or recent, but they are definitely my go-to apps. Here are a few of my favorites:

Writing Pad a.k.a. ShapeWriter

Surprisingly I think my favorite free app is one that does something that the iPod already does out of the box — type notes and e-mails. The twist with ShapeWriter is that you move your finger around the keypad to spell out your word. For me this is much better and more efficient than the tapping of the virtual keypad on the native iPod mail or note app. It’s actually even kind of fun. Sometimes there is a possibility of multiple words so ShapeWriter gives you a few choices to select from. When you’re done typing, or rather sliding, words you can either save the note or you can export it as an e-mail to the Mail application (which is a weird kind of loophole in the “No cut and paste” problem with iPhone/iPods, anyway). I find this very handy and I use it for all my typing on the iPod where possible.

Weather Eye

This one is just a replacement for your standard Weather app that comes with the iPod. It comes from the Canadian Weather Network and I think it looks better and has more information than the standard Weather app. I don’t know if it covers all of the US cities or other cities around the world, but does a good job with Canada. It’s free, so you can compare it for yourself.

Check Please

People make fun of tip calculator programs as if they were the losers of the App store. While I wouldn’t pay serious money for them, since this one is free I find it actually very useful. Sure, you could just use your Calculator app to figure out the amount of tip and how much each person at your table owes, but this one does it all for you in a nice-looking, easy-to-use package. I’ve tried a couple of other free tip calculators, but I think this one is the best. There’s a banner ad loaded (actually a few of these free apps have banner ads) but you can still use it if you don’t have an Internet connection, and I don’t think it too distracting.

Flixster Movies

I’ve tried a number of different movie apps (the kind that give you listings and showtimes), even some that I’ve paid for, and I’ll probably do a comparison post of all of them at some point. The one on my homepage comes from Flixster (the movie-rating social networking site), and you have to actually be connected to the Internet to look at your information (which is a negative) but otherwise I find this one to be the best of them all. Not only is the information very accurate, you can set your favorite theaters, you have Rotten Tomatoes of Flixster ratings, and you can see recent or upcoming DVD releases as well. I think it’s the best designed movie app by far, what it really needs for its next update is an off-line mode for us iPod users.

NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire is already one of the more popular RSS reader applications on the Mac, and it was one of the first to come out on the iPod as well. You need to set up an online account, where you register all your RSS feeds, but after that it does a very good job of updating and downloading all the latest headlines and even caches parts or all of the articles for off-line reading. It’s easy to use and I find it great for taking my RSS reading onto the subway.

Instapaper

It may not look like much, but this app is very useful if you browse the web and find a lot of things that you want to read but just don’t have time. Coupled with a web bookmarklet for your browser, you just click on the Read Later link in your toolbar and Instapaper saves the page for off-line reading later. You don’t get any of the graphics or other bells and whistles, so if it’s a lot of fancy pages that you tend to go to, this might not work for you. But if it’s just posts and other kinds of text information, then this is great for saving articles. Just sync-and-go to take those pages with you anywhere. It’s the perfect companion to NetNewsWire.

MacSpeech Dictate – Software Review

Have any of you noticed the huge gap in the dates of my blog posts? Before my previous post, I had not posted anything since last May. So why am I suddenly posting two articles in a row? Well, the answer is simple: I don’t have to type them anymore. Thanks to the magic of MacSpeech Dictate, all I have to do is say my posts and they appear. (While it’s not that easy, it might as well be.)

It all started with the review on GeekBrief.tv. I didn’t really think that I needed dictation software. I wasn’t physically challenged, nor was I a two-finger typist. However, when I saw the really good review, I began to think about how I might actually use dictation software to write more. I realized that I was getting tired of typing and that made me post less on my blogs.

Like many others, I have not had much success with the speech recognition that came with the Mac OS. Repeating something five times each word did not seem to help improve the efficiency. However, I took a chance on MacSpeech Dictate because it seems to be much more accurate. I read about how MacSpeech licensed the Dragon Naturally Speaking engine that was very popular in the Windows environment and brought it over to the Mac OS. Now I’m a believer.

For those of you who are interested, I’ll include an unedited transcript produced solely by MacSpeech Dictate, so you can compare the accuracy for yourself.

