Just got my new 24″ iMac. It arrived here in the office a short time ago and I am soooo impressed right now. Apple really know how to do style, even just the packaging of the whole thing.

From using pc’s all my life I’ve never really understood that it truly is possible to take this machine out of the box, plug it in and start doing whatever it is that I want to do.

Two words…Vista who?

I ordered my new iMac yesterday. They said it’ll be 3 days before it’s shipped because I wanted the gpu boosted to the 256mb model instead of the 128mb one. After that it should be on it’s way. I’d say I’ll have it by next wednesday at the latest.

I just can’t wait. I’ve always hated waiting for stuff that I’ve ordered online. I want my new toy now dammit

The time has come to make the change.

Isn’t it pretty?
I’ve been approved for a small loan to buy this greatly needed and long desired bit o’ kit.

Should be putting in my order later this week. Ooh I can’t wait.

I stumbled across Google’s calculator, unit and currency conversion features tonight by pure accident.
I never knew they existed, some of you might not be aware either so I thought I’d share my little discovery.

Google’s search can do simple math, unit and currency conversions. No frills, just quick answers. I like it.

Have a look here for more information on these features.

I’ve had my gripes with Vista before. Still I came to the conclusion at that point that I could live with Vista’s shortcomings because the interface is pretty. I know that’s kind of juvenile but still. Now I’m changing my mind. I’m slow close to switching back to XP now. Just copying files is ridiculous.

Vista takes an age to do even some of the smallest file copy operations.

I thought it was just my own machine at first, it has a few years under it’s belt but I know for certain copying files was faster on my home pc under XP than it is now with Vista. I mentioned it to a friend of mine during the week who has Vista running on a brand spanking new laptop with a really hot spec. He still noticed the same problem. Also after a little digging I’ve found loads of people have the same problem but there’s no sign of an explanation let alone a solution.

If anyone knows anything about this I’d love to hear from you, because this has me stumped. And very annoyed.

Update:
Many people have reported good results from disabling Remote Differential Compression. To do this go to Control Panel / Add Remove Programs / Turn off Windows features -> Untick Remote Differential Compression.
Thanks to Tarique Naseem for the tip.

Although Windows Vista is recommended by various PC users, some of them are not happy with the file copying speed offered by the software. Undoubtedly, Microsoft computers software has been regarded as the outstanding in every field and its web server software has always been stable on Windows based computers. However, it can not be guaranteed as to which complex module of the commerce software such as tax software can go well with the specialized needs of some users because of the huge number of variables involved as is the case with almost every piece of finance software. With the incredible potential of the Internet, it is exceedingly easy to download software which has made it a must to have an updated copy of norton antivirus to remain up and running all the time and sufficient software patents to be in place.

I wrote about a problem with accessing certain areas of the Vodafone.ie website recently.

Well the problem is fixed now only 3 weeks (smell the sarcasm) from when I initially noticed the issue. I’ve been in contact with their customer services over the last two weeks and finally a girl I spoke to yesterday seemed to be able to light a fire under somebody to get this sorted. Thank you kind customer care agent whose name I can’t recall.

I was impressed with the courtesy and professionalism of all Vodafone Ireland’s customer care staff that I dealt with however I do think that their background processes need to be reviewed, where online tech issues are concerned at least. Three weeks to escalate the problem to the right people just doesn’t cut it.

I don’t care what they call the new Dreamweaver, but please can we have it soon.

It’s very hard to find any solid information on the new version of Dreamweaver, but it simply must get here soon. The way we approach development for the web has changed too much since DW8 was launched. So what will it have. There are obvious improvements and updates to be made to many areas of the application but here are some that stand out for me:

• I pray that the built in FTP doesn’t take forever to complete even the simplest ftp operation.
• Hopefully the design view won’t look messed up, even though your site looks fine in the majority of mainstream browsers. Maybe if they used Gecko instead of their proprietary rendering engine.
• AJAX support is a given. But the dreamweaver team are developing their own AJAX framework called Spry. What about support for Prototype and Script.aculo.us etc? Why reinvent the wheel? I’m not sure how I feel about the Spry Framework yet, you can watch a short video of Jorge Taylor, engineering manager for the Spry framework, explaining the reasons for developing Spry here.
• I’ve also heard rumours of template support for the likes of Wordpress and Typepad, that would be cool.
• It would be nice if DW9 could flag known cross browser css issues and offer to fix them.

• Better PHP application development support would be great. I know there are better development tools out there but Dreamweaver’s wysiwyg features are still better than those alternatives and so I find that I constantly need to return to using Dreamweaver.

  What if DW9 adopted the Zend Framework for developing web apps? It could include nice tools for creating new actions, controllers, views and taking advantage of all the other great things the Zend Framework supports. Kind of like Rails for PHP? Personally I hate ROR but would love to see something like it for PHP.

So they are just some of the things that affect me in my day to day work that I would like to see improved. For now I live in hope. In the meantime I’ll be trawling anxiously for any news of the new DW release. Come on Adobe, we need this!

Screenshots 21/02:

I’ve found some dodgy enough looking screenshots of what is meant to be an early alpha of Dreamweaver 9. Have a look at them here and see what you make of them. They don’t really give anything away.

• http://hs.swl.cn/article.asp?id=30
• http://www.osxcn.com/dreamweaver-cs3-alpha-1.html

I’ve been using Vista since RC2 and I have to say I rather like it. The transition from XP hasn’t been too painful but In truth I don’t know if it’s really worth shelling out the cash for.

These little problems I have to get off my chest first:

• I will be very happy when Video LAN get Vista compatible. At the moment the UI is forced to drop out of Aero when you try to play a video.
• The Windows Audio service likes to crash out once in a while which is kind of annoying. I guess it’s something to do with my nvaudio driver but I’m fully up to date with drivers and that. Anyone else getting that problem? Restarting the service sorts it out anyway.
• My ruby on rails install went mad. Rails decided to continuously write to Apaches error log for a few days and ate 12gigs before I saw what was going on. Don’t know if that’s a Vista only thing? Rails sucks anyway so I lost no sleep over removing that completely. I was only trying it out anyway. Why couldn’t somebody put php on rails instead? Never mind, that’s a rant for another day.
• My copy of Vista hangs at the last stage of shutting down too. That’s annoying.
• What’s also annoying is the sidebar. I don’t like it. It’s clutter. And sluggish. I can see how the average user will love it and fill it with widgets and rubbish till it bursts but it just doesn’t do it for me.
• The start menu seems to be dead slow when going through all the programs.

Now on the whole, it could be worse. These things will be worked out as Vista matures.

Now to get to my point, while I don’t see very much benefit from switching to Vista, I wont be dropping back to XP.

I like the Aero interface. At the end of it all Vista’s looks are what swing it for me. I know you can get some nice looks from shell enhancements under previous Windows versions, I’ve used a lot of them but Aero beats them for me anyway. But that’s it. My attachment to Vista is purely to its cosmetics. Outside of that my user experience is pretty much the same as it was on XP. Other than a pretty interface it hasn’t brought anything new to the table that would make me stand back and say “hey, that’s useful, I could have done that a long time ago”.

Has anyone else found anything in Vista they can say is truly useful or innovative?