Review: Power Support Anti-Glare Film For MacBook Pro

I’ve had my MacBook Pro for a couple of weeks now and the glare from the glossy screen can be annoying at times. So I was really happy when I tripped over a product from Power Support that looks like it mitigates the problem. They make an anti-glare film that claims to cut down the glare without affecting the color quality of the screen, and having used some of their products in the past, I decided to give this a shot. Applying the film is tricky, but doable. Just make sure you take your time and follow the directions that come with the product. So once it’s on, how does it work? It really cuts down on the glare and now my MacBook Pro is closer to the MacBook Pro with the matte screen that it replaced. It is slightly on the fuzzy side, but not objectionably so. Your mileage may vary though. I also note that fingerprints are a non-issue with this film as well. A welcome bonus.

At $35, it’s not a cheap solution. But until Apple gets a clue decides to offer a matte screen option on their entire MacBook line, I think that this is a good solution for those who can’t stand the glossy screen. Also, it’s cheaper than the option of sending your MacBook to a company called TechRestore so that they can install a matte screen (which if you go that route may have warranty implications).

FireFox 3.5 Now Available! [UPDATED]

For those of you who were waiting for Firefox 3.5 to hit the streets, it’s now available for download. An early review of it was posted on Slate and it’s positive. I’m downloading it right now and I’ll have some impressions shortly. But if you’ve got something to share, feel free to leave a comment.

UPDATE: Every man, woman and dog appears to be downloading this as their download servers are being hammered. But I managed to get a couple of my computers upgraded. My immediate thoughts are that it’s a lot faster than it has been in a very long time. Safari and Chrome may have to watch their backs.

BREAKING NEWS: The Pirate Bay Bought Out….. Will Now Go Legit

A company called Global Gaming Factory (owner of a network of Internet cafes and gaming centers) has bought the infamous torrent site The Pirate Bay for 60 million Swedish Krona or roughly $7.8 million. In their press release, the new owners lay out their plans:

“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site, ” said Hans Pandeya, CEO GGF.

“The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary. Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers ‘need faster downloads and better quality, ” continues Hans Pandeya.

But there’s more to this. Global Gaming Factory has also bought Peerialism, a small IT company with roots at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology, which has developed a new file sharing technology. So with both these purchases, Global Gaming Factory wants to become the next Napster or iTunes. The deal is set to close in August, and it will be interesting to see if they can make a go of it.

Does The iPhone 3GS Overheat And Turn White iPhone 3GS Models Brown?

There’s some noise on the Interwebs that the iPhone 3GS has an overheating problem that apparently turns the white version of the iPhone a brownish color. I checked on the Apple Discussion Boards where Apple Fanbois usually complain about such things and found nothing. Although there are reports of the battery getting hot and one report of the phone overheating while using GPS. So I’m inclined to think that there MAY be something to this.

If you’ve got one of these phones and you’ve got any of these issues, please leave a comment and let us know.

FireFox 3.5 Tomorrow?

There’s a rumor floating around that FireFox 3.5 will make an appearance tomorrow. At least, that’s what The Register says:

Mozilla is expected to spin out a complete version of Firefox 3.5 tomorrow, more than six months on from when it had originally planned to release the browser.

A company rep confirmed on Friday that 30 June had been earmarked for the day Firefox 3.5 would be shipped.

That didnt exactly convince me that it’s going to happen. But a quick Google search turns up other news sites with the same story. So perhaps this more fact than rumor. We’ll see tomorrow. So that brings me to the next question, what does FireFox 3.5 get you? Here’s a brief list:

• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.

All of which may make me switch back from Safari which is my browser de jour. If they do ship it tomorrow, I’ll download a copy (or two) and post my impressions here.

Apple Fanbois Whine About Reduced SATA Speeds In New MacBooks… Apple Updates Firmware… Firmware Stops Third Party Drives From Working Correctly… Fanbois Whine Louder

From the “Be careful what you wish for” department comes this story.

