iPod Touch 3.0 (and iPhone)

iPod Touch users like myself had the privilege of shelling out $9.95 for the latest upgrade to the OS, an upgrade that's free to iPhone users. Well, for some reason, Apple charged me $10.55 for the upgrade (Edit: TAX. On an Internet purchase. Really?). Anyway, was the upgrade worth the money? Here's what I got

• Copy and Paste - well it's about time. That alone means the upgrade was a must-have.
• Spotlight search - very nice and the access to it as the first page is a nice touch.
• Autofill - would have been more important before copy and paste but it's still nice to have.
• Landscape keyboard - nice to have but didn't work in all applications I tried.
• Safari - supposedly faster but not that I've noticed (over wifi).
• Wi-Fi auto-login - I thought I already had this. I guess there's some nuance that I was missing.
• Shake to Shuffle - can't believe they paid someone to develop this. Oh well.

It's a nice incremental update. Evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Fills in some gaps that never should have been there but overall, probably worth the $10. Free would have been better, of course.

Don't Look Over There - Here's the New MacBook, er, Pro

A quick specs comparison between the now discontinued 13" MacBook and the new 13" MacBook Pro show very little difference:

• MacBook Pro adds Firewire - I guess all the fuss we made ensured that they rethought that decision.
• Add an SD card reader - they really are going after the multimeda home user with this unit.
• Slight bump in processor speed and RAM capabilities.
• Same case, battery, superdrive, trackpad, isight, video card - wasn't the difference in video card what identified the Pro as such?
• Nice drop in price.

All this makes for a very nice upgrade and it's one I will probably jump at (just have to get Mrs. Khan on a good-mood day before I break it to her) but does it warrant the new name?

I guess they can all it what they want but is it really a MacBook Pro?

MacBook Pro 13" - Very Nice

Apple announced the release of the 13" MacBook Pro at the WWDC 2009 today. It looks to have all the features I was missing with the MacBook they announced late last year. Tied to that is a phenomenal price point for such a great machine. Let me do the maths:

MacBook Pro 13" $1,199
-student discount $100
+RAM to 4GB $100
-free iPod Touch (which Khan Jr. really wants for Christmas) -$229
-free Snow Leopard upgarde if I wait until the beginning of September -$29

Total effective cost for a 4GB model (which will be 64bit, my current mac isn't) and have a dual layer burner (my current mac doesn't).......$941. I'll switch out the HD as the upgrade isn't cost effective and put in 500 GB for another $100.

Sounds like I'm going to have to start saving.

Oh, and I get to keep my firewire port FTW!

Eversave - Wish I'd Known About THAT Before!

Toolsoft Software produce Eversave. Eversave is freeware that can save your documents in a specific time interval.

I know, I can hit ⌘S but it's hard to remember to do that when I'm transferring a lot of data into a long table.

Of course, that's the action that usually causes M$ Word to crash on my mac (I know, but I have to use Word at work).

This means no more data loss if applications crash. No more redundant typing.

Really nice for free.