Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
Have you tried Bing yet? You know, that new Microsoft search engine, powered (and advertised for) by Microsoft?
Why Microsoft thinks we need another old school web search engine is beyond me. With Web 3.0 about to bloom, and real-time search making it’s entrance, showing up sporadically as we speak, how could they possibly think that there is a market? WIth all the big bloggers raving about the real-time web every other day, why would anyone endeavor to fill a niche that Google beat to death a decade ago?
That being said, Microsoft is doing a pretty decent job. As a standard text search it doesn’t do anything new, it’s basically just Google with a new logo. It’s supposed to have all these nifty features, but they just don’t show up. I’m thinking maybe they only work in Internet Explorer, which is just a childish decision if that turns out to be the case, but neither google nor Bing provides any kind of fast confirmation. Supposedly, Bing will categorize your search results, pull up online stores when you’re searching for a product, look up reliable medical info, etc. Sadly, as far as I can tell, this is not the case. Simply put, none of the features touted are actually available (at least not to mac users).
I very recently wrote a blog on how I felt about Snow Leopard, and my first impression with the OS. This is just an update to that post, so if you have not read it already, you may either ignore this post, or put it on hold while you read this.
One thing that I talked about was the apparent lack of Quicktime X, one of the innovations of the new OS that Apple touted the most at the World WIde Developers Conference. While it has suddenly appeared, and is indeed very nicely designed, it has some serious issues, surprise surprise. It seems Apple hasn’t done such a good job with the 64bit environment as I first gave them praise for, at least not yet, this might (and should) be fixed by the official release. Now the Quicktime player in and of itself is fully 64bit, there are no issues there, but it seems Apple has chosen to split up the processes, letting Quicktime handle the GUI and design, while a separate process, the QTKit Server, handles some of the more hardcore processing. When it turns out that the QTKit Server shows up as a “normal” 32bit process in the activity monitor, the alarm bells start wailing.
Come on Apple! You can do better than this! Or maybe there’s something I don’t understand, it’s not like I’ve done any research on this new thing, it might be that a 32bit process is necessary to play movie files that were made on a 32-bit processor, and therefore the QTKit needs to be 32bit for these movie files? I don’t think that sounds very reasonable, but it’s possible, and I will test the hypothesis some time in the future, I shall simply make a movie myself and see how Quicktime handles that, but for now I stand disappointed.
Edit: I googled a bit, and found an article suggesting that the QTKit is in an even worse shape than I thought… Read more about it here.
Song of the Blog: The Static Age
Sincerely yours
Bjørn
I have a new addiction. Well, actually it’s more of a recurring old one. Tiny in-browser flash games are more addictive than cocaine, I swear. Not that I’ve tried it or anything, but I can’t imagine anything more addictive than these things. The reason for my most current recursion is that I’ve joined Facebook. For a long time I avoided that thing like the plague, I used to have principles, but now that I’ve joined I can’t get away! The flash games! They’re killing me! Bubble spinner is an awesome game. There’s no story, there’s no way of winning, the only purpose is to shoot loose as many balloons as possible, preferably more than your friends. The simplicity is beautiful, and the effect marvelous.
