Brad Arsenault (dot com)
The Blog of Brad
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MacHeist has FREE nanoBundle
Nov 7th
MacHeist nanoBundle
For the next 5 days everyone is welcome to download 5 Mac apps which retail for $154, for FREE! They’ve offered:
- ShoveBox ($25)
- WriteRoom ($25)
- Twitterrific ($15)
- TinyGrab ($14)
- Hordes of Orcs ($25)
and in MacHeist tradition, once 500,000 bundles have been given away everyone will get a copy of
- Mariner Write ($50)
The key part of this bundle is this:
What would you pay for this bundle?
FWIW: you should know that MacHeist is 100% legal, the developers are NOT getting swindled out of sales; MacHeist is a marketing promotion organization.
Remember Widgets?
Sep 2nd
As I may have noted, I’ve purchased every version of Mac OS X. That means that I’ve been around for some of the less-than-great versions and features and have seen those features eventually get finely tuned to become a seamless part of my computing experience. However there were some features that were perfect from day one, most notable in my books is “Dashboard”– the widget host for the Mac OS X desktop that premiered in Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) in 2005. Whether or not you use, or even know about this, widgets have a long and great history… Read the rest of this entry »
Snow Leopard Available / Apple Taking Orders (ships Friday, August 28)
Aug 24th
Snow Leopard is available in the online Apple Store for $29 USD for a single-user license, $49 USD for a family pack (5 licenses) in the US. In Canada you can get Snow Leopard for $35 CAD for a single-user license and $59 CAD for a family pack (5 licenses).
All of these are available with free shipping or $13 CAD for expedited shipping (in Canada). Expedited shipping is imaginably the roughly the same in the US.
Requirements for Growth
Aug 24th
I have been a mostly faithful mac user since 2003 when I got my first Mac (an eMac). It shipped with 384 MB memory, an 800MHz G4 proc, a 40GB HDD, a CD-ROM drive that I had swapped for a combo—then eventually SuperDrive. That Mac saw Jaguar, Panther, and Tiger, and like all versions of Mac OS X are based on a the same core, Darwin—a Unix like core operating system based on FreeBSD, and it points out how well Apple gets OS X to scale to meet the hardware requirements. That Mac was relatively well-equipped with 384MB of memory (for the time), however now, at least is my experience with Leopard, 384MB is less memory than the kernel_task process uses, let alone today’s Adobe AIR based Twitter clients (at almost 500MB for Twhirl).
I think it’s interesting how Mac OS X is so robust that it natively runs on a processor as primitive as the G3 while still being able to run on a modern SSSE-enabled Intel Xenon. Given that Apple has a lot of deep, dark voodoo going on under the pleasant Aqua interface, it still gives credence to the abilities of Unix.
As a special note, today, Apple announced that Snow Leopard is available for pre-order and will ship (in-store and pre-orders) on August 28 (2009)-and this is the first version since Mac OS 7.1.2 to not support any PowerPC-based macs.
| 10.0 | 10.1 | 10.2 | 10.3 | 10.4 | 10.5 | 10.6 | |
| Min. Processor family | G3 | G3 | G3 | G3 | G3 | G4 Intel for some features |
Intel |
| Rec. Processor family | G4 | G4 | G4 / max G5 | G4 / max G5 | G4/G5 | G5/Intel | Intel 64-bit |
| Min. Clock speed | ? | ? | 233 MHz | 233 MHz | 333 MHz | G4-867 MHz | – |
| Rec. Clock speed | ? | ? | 233+ MHz | min 333 MHz | 333+ MHz | >867 MHz | – |
| Min. Memory | 64MB | 64MB* | 128MB | 128MB | 256MB | 512MB | 1GB |
| Rec. Memory | 128MB | 128MB | 256-512MB | 512 | 512MB-1GB | 1GB+ | 1GB+ |
| Min. Free HD | 800MB | 1.5GB | 2GB | 1.5GB | 2GB | 9GB | 5GB |
| Rec. Free HD | 1.5GB | N/A | N/A | N/A | 4 (developer tools) | N/A | N/A |
| Install media | 1xCD | 1xCD | 2xCD | 3xCD or DVD | 4xCD/DVD | DVD DL | DVD DL |
| Other | PB G3 “Kanga” not sorted | Free update to existing users. *unofficial minimum |
Original PB G3 not supported | “New World” ROM & USB | (ignoring Intel version) DVD drive built-in firewire |
All G3s and slower G4s dropped | All PPC dropped. OpenCL/H.264 hw de/encode requires min NVidia GeForece 8600 / ATI Radeon 4850 +) |
Mac App: Transmission
Jun 11th
Bittorrent. I have found what I consider to be the holy grail of bittorrent clients for the Mac, Transmission. Transmission is simply a front-end to a historic backend bittorrent engine and has been built to be (according to developer’s site), “Easy, Lean, Native, Powerful, Free” which I have interpreted as a very cutdown interface (especially when compared with Vuze, formally Azureus) and uses very little resources and memory; it just seems fast. The other point is that it feels ‘Mac’, it completely utilizes Growl, dock notifications, and complies with the GNOME HID Guidelines. The other features include encrypted connections, selective file downloading and prioritizing, fast resume, bandwidth management, HTTPS, IPv6, and DHT support. And what I consider to be the best feature, if you click and drag a hyperlink from a webpage on to the program screen, it automatically downloads the linked torrent file and starts downloading; you never have to see another .torrent file again!
You can get this for FREE from Transmissionbt.com.
**Of course in pointing you in this direction I do not ever intend for you to break copyright laws in your local jurisdiction, and do not accept any liability for your doing so. Bittorrent is not all evil and has legitimate uses, such as my primary use, downloading Linux distributions while saving bandwidth $$ for the host.**