One of the other great things about MacSpeech Dictate is that it works with existing programs that you run. I use Textmate to type my blog posts and Thunderbird for my e-mail. I have used MacSpeech Dictate to type, or rather dictate, in both of those programs so far. (Did I mention that I’ve only had this program for one day?)

Some have complained about the lack of spelling feature. In the latest update they have added that feature as well. In only one day, I’ve definitely not exercised all the features of the application. There are many reviews out there with more detail. However, I want to get out my opinion and my feedback about how wonderful this program is and how much it’s already changed my computing experience.

It’s not the cheapest thing on the market, but it works. Also, it comes with (i.e. you have to buy) a headset mic in order for it to work. It doesn’t seem to work with the built-in mic on my iMac (not that I’ve tried).

If you are at all into writing and don’t like the labor of typing, I definitely encourage you to look into MacSpeech Dictate. It has made things so much better for me and I’m sure it will help you as well.

My Five Favorite iPod/iPhone Games

First of all, I know there are lots of simulation and action games for the iPhone. However, this review will not cover those games. I’m generally more a fan of the puzzle-type or quiz type games. I liked to think outside-the-box and exercise my brain rather than my coordination. So if you’re into that type of thing too, here are a few suggestions but you should check out from the App store.

Frenzic

Frenzic is kind of an action puzzle game. The objective is to make pies of six wedge pieces. The pieces come out of the middle and you have to decide which pie to put them in. It’s better if you can create pies of a single color but as the pieces come at you fast and quick, sometimes you just have to put them wherever you can. If you do well, you get power ups such as slowing down the clock, double your score, or nuke all the pies. This is a well-designed fast-paced game that I got really addicted to. I was playing this in the bathroom! (TMI, sorry!)

Parking Lot

Parking Lot is a port of a real-world toy game similar to the classic sliding tile game where you have to move pieces around to form a picture, but the objective here is to slide cars out of the way so that you can move the yellow Volkswagen out the exit. The levels go from easy to very difficult, where you might have to move many cars around several times before you can get the yellow car out. I think this is a great one for thinking outside-the-box.

The Plateau

This is a really polished version of the game that I had already played on the Macintosh before. You start with a bunch of balls connected by lasers/strings that overlap. You move the balls around until the strings no longer overlap any others. That’s how you clear the screen. It sounds very easy, but there’s a lot of strings and you need to move them in ways that you may not consider at first. This is another one of those brain-stretching ones.

Movie Challenge

I’ve tried a few quiz games, but this is the best one so far. The questions are all about movies, which I like. You need to make your way across the screen by answering questions correctly. You pick from categories such as comedy, sci-fi, actors, directors, etc. and there are different types of questions such as true or false, scrambled words, what’s the date?, trivia, quotes, etc. There are even some power ups to help you get the answers. One of the best things is that the questions are very up-to-date (I’m expecting some Slumdog Millionaire questions in the next update!). There are not as many of the graphical gimmicks as some of the other quiz games (no cartoon hosts or contestants) but I think this one has better questions and is more fun for a true movie buff.

Trism

Trism is a matching block game similar to Bejeweled or Tetris. You slide triangles across the board to match up rows of three of the same color. When you do they go away and make room for more to slide in. One of the differences is that with the iPod’s accelerometer you can control the direction in which the pieces slide. I know this is supposed to be a big feature, but I don’t see how it makes a very big difference. Nevertheless, this is a new variation on an essentially fun style of game. As you progress, there are both power-up pieces, as well as obstacle pieces. Locked pieces cannot be slid, and bomb pieces must be removed within a certain number of rounds. So if you’re tired of Bejeweled, or Tetris, you might give Trism a try.

That’s just a small selection from the vast number of games that are showing up for the iPhone/iPod in the App store every day. Many of them are free, or have light versions, but even the ones that cost money don’t cost much. They are a great way to pass the time on the subway or in a doctor’s office. Trust me.

Google gets more Mac-friendly

Have you been frustrated at getting so many Windows-oriented results when trawling for tech help on Google? Well, Google is doing a little bit more to help us Apple-ites out. Not only have they consolidated all their Mac software products on one page (including Google Desktop, Google Earth, Sketchup and Gmail Notifier), at the top they’ve added a new Search button that targets Mac sites. Vive la revolution!
(Check out the page here.)

