µTorrent or Transmission for MacOSX

I found an early alpha of µTorrent for the mac so I thought I'd try it and compare it to Transmission, my current BitTorrent client of choice.

Transmission has a lot of benefits: it's free, lightweight and open source. The only downsides I've found are that:

1. Some torrent sites don't count it's actions and
2. It doesn't open all open peers

Still, I prefer it to Vuze (formerly Azureus) which I found to be very slow and with a lot of overhead.

But I wanted to see if all the accolades that the PC version of µTorrent had been awarded applied to the mac version. Again, one has to recognize that this is an early alpha release (which wasn't supposed to be released) so, to be fair, I was expecting it to be buggy.

Except it wasn't. It worked fine. It didn't seem to work any better than Transmission but it wasn't any worse. It did open more peers but it didn't download a torrent any faster.

So, the jury is still out but this early version is very promising. I look forward to subsequent releases.

I'm a Dildo

In the Apple ads, Justin Long is a human representation of a Mac and John Hodgman is a human representation of a PC.

So their welcoming comments to start each of the ads of "Hello, I'm a Mac" and "and I'm a PC" sound perfectly appropriate. It states what each actor represents and establishes the premise for the ad campaign.

Enter the new Microsoft ad in which supposedly real people say "I'm a PC"?

Why would real people claim to be an inanimate object?

Shouldn't it be "I use a PC"?

Thank goodness they don't use marital aids.

"Hello, I'm a dildo".

Perhaps that would too honest.

Apple Announces the Mactendo (okay, it's the iPod Touch really)

Apple's keynote today wasn't too earth shattering. A new iTunes, which means new Quick Time headaches, and a new Front Row (they all kind of go hand-in-hand).

Except, if you're Nintendo. Hasn't the iPod Touch become the ultimate portable gaming machine now? The Mactendo has the motion sensitivity of a Nintendo Wii tied to the portability of the DS. I'm guessing Nintendo are keeping a close eye on how this effects sales of their systems.

Nice touch Apple (sorry about the pun). I may seriously have to look at getting one.

Reference: Mactendo (n) derogative term PC users used to define Macs back in the early 1980's. Funny really, since PCs became the gamers computer of choice.

Garmin RoadTrip and the Potential Removal of Windows

As I've said in an earlier review, I run Parallels on my mac for one reason, to run the Garmin GPS software. Garmin was trying to accommodate the mac community with the release of a beta that works in OSX. The early beta, called Bobcat, was buggy and, although a step in the right direction, not quite ready for prime time.

Garmin released RoadTrip on September 5th, the full version that replaces Bobcat. RoadTrip is ready for prime time. The conversions work flawlessly. The software is very mac-like. Uploading to my GPS just worked (I use a 2610). They got this one right.

Except.....I still need to keep Windows around as I still need to initially install and unlock the maps on a Windows computer.

It would be nice if I could trade in my maps for a Mac version so I could do away with Windows entirely.

But I can live with having to use that other OS just once.

From Twitterific to Twhirl

Twitter is a service for people to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of brief messages. In fact, the messages are limited to 140 characters (or less). Some people love it, others don't see the point of it. I use it but I'm still not totally sold on the concept. It's proven to be a good way to stalk podcasters I like though.

The big negative against me using the service regularly was that it's web-paged based and I'm just not the kind of person that will go to the twitter web page, go through logging in, just to check what someone has posted.

Enter Twitterific. This is a stand-alone program, that loads your twitter account settings and sits in the system tray. You can post directly from the program and read what others have posted. It works with Growl and is a pretty well done program. It makes twittering easy. There are only two drawbacks to using Twitterific as I see it; it costs money (~$15) and it only works with Twitter.

Enter (again?) Twhirl. Again, a stand alone program but this one is free, it connects to Twitter (even allowing the option for you to open multiple accounts), identi.ca, Friendfeed and Seesmic and seems to work pretty well. There are a number of extra tools that you can use (Twittersearch and Twitterscan direct links, for instance) that make it a nice tool. I'd prefer to have the software just sit in the system tray, but hiding it works just as well.

So, if you want an elegant, albeit one-trick-pony that does the job, go with Twitterific. If you want to be able to join multiple microblogging sites with the swiss army penknife styled option, then Twhirl might be what you need. However, Twhirl would be better yet if it allowed you to post to and read from all the different microblogging sites in one frame. If it is able to do that, it isn't immediately apparent to me how. And both Twhirl and Twitterific might be more useful if they worked with other sites (The Twit Army, for instance).