When the new MacBook  made it’s appearance, Apple fanbois immediately noticed that the SATA interface for the hard drive was capped at 1.5 Gb/s as opposed to the 3 Gb/s that the previous models could achieve. Predictably the fanbois started to complain loudly in Apple’s Discussion Forums and in few other places as well (for example, Gizmodo). Apple to it’s credit quickly came up with a firmware update that restored the computer’s ability to do 3 Gb/s which was no doubt quickly applied to MacBook after MacBook around the world. Now, reports are appearing on Apple’s Discussion Boards that this firmware update doesn’t play nice with third party drives. Here’s a couple of examples that describe what people are seeing:

“No disk access can happen at all for 20-30 seconds, then usage spikes, then no disk access at all.”

“I would like to add that I’m experiencing the same thing as the above users. I am using the Intel x25-M. This is terrible, the laptop is near-unusable.”

Oh, in case you’re wondering why they don’t just revert back to the previous firmware…. They can’t if the update completed successfully.

To be fair, Apple did warn that this might be a possibility. In the support document that was bundled with the firmware update, Apple posts this warning:

This update allows drives to use transfer rates greater than 1.5Gbps, however Apple has not qualified or offered these drives for Mac portable computers, and their use remains unsupported.  All previous and current Apple portables with a SATA drive interface include a SATA 1.5Gbps hard drive.

So that implies that if you’re on the bleeding edge looking to put the fastest hard drive in your shiny new MacBook, you’re on you’re own if things don’t work. Having said that, I can see Apple coming out with another firmware update to try and silence the screams of the Fanbois. Hopefully that happens sooner rather than later .

Windows 7 Pricing And Upgrade Details Announced

The Windows Blog has posted details about Windows 7 pricing and upgrades. Here are the highlights:

• If you buy a PC starting Friday, June 26th, it should be covered under a free upgrade plan. Unless you happen to buy a PC with Vista Basic. Then you’re out of luck.
• If you already own a PC running XP or Vista, you’ll will be able to pre-order the upgrade package at around half the price that they’ll eventually sell for. This too starts on the 26th, but this offer is only available until July 11th.

Okay now the pricing:

• Windows 7 Home Premium: $119 USD for the upgrade or $199 for the full version
• Windows 7 Professional: $199 USD for the upgrade or $299 for the full version
• Windows 7 Ultimate: $219 USD for the upgrade or $319 for the full version

All things considered, this is very aggressive pricing. Clearly Microsoft really wants you to upgrade to Windows 7 so that you’ll forget that Vista even existed.

What do you think of this? Leave a comment and share your wisdom.

More Impressions Of My 15″ MacBook Pro

I’ve had this new MacBook Pro for over a week now and I have a few more impressions of it beyond what I wrote about it last week, as well as one correction to make. First my impressions:

• The so called “non-removable” battery is actually very easy to remove, despite what this document says. There are 10 screws on the bottom of the computer that give you very easy access to not only the battery, but to the RAM and hard disk as well.
• My last 15″ MacBook Pro had 2 USB ports, not three. Only the 17″ MacBook Pro has three USB ports.
• The battery life that I get from this computer is six “ish” hours consistently which is very very good.
• The screen is kind of hard to keep clean. At least Apple provides you with a microfibre cloth to wipe the screen with.
• As is the case with every Apple notebook I’ve ever owned, the keys are just a bit too close to the screen. If you have greasy fingers, that grease will end up on the screen. You just notice it more because of the glossy screen.

After living with this notebook for the last week, I can say that I really like it. The only things that I suggest that Apple do are:

• Play with the placement of the USB ports. They’re really too close together IMHO.
• Apple needs a matte screen option. “The Steve” may like glossy screens, but they’re not perfect for every situation.

Comments? Please leave one and share your wisdom.