Alvin Meets Tivo

This blog is normally about switching to Mac, but I needed a place to talk about my experience switching to Tivo, so I figure this is as good a place as I can find (there will be Mac stuff mentioned as well). If you’re reading this thinking, “Switching to Tivo? Does your Tivo have a time-travel feature to take me back to when that was actually something worth reading about?” Well, cut me some slack (you must be living in the U.S., the Land of Media Plenty). In Canada, we’ve only had Tivo officially available for a couple of months. (Many have been using Tivos purchased independently for years.) Now we have official Tivo service in Canada along with the Tivo Series 2 boxes on sale. I hadn’t found much feedback on the web from Canadians who had actually purchased one of these boxes and were using it with one of the local TV services (I use Rogers Cable) so I wanted to put my experiences out there.

As most of you probably know, Tivo is a popular brand of digital video recorder, used for pausing and recording TV programs. Tivo is known for its user-friendly interface and super-handy recording features. I’ve been using the Rogers Personal Video Recorder (made by Scientific Atlanta) since they first started offering it more than 5 years ago. At best, the Rogers box does an acceptable job, but I’ve always longed for the fabled ease-of-use that a Tivo brings. Before I continue, I need to make the obvious caveat that the Series 2 box which is now selling in Canada does not support high definition recordings. From what I’ve read, there are incompatibilities between the Tivo Series 3 box and the delivery devices for HD programming here in Canada. Boo-hoo for all you HD fans out there.

First Impressions

There are very clear setup instructions (in the form of a poster with connection diagrams) and two bags of cables clearly labelled A and B. I’m pretty experienced with home audio/video equipment, but the instructions made it very simple (even including connecting the ethernet cable to allow my Tivo to access to my home computer network). In a snap I was ready to go and there was an on-screen guide to take me the rest of the way. (Oh, I forgot to mention, that before I got going with the on-screen setup, I followed the instructions to activate my Tivo service — which you need to pay for — at tivo.com/canada first. That part was a little odd. Be sure to click the link for Canadian subscribers because a pop-up window shows you how to fill out the form if you have a non-U.S. address.)

So once I got up and running it was very nice to use. The interface was as slick as promised. Lots of soft little chimes and fun graphics. This was a far cry from my Rogers experience with its clunky and primitive interface. The show listings were very easy to navigate and since Tivo uses a semi-transparent overlay on top of the TV image, I could see a lot more information at once. Scrolling was quick and smooth (Rogers is slow and very stilted. Often if you hold down the arrow button you end up going past where you want to get to and then you have to navigate back — whaddapain!) The one oddity I have found with the Tivo listings so far is that it’s not very easy to switch from one day to another. It’s a few clicks down some not-quite-logical submenus to change the date on the listings. There’s got to be a quicker way.

Recording stuff

The one big drawback that I was anticipating from what I’d read was that Tivo was not going to be able to decode the digital cable signal directly. I have standard definition digital cable with Rogers, which means that I have a box which changes digital channels for me. When I used to use a VCR, I had to keep it on channel 3 and make sure that when I set a timer to record a show, the VCR would record channel 3 and the digital cable box would change itself to whatever channel the actual show was on. The same kind of thing happens with Tivo. The machine comes with a set of little sticks that you put around the digital cable box and these IR blasters send infrared signals to the digital box as if it were your remote control, changing the channel for you when it’s time to record a show. This was not a problem that I had with the Rogers box. The digital cable tuner was integrated with the recorder, so I could record any channel at any time and the machine would change the channel itself.

Thankfully, Tivo is able to take care of the channel changing for the analog (i.e. non-digital) channels which appear in the lower numbers (up to 72) but the quality is not digital, so the picture is definitely inferior. Because the Tivo Series 2 is a dual-tuner machine, it can record two shows at the same time. However, you can only record one digital signal because your digital cable box can only be showing one channel at a time. Also, if you’re watching TV on a high-numbered channel, Tivo warns you that it needs to change the channel for a recording (if that recording is on a digital channel). All that being said, Tivo does a really good job of making things as painless as possible. You don’t have to worry about which channels are digital and which ones aren’t. You can just let Tivo do its thing for the most part.

