Living Critic

Dear World,

The fax machine is a fucking antique. Please stop requiring me to use one.

Love, James

Apple Recently updated iLife. The release was interesting. Most notable is their new quick movie editor. Many are quite upset about it. Many editing features have been stripped out. However they’re continuing to provide iMovie ‘06 to compensate.

iClip ‘08 is a terrific program for those quick videos that you’d like to put together. It’s also got an amazing library tool that let’s you view all of the video footage you have stored in your collection. It’s a cool tool, but it’s not iMovie.

Google Notifier sucks! Does anyone at Google actually use it? Every time it has trouble talking to Google, it pops up the password dialog. If Google is having an off day, this can happen a couple times a minute. Why not just wait and try again later?

With any other mail application, if I had this problem, I’d turn down the frequency it checks for new mail. But that isn’t even an option with Google Notifier.

You get what you pay for I guess.

iCal sits there on your doc. Always exhibiting the same date. Until that is you open the app.

This is a ridiculous user experience issue. Putting no date would have been a better choice and of course making it so that the actual date was displayed would be best.

July 17, 2002 was the date of iCal’s introduction at MacWorld. Why on earth they’d have a date sitting their in your doc that isn’t relevant is beyond me.

Apple has finally released what a lot of Apple fans, and speculators have been waiting for. With the release of iWork ‘08 Apple has added a spreadsheet.

The application shifts how you might think of spreadsheets. With numbers a spreadsheet is so much more. For example.

You are not restricted to the normal grid structure of a typical spreadsheet. The focus is much more on presentation and design. You can move or resize a particular table and position it where you would like without having an affect on surrounding tables.

Separate sheets take on a more important role, they are more accessible and useful in Numbers because of the way Apple has separated the tables and charts within the sheets list. Checking out a few of the templates in the trial will help illustrate this. The image on the left is the home improvement template. Each option in the list provides a different view of the data.

Image, text, and other media are very easy to use in Numbers. They call it “a flexible media-rich canvas.” And that’s what it is. This software makes presentation easy.

I don’t think I’m going to buy it however. The reason is most of my work is done on the web, and numbers for some ridiculous reason does not support HTML exporting. Apparently it does export to iWeb ‘08, I’ve never been able to work well with iWeb. I’ll have to check it out more perhaps. It seems to me that Apple would have made it easier to export to HTML.

I’ll be sticking with NeoOffice, or perhaps I’ll give Office:Mac ‘08 a try.