October 21, 2008 at 2:52 pm · Filed under windows

This post would be titled differently, but I’m not allowed to say the V word, so it’s just Windows Impressions.

I decided to give my gaming rig a reformat this weekend, and thought as an experiment (and because I don’t use it much) I’d make use of the MDNAA software available to me through my university and install a fresh copy of Windows Vista (I cannot be bothered to avoid the V word) Business 64-bit, which is perfectly capable of being Vista, it just doesn’t contain some of the fun stuff such as the Media Centre, or Movie Maker, yet still comes with the Games Explorer, so is perfectly capable for being on my gaming rig.

After some initial install problems (I decided midway through setting stuff up that I wanted to use a different drive, and cloning didn’t go well, and it doesn’t seem to like installing on a logical partition) everything was working fine. I’ve been using it on and off for a few days now, so I thought I’d give my good and bad points that I’ve experienced so far:

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October 16, 2008 at 4:09 pm · Filed under Software

Spotify sounds like a music listeners dream come true. It’s a way of listening to a huge library of music for free, and completely legally. If you don’t like the adverts the free version comes with you can pay just £10 a month for the privilege of unlimited music all the time, or just 99p for 24 hours of ad-free music (ideal for a party or something like that). To be honest though, the adverts are less intrusive than a commercial radio station, so it’s no big deal. Also, as I’m in the UK, Spotify feeds me UK adverts - which I appreciate (you never know, something interesting might come up). It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux under Wine, and is a very small (just a couple of megabytes) download.

The interface is very clean. I’d like a proper way of browsing by genre without having to use a search function (genre:”folk” for example), but other than that it does it’s job well. It’s a small request - but I’d quite like it to scrobble to last.fm what I’m listening to.

There’s clearly a lot of music here, and it’s not obscure stuff by any means. Sure, there’s some gaps in the collection, but overall it looks pretty good.

As I just have a free account, I have no invites I can give out. However you can go to the Spotify website, and request an invite there. I only requested one a few weeks ago, so it’s definitely worth requesting if you’re interested in checking this great application out. I think Spotify definitely has the potential to become very popular, and could push companies like Apple to do more than just 30 second samples for songs. However I’m not sure their £10 subscription model will catch on, as similar services such as Napster offer the same functionality for similar prices, but also offer additional features like downloading the tracks to your portable music players. I definitely think the ‘99p for 24 hours of ad-free music’ model is a great idea though; it’s a sign that the people at Spotify really understand what people want from their music.

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October 15, 2008 at 11:32 am · Filed under Apple

Everyone else is writing about them, so I thought I would too.

As I’m sure you all know, Apple have released design and hardware refreshes of the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air lines. Most of the design refresh is actually behind the scenes - they have changed to a new manufacturing process that involves taking a slab (or ‘brick’) of aluminum and carving out the body of the laptop, causing it to be made out of one piece (more or less). This improves strength and makes it lighter. They’ve also added some new nVidia chips across the board, improving the graphics somewhat. They’ve also added a bunch of glass; a multitouch glass trackpad which has no button - it’s all a button, and a glass front to the new LED full-colour screens.

Nothing surprising there then, there were so many rumours about all this, and the later ones got it all right. They all look pretty nice, nothing ground breaking though. Elysium is pleased because she plans to get a MacBook for university next year, and it looks like this design will be the design she gets.

Finally, don’t you think Jony Ive is the next Steve Jobs? Just look at the MacBook video.

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