Tivo meets Mac

One of the most exciting aspects of the Tivo experience for me was going to be TivoToGo. That’s the feature that allows you to transfer your recorded shows to your computer and from there to your portable media (i.e. DVDs) or devices (i.e. iPods). The catch, however, was that it wasn’t going to be as simple as just copying a file off of the Tivo. Tivo offers some free software, but for the Mac, the TivoDesktop software only allows your Tivo to show photos from your computer on the TV and play your music (from iTunes). While that in itself is a pretty cool set of features, it’s still missing that major video piece. The Tivo downloading feature is (for some reason) packaged within another company’s CD/DVD burning software called Roxio Toast, which costs about $100 (or their smaller program Popcorn, which is about $50). Tivo offers a more complete TivoDesktop application for Windows users (which I tried to run within Parallels on my Mac, but couldn’t quite get it to work). Along comes the open-source community to the rescue: a free program called Galleon (after a few trials at getting the settings right) allows me to download the shows off of my Tivo and allows my Tivo to see the videos on my iMac (make sure you convert video files to mpeg2 if you want to transfer them back to the Tivo). Another little program called Tivo File Decoder allows me to strip away the stuff around the Tivo video files (.tivo) so that other video conversion programs can convert them to a normal format for me to use. Yay! I am now able to truly take Tivo To Go.

I’m really enjoying the Tivo (I’ve only had it for 4 days), and I don’t mind the sacrifice in video quality or the whole IR blaster inconvenience (though I’d still love it if they could integrate digital cable decoding in the Tivo box). I especially love the great interface and the back and forth communication between my computer and the Tivo. Also, compared to my Rogers PVR, it is the difference between something you have to use to something you actually enjoy using. If you’re thinking of getting into the world of Tivo, you’re in for some fun.

Am I Happy I Upgraded to Leopard?

Finally, two whole months after it came out (and about a month after most people finished blogging about it) I took the plunge and upgraded to Mac OSX Leopard. With issue of incompatible software floating around, I was a bit hesitant (especially since Tiger was doing just fine). However, I hate being left behind (reminds me of when I was the only one left at the dinner table because I had to finish my soup and didn’t really want to). When I finally put the installation DVD into my precious iMac, I was kind of nervous about messing with a working OS (a result of a Windows upbringing, no doubt), which was only made worse by the fact that my DVD was corrupt (kudos to Apple for adding that disc validation step, though). We had to bring it back to the Apple Store for an exchange. Now I’ve been Leopardized and I am pretty happy about it. After about 3 weeks with it, there are still many of the upgraded features that I haven’t done much with. I don’t use iChat, Safari, Boot Camp, or Mail (though the new email templates are really tempting) so I can’t really comment on improvements there. I tried the new speedier Safari, but I didn’t feel the difference. I guess there’s just too many factors that impact web browsing speeds. Let me walk through my impressions of some of the other Leopard enhancements.

Dock/Desktop

The change to a 3D Dock is no big a deal. It looks slicker to have the icons appear to sit on a shiny glass surface, but I don’t understand all the hubbub about it. There’s a little spotlight now instead of the triangle pointing to open applications — again, subtle touches, but no big. Stacks is a relatively big change, though. Now my folders that are on the Dock show little pictures of the files in them like a stack of images. I don’t really like that because it’s confusing (especially the image reflects whatever’s the first file on the list, so the icon will change). Many people are annoyed by the way clicking the folder displays icons in a fan formation or a grid, but what bothers me is the fact that when I click the folder icon, I still have to click a second arrow icon to open the folder in Finder. I guess I just like working with Finder (again, Windows upbringing) and want to get right to the folder I want.

One of the general improvements regarding icons, though, is that the graphical resolution is higher. One of my old pet peeves was seeing the icon for Preview in the dock because it’s a picture of a little boy and for some reason, because of the way the pixels appeared, his eyes always looked creepy — kind of glowy like in Village of the Damned. Now that I can clearly see his eyes and his cute rosy cheeks, all is well.