Judge Says Apple Can Continue To Kick Psystar In The Nether Regions

When we last we looked at Apple vs. Psystar, the whole suit was on hold because Psystar had filed for chapter 11 protection. Normally, that should put a hold on any legal proceedings until the chapter 11 issues are sorted out. But Apple has won the right to keep going after Psystar despite their ongoing chapter 11 issues:

Apple made a strong case for having the stay lifted, noting that Psystar filed for bankruptcy after a motion was granted compelling Psystar to give Apple additional documents. The bankruptcy filing also came just before a scheduled deposition from Psystar.

Apple cleared the way for the bankruptcy court to lift the stay by agreeing that it would not try to collect any monetary damages against Psystar if it won the infringement case. That was also a condition imposed by Judge Mark in making his ruling.

So unless Psystar can somehow come up with another way to stall things, they may be screwed once and for all. Of course, the proof is always in the pudding, so we’ll see what happens next in this bizarre tale.

iMovie 09…. The Good And The Ugly

One of the things that I do in my spare time is edititng videos for friends and “friends.” Basically, I take their crappy not so well shot video, edit it so it covers up their crappy filming skills looks good and burn the result to DVD. For my latest project, I decided to try iMovie 09 which came with my new MacBook Pro. Now I must admit that I was not looking forward to this as iMovie 08 and 09 was a radical change from iMovie 06. For starters, both applications broke the ability to add plug ins which means that I couldn’t use any of the Slick iMovie Plug ins that I had purchased. Plus, it’s received a fair amount of flak because it wasn’t a traditional timeline based video editor. But I was willing to dive head first into this to see if iMovie 09 was worth using. The result? There’s some good, and there’s some ugly.

First the good. The usability while a bit quirky to those of us who use timeline based video editors is actually decent. I was able to edit and assemble the movie very quickly. It uses a “iPhoto like” interface to give you access to your clips and the Precision Editor allows you to nail down exactly where scenes start and stop. From an editing standpoint, that’s pretty good. Plus it has a feature that will stabilize the video so that it makes up for the fact that you didn’t shoot the video using a SteadyCam. It’s not perfect, but it does work. All of this makes iMovie 09 one of the better consumer video editing applications I’ve seen lately.

Now the ugly.  The footage that I was editing came from a standard definition DV camcorder that will shoot in 720×480 resolution. Imports from this camcorder look horrible and the exports to iDVD are equally as horrible. I confirmed this by importing the same footage to iMovie 06. That produces the high quality footage that I’ve come to to expect when I edit movies. Why is that? The answer can be found in this review:

The way iMovie ’09 handles video internally is mostly unchanged from the previous version: interlaced DV and HDV footage use single-field processing to improve performance, which means iMovie is throwing out every other horizontal line of information.

Lovely. That sucks. Apparently others feel that way as there is a rather long thread about this on the Apple Discussion Boards. What this means for you is that if you have standard definition DV video and you need it at the same quality level as you shot it in, use iMovie 06 or Final Cut Express (which apparently have no problem importing standard definition DV video). Or, replace your camcorder with a HD camcorder. Here’s the problem with these three options:

• iMovie 06 still works on current Macs. But you can be sure that since Apple no longer offers it for download (like they did when iMovie 08 was available) that an OS update will break iMovie 06 and then you’re out of luck.
• Final Cut Express is a great editing tool, but it may be overkill for a lot of users. Plus it’s $200 to buy the last time I checked.
• Not everyone is going to run out and buy a HD camcorder just to use iMovie 09. Besides, there’s a ton of standard definition camcorders out there that are still in use along with footage that was recorded by them. What happens to people in that situation?

Here’s the bottom line. iMovie 09 is a very usable application. If you have the need for a simple and easy to learn editing program, it should fit the bill. But the fact that it doesn’t properly import standard definition video is a major flaw in a very good application. If Apple is smart, they’ll address this issue ASAP. By doing so, they can set the bar very high for anybody who wants to challenge them in the consumer video editing market.