Mackeeper, everyone’s favourite sketchy and trojan-esque piece of Mac software malware, has had a little branding update. And a little branding fail at the same time. As I’m sure I’ve pointed out before, their advertising is sketch to say the least, even at the level of rebranding what they do at every possible juncture, just so you get fooled again (ladies and gentlemen, take advice from The Who here please) into trying it.
So you may, or even may not, have heard of a Mac software cleanup/antivirus/antislow program called MacKeeper. It markets itself on Google as:
Ensure your Mac’s top performance with MacKeeper – an award-winning system utility for Mac that offers a completely new approach to system care.
Judging by their advertising, which if you haven’t seen it, is just overly invasive, and presented in such a way that a certain type of tinned meat [[spam]] comes to mind as soon as you see it, you’d think they’re not legit
This could alternatively be titled ‘How can iOS and AppStore design ruin perfectly good apps’. I feel bad about writing this, but I’m writing this for a reason, and frankly this is in a similar light to a lot of the new Skype for Mac criticism. The application in question here is Awaken, by Embraceware, what I considered to be the best of the alarm clock applications.
Recently, being on holiday and all, I had the time to upgrade an old Powerbook G4. One of those 12″ ones, that were basically netbooks before the whole craze started. It was running some old old version on 10.3, which was probably pretty state of the art in those days, and still isn’t that bad. But it’s just plain crazy with no Spotlight and trackpad gestures (partly a hardware thing…). A little bit crazy how much I use some of these features…
Just adding a quick note as I head down to Cambridge to start Easter term of my first year. So far, it’s been phenomenal, the course, while being quite hard (and the workload just fairly intense at points), is excellent and thoroughly enjoyable. I’ve had the chance (and still have it from what I see) to try all aspects of engineering with all sorts of different practicals and labs and exercises, including some that have been tedious, and others that have been incredibly useful and even then not necessarily directly engineering related. But alas, finally, there are exams coming up. A mere 12 hours so I recall. So fun times ahead! (On a sidenote, it felt like I was about to come to a conclusion in that previous paragraph, but clearly it was going nowhere fast so I just ended it… oh well!)
Though the title of this post may seem fairly complex and all confusing, I assure you it will not be so. It’s merely a collection of thoughts that I decided not to name ‘More thoughts’ or something along those lines…
As for the logic part, while looking around Waterstones (that would be a bookstore) in Edinburgh early last week, I found a very interesting book among the ‘… for Dummies’ and computing books – ‘The Fundamentals of Logic Design’ by Charles H Roth Jr. When leafing through it then, I realised that though a lot of the information contained in it may be really quite obsolete, and not necessarily relevant in these days of computers and so on, it is very fundamental to the understanding to all of the current technologies. To be honest, ever since reading iWoz (Steve Wozniak’s autobiography) and reading about how he managed to redesign computers with fewer (and a more optimal number of) chips, I’ve wanted to be able to learn how this was done, and essentially work out how to do this myself – as it would undoubtedly lead to better understanding of logic systems (which are just slightly fundamental to lots and lots of things!).
Once upon a time I used to go ecstatically crazy over a Macworld launch and write all sorts of stuff about it and so on and so forth. These days I find it easier just to sit back and look at all of the cool things unfurl.
If you’re very new to the internet, or never really look at newspapers or take part in any other forms of communication between people, then you might not be aware that firstly, Apple has launched a new laptop (or notebook (which I believe is the more generally accepted term (at least in the US) these days)) and secondly, it has received lots of criticism.
Apropos Engadget’s story on a new iPod dock
(http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/201633238/) entitled “Jibe Audio’s Sound Machine iPhone dock — designed by Apple alumni.”
The article states that this company’s new iPod dock is, and I quote, “Designed in part by Robert Brunner who led Apple’s design team from 1989-1996, an era which birthed the Newton and the first Powerbooks.” Whilst this is true (I’m not contesting this fact), I don’t see the need to boast that this is by the same Apple alumni from ’89 to ’96 as this wasn’t particularly the best era of Apple products.
Finally I get my computer back from Apple. Much better. So, so, much better! You don’t realise how bad it is to be stuck using Windows all the time at work, and then going home to no beautiful *functioning* iMac. Well now its back. It works this time, but what I actually mean is I haven’t found any more faults yet…
I’m not sure why or how I’m finding it so hard to cope with the general shitness of Windows at the moment. It might be because I actually have to do something with it.