Finder

The biggest improvement in Finder seems to be Cover Flow. Now I can see and browse all my files as graphical previews (much like album art in iTunes). Actually, I’m not sold on this one. When I see a window with Cover Flow, I feel like iTunes is open and I always do a double-take (”When did I open iTunes?” I ask myself, “And where is my Finder window?”). I’m sure I’ll get used to it eventually. Nevertheless, I still haven’t found it super-useful. When I am browsing files, I’m going to have to interact with them so I would rather use big icons (since most document icons now also display miniature previews) than Cover Flow. Quick Look is very slick, and probably a handier feature than Cover Flow. By clicking on the space bar, a window flies out showing a full size preview of the file (including graphics, documents, and even plays video). The best part about all these browsing conveniences is that they don’t slow down my system. Cover Flow seems even smoother in Finder than it does in iTunes.

Spaces

I think Spaces is a great feature. It allows you to basically have separate virtual desktops for your applications and can switch between them easily. It’s very easy to use and I love that when you click the application icon in the Dock, you are automatically switched to the virtual desktop that the application is in. However, I can’t say that I’ve gotten into the groove of using Spaces. I don’t exactly run a ton of applications at the same time, so there’s not that much clutter on my desktop. Nevertheless, I’m glad that it’s there for when I need it.

Front Row

I’m told that Leopard’s Front Row is more like the AppleTV interface (which I can’t confirm, since I don’t have one, but from what I’ve seen in the Apple store, that seems accurate). It’s less flashy, using more lists and less animation of graphics whirling around (if you use or remember Front Row in Tiger, you probably know what I mean). For me, the best thing about the new Front Row is that it doesn’t have to process all my movie files before bringing up a list of what it can play for me. In the old Front Row, it took so long that I moved most of my movie files to a separate folder and used an alias to connect the two because Front Row would work for hours just to show me what was in my Movies folder. Now I put them all back because it takes almost no time for me to see all the folders and find whatever I want to watch.

Other Features

Unfortunately I have not been able to use Leopard’s fancy backup solution, Time Machine (which I was really looking forward to doing), because my external hard drive is already half-used by other files. Time Machine demanded the entire drive, but it’s not worthwhile for me to reformat or repartition the drive to allow Time Machine to go at it, so I’ll have to find some other less-pretty backup solution. Also, I was kind of keen to try Back To My Mac (to access my computer remotely) but I don’t have a .mac account, so that’s moot.

As for application compatibilities, I have upgraded a few things to be compatible with Leopard (including system maintenance application Onyx), but I haven’t had any problems with my applications so far (including the Adobe CS3 collection — I don’t have any of the Adobe video apps, though, which I have read about compatibility issues with). All in all, I am really happy that I upgraded, but none of the features have dramatically changed my computer life. Experts keep saying that a lot of the upgrades are invisible and that when people start developing software to take advantage of the under-the-hood improvements, things will really start to feel different. If you’re on the fence about Leopard, you could probably wait until something comes along that forces you to upgrade. However, unlike some of the horrific Windows Vista stories that are out there, the change is also relatively painless if you want to get on board now.

Virtualization: The Return of Windows

Sorry that it’s been so long since I last posted. Given the current buzz in the Mac community, you’d expect that I’d be posting about the new Leopard operating system. Unfortunately, I haven’t made up my mind to drop coin on an OS upgrade. All the reviews I’ve seen are pretty positive, but it’s still going to take some bigger reason for me to change my Tiger’s stripes to Leopard spots. Since I’m not topical enough to post about Leopard, you’d guess that I’d be posting about the iPod Touch, eh? (No. not that, either.) It has now been over a year since I swore off all things Microsoft, so it’s probably enough distance for me to finally try out virtualization software for the Mac. I decided to take a little adventure and tried both Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion — the two most popular virtualization applications for Mac OS X.

If you don’t know what “virtualization” software is, it allows users to run a “guest” operating system such as Windows from within their Mac OS. Simply put, it’s running Windows in a Mac window. If you think about it, it’s a great idea because it gives switchers like us the best of both worlds. Whatever software it pained me to leave behind from the Windows world can now be run on my cool little iMac. Frankly, there wasn’t that much that I felt sad to leave behind (another reason why this virtualization adventure is so late in coming). Nevertheless, you’ve got the software, why not dust it off and put it to use?

You may wonder what happens when you start this guest operating system (aka virtual machine). Well, the installation part is a breeze (which is something more Mac-like than Windows-like, if you ask me). Both Parallels and Fusion have an easy installation mode. You just enter your Windows key number and the application takes care of the rest (it’s actually even easier than installing Windows on a PC). The virtualization application takes care of setting up all your hardware and network connections, as well as sharing your Mac folders with the virtual Windows OS. That means that when you’re in virtual Windows, you can still get access to all your Mac documents as if they were on a networked drive or something (of course, there may still be compatibility issues, depending on the program you try to open them with in Windows).

Once the initial OS installation was done, installing additional applications within the virtual Windows was just like what it was like on a PC. Once I installed MS Office, it ran great (at least on Parallels it did). This brings me to my very short head to head comparison of the two applications. For me (and I stress that last word because I’ve read reviews that differ completely from my experience) there was no contest because Parallels worked smoothly and Fusion was beyond-slow. I gave up installing any software on Fusion because it took me minutes just to open a single folder. I don’t know what went wrong and I probably could have figured it out if I’d invested more time with it, but Parallels had no such problem so why bother? I immediately uninstalled Fusion.

However, there’s not much more to say about how Parallels works other than that it works pretty much just as you might imagine: Windows living within a Mac window. The additional aspect that is really cool is a mode called Coherence (in Parallels, “Unity” in Fusion) that gets rid of the Windows background and other icons and narrows down the frame just around the application window: so except for all the Windows-style frame, bars and buttons, a Windows application in Coherence mode looks like it’s a Mac application (see my little screen grab showing MS Word and Minesweeper as windows next to my iTunes window) — pretty cool, eh?

I also found that the Windows stuff looked even better than I remember (mainly because my iMac has a much nicer monitor than my PC did). Unfortunately, I am going to have to reinstall any fonts that I want to use in Parallels (even though they are cross-system TrueType fonts) — unless I discover a way for Parallels to link to the Mac font folder without needing duplication of the fonts within Windows. Also, my understanding is that the virtual machine is vulnerable to viruses and other malware since it is the Windows system and connected to the Internet (Sigh! Good ol’ virus-ridden Windows … I have absolutely not missed that aspect.)

So, if you’re pining away for some of the software from your Windows days, consider trying Parallels (or Fusion) to keep those applications alive on your Mac. That way you can have your cake and eat it too.

Web Sites for Switchers

Switchers — I know this topic sounds kinkier than it should, but if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably a Mac switcher. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. When your PC friends start talking about Vista or their latest Microsoft applications, maybe you can play a little sabotage by bringing up the topic of which anti-virus software they are using now (obviously to lead to the end point where you get to say how you don’t need any anti-virus software). However, regardless of how much we may love our Macs (again, nothing worthy of naughtiness or shame), we are in the minority. You can probably spit in any direction and hit a PC user, but don’t look for a Mac user in your line-of-fire. So we probably overcompensate whenever we represent ourselves in a PC crowd by stating emphatically how great our Macs are. Unfortunately, we may preserve our pride, but sometimes it ends up feeling a little lonely. There’s something to be said for the commiseration of being afraid of the same new trojan viruses or being able to share each other’s blue-screen-of-death stories or tips on how to best re-install one’s Windows system again. Very recently, another switcher asked me if I had any recommendations for where to get information about Macs. Of course there are plenty of Mac news sites (lately plagued by endless news and non-news about the iPhone) however, I found a few web sites with potentially useful information for us switchers.

The first site is a work-in-progress from the guy who also brings us new Mac tips every day: The Ultimate Guide for switching from a PC to a Mac only has one chapter so far, but it looks like it will be great source of basic and essential info for anyone switching to Mac from PC.

Another even more comprehensive switcher web site is My First Mac. The name sounds rudimentary and pre-school, but don’t let that put you off. This site has tons of useful information for switchers and Mac lovers alike. Their tag line is: “Help Buying and Getting Started With Your New Mac”, but this site has so much more. Everything from basics to tweaks, tips to testimonials, even an analysis of the newest Mac news in very everyday language makes this a comfortable site for the not-so-technical. It’s also full of pictures and has an eye-catching style that makes it a fun site to check out. (If you know how, you can even subscribe to its RSS feed).

Plus, don’t forget about the page I mentioned before on lifehacker.com

I know there are probably tons of other sites like these (and I’ll add more when I find them). It’s a great little community of shared, quiet pride for us switchers. Let’s all get informed about our beloved Macs so we can really show those PC users a thing